Brothers Grinn: back in business?

I sent out the first Chicken Soup for the Soulless piece for the first time in over a year, yesterday. It feels good to be back in the saddle.

Chicken Soup for the Soulless grew out of those annoyingly saccharine e-mails that people forward to everyone in their mailbox, about the meaning of life, footprints in the sand, and how God loves America more than any other nation in the world. I started making improvements and sending them back to the people who had first shared them with me, sold a few to The Wittenburg Door, and soon found myself running a mailing list with my friend.

The highlight of our run when was when Chicken Soup for the Soul threatened us with a lawsuit.

In addition to the lawsuit (which got us attention from The Home News-Tribune, The Times of Trenton, NJ Biz, the About.com Christian Humor site, and a Trenton-based legal journal), we were getting links from all over. We had readers in the military, the government, Youth Specialities, and God only knows where else. Plus, we had readers in Cambodia, China, Singapore, Russian, the United Kingdom, Australia and probably more than a dozen other countries with Internet access.

For various reasons, having to do rather somewhat with the labor-intensive nature of the list -- we wrote all our own stuff, and never made any money on it -- we took a long break, starting about two or two-and-a-half years ago. We wrote a few and distributed a few things during that period, but mostly the list was silent.

Not surprisingly, we lost about 250 readers during the most recent hiatus, an attrition due simply to people changing their e-mail addresses. I'm wondering if we'll take an even bigger hit when people check their e-mail and find themselves subscribed to a list they barely remember, if at all.

Well, I have hopes of getting the list's momentum back. I sent out a new mailing on Sunday evening, a little piece that turned an inspirational vignette about how heaven wouldn't be heaven without your dog, into a piece about SUVs and the people who drive them.

I'm working on a mailing for Tuesday or Wednesday about the Bush administration's solution to the growing energy crisis. After that I have plans for a murder mystery that I might be able to stretch into a couple weeks. We'll see.

My job at WCN was a bitch, and really ruined writing for me. It's good to be getting past that at last. I hope I can stay the course this time and get over them.


By the way, if you want to subscribe to the Brothers Grinn, we're hosted by Topica.


Copyright © 2005 by David Learn. Used with permission.

chief justice roberts?

So, according to ABC News and dozens of other news outlets, President Bush has nominated Roberts to replace the recently deceased Rehnquist as chief justice.

What the heck is up with that? He's not even on the Supreme Court, and he's already being considered for the top post? It doesn't really bother me that Roberts is considered a conservative, as long as he's qualified to be on the Supreme Court, but it really seems over the top to be nominating him for the chief justice spot. His experience on the Supreme Court is nonexistent. What makes him more qualified than the other justices, all of whom have been sitting there for more than a decade?

That's just crazy.

Still, give Bush credit for sheer ballsiness. Roberts generally has been considered a shoe-in for the court, with virtually no objections lodged so far from the Democrats in the Senate. Now that there are two justices to replace, since O'Connor is retiring, he may have made it unpalatable for the Democrats to fight him on this appointment, since there's another, potentially bruising confirmation hearing coming once a new replacement for O'Connor surfaces. If the appointment goes through, Bush's legacy on the nation will be considerable because of the hearings his justices will hand down.

But I'd still feel slighted if I were Scalia or one of the other justices being passed over.

hurricane katrina

One of the other things that just bites about this is the inhumanity of the authorities. People at the Superdome discovered that there was a supply of food and water there, and broke in to prepare it and distribute it. The National Guard showed up and they were ordered out of the kitchens, at gunpoint, with the stated threat that they would be shot if they didn't go.

I heard a guy showed up with 500 hot dogs at the Superdome to give them, and he was turned away, because police said they had no way of knowing whether the hot dogs were safe to consume.

Or there's the kid who was being evacuated, and they made him leave behind his dog because there was a no-animals policy. The kid begged, pleaded and cried so hard he started to throw up, and they wouldn't budge. Gee, do you think the kid might have lost everything else he had and was clinging to the one shred of his own life that was left? Would it have been so unthinkable to have some basic human compassion? Had the kid suffered so little that they had to take even this from him?

Disasters always bring out the best in humanity, but they also bring out the worst.

I hope to God that these and the other bureaucrat-from-hell stories I've heard are false, because they're making me furious. I know we shouldn't resent petty people for their pettiness, just as we shouldn't resent the bee for stinging us -- each acts according to its nature -- but that's just awful.

pain at the pump

Gas prices here in New Jersey and throughout the United States have been positively painful latelyevels. I filled my car's gas tank on Tuesday, even though it was three-quarters full, because I was passing a gas station where regular fuel was $2.55 and I had no idea when I would see gas that cheaply again. Since then, when I took the car out on Wednesday, I saw gas going for as high as $3.19. I'm sure it's even worse in other states.

So, in a fit of civic-mindedness, I actually wrote to my elected officials Thursday night and asked them, not to lower gasoline prices, but to encourage greater conservation efforts and, more importantly, to encourage our nation's auto manufacturers to produce the alternative-fuel vehicles we have heard much about but seen little of.

On the first front, I believe Congress could do much to encourage greater conservation simply with an appeal to our nation's industries to allow telecommuting when possible, and even providing a financial incentive such as a tax credit or other recognition for businesses that encourage telecommuting. They also could prevail upon Bush to stop flying to Crawford, Texas, all the time, ground their limosines, and encourage the use of more fuel-efficient vehicles, like hybrids, for starters.

It would also be nice to see more options in terms of fuel. Internal combustion engines can be modified fairly easily to run on natural gas, as I witnessed firsthand in New Zealand in 1987, and again in Haiti during the ill-conceived embargo of the previous Bush and Clinton administrations. Aside from the post office trucks and a few other government-type vehicles, I'm aware of no such vehicles here in the United States, let alone places for people to fuel them.

More to the point, I've heard reports of prototype fuel cell vehicles for years, but I'm not aware of any efforts to put them into mass production. It would be nice if our elected officials exerted some effort to encourage these alternatives. Left to the market, these changes are going to be disastrously slow in coming and horrendously expensive when they do.

This current presidential administration has been extremely friendly to the automotive and oil industries, through measures such as relaxing fuel-economy standards in early 2001. It's past time we as a nation took seriously our obligation to consider the environment and the economy we will be leaving our children. Any incentive the government can give the auto industry to break our dependence on imported oil can only be a good thing.

gas

I was at three-quarters of a tank the other day, and filled up anyway because gas was selling for $2.55 a gallon and I didn't know when I would see it that low again.

I've seen it ranging from $2.61 to $3.19, all on the same day, at stations no more than five miles from another. It's bad, and it's getting worse. Between Bush's war in Iraq, the disruption in supply lines caused by the hurricane, and the world getting close to peak output just as China and India are coming online to consume gas in record quantities, the piper's fee is coming due. We're well past the point that we should be using alternative fuels for cars, but no one wanted to hear that for years. It may be my imagination, but I think I've been seeing fewer cars on the road the last few days.

I'm planning to take my bike to get places by myself that I would have taken the car for other days, and I'm trying to convince Natasha that we can walk to church instead of driving. (We already dropped the church that was 20 minutes away, but we were going to do that anyway.)

Honestly, I've no idea how this is going to pan out for us as far as travel goes. Natasha walks to work, which helps tremendously. We use natural gas for heat in the winter, which I'm extremely grateful for.

I've read of some gas stations that are selling gas at a loss just to stay competitive with the other stations -- the price depends on when you got your last shipment, see -- only to still be accused of price gouging.

It's a wake-up call to responsibility. Gas-electric hybrids, biodiesel, hydrogen-powered and natural gas engines are long past due not just to be available but to be in widespread use. But for years we've been deluding ourselves that oil is the second most abundant liquid in the world, and shortages are all manufactured by OPEC in order to enrich the Arab world. Yeah, there's undoubtedly some manufactured element to shortages, but it should have been obvious years ago that our levels of consumption were past ridiculous.

I'm wondering if Bush is going to enact rationing like Carter did, or if he's going to stand by his policy of letting the market deal with it. (Gas prices are supposed to correct themselves somewhat and drop back down 50 cents in another month or so, to the mid-$2 range, once the supply routes get straightened out, supposedly, but we're talking major disruption of the transportation setup in the meantime, with prices for EVERYTHING going through the roof. I see massive cutbacks in retail spending, leading to job layoffs and a shrinking economy. If this goes on long enough, we're looking at a recession or another depression, with more mortgage foreclosures. And it's not like people have oodles of savings they can tap. ...)

Not all of this is Bush's fault, but he's lucky he's not running for re-election this year. Even Doug Forrester could beat him in a run-off.

telemarketing bastards

Dear American Fidelity:

I'd just like it if you people would just take a clue from the Federal Trade Commission and STOP CALLING ME. I signed up for the federal Do Not Call list when it was launched, well over a year ago, and your New Jersey office (908-364-0496) has been amazing in its disregard for federal law. We have received three phone calls in the last three days from that office.

Rest assured that if we should decide to refinance our mortgage, American Fidelity is the LAST brokerage we would consider doing it with. Any firm with that little regard for federal law, a family's stated desire to be left alone, and just basic human decency is not fit to be in business, let alone to receive our hard-earned money.

We've been keeping track of the phone calls. If they continue, I will be filing a harassment suit.

Yours truly,
Me

P.S. You'll note that I didn't provide you with valid contact information. That's because I don't want you to take this as a legitimization of your business tactics. Chances are good that I'm not the only person being harassed. Maybe you should just crack down on the entire office and discipline your telemarketers. (Actually you'd be doing your firm a tremendous favor in terms of publicity if you gave everyone in telemarketing a more useful, and publicly acceptable job. Annoying the public is a lousy way to build your clientele.)

new orleans

Things are really bad in New Orleans. People are dying now, infants and the elderly, because there's no drinking water, and no effort to get it to them. People are being tossed out of the Superdome with nowhere to go, since people are unwilling or afraid to drive buses into that part of the city to help evacuate refugees. It's going to be even worse in the next two days if there is no water taken to them. To quote Harlan Ellison, "We're going to see people eating their own babies, for chrissake."

There's going to be disease and hunger and loads of terrible things we can't even imagine yet. A friend of mine said, he was thinking, "Wake up, America, this is what the rest of the world encounters daily." No. Not like this, it doesn't. This is a wholesale disruption of the entire social structure down there, worse than you find in many third world countries. There are looters entering stores just to get food and water, there are anarchists pillaging because they can and shooting at police, rescue workers have been slow to get there, there has been rising tension in the refugee camp at the Superdome, and relief/evacuation efforts have been hideously slow, with no food or water brought in to help these people. We knew the hurricane was coming, and people were told to go to the Superdome, and there was nothing done to prepare for when they got there.

What the fuck were the civil leaders thinking?

My aunt lives in Louisiana. She's now with her son in Atlanta, but I'm sure her house is gone now, and it wouldn't surprise me if my late uncle was exhumed by the flood. (What a cheery, uplifting thought.) My brother-in-law also escaped, but we've no idea what condition his house is in right now. I suspect it's ruined. News reports are saying that more than a thousand people are dead, the survivors who didn't evacuate are being removed, and that it will be more than three months before the city will be inhabitable again. Property damage is in the billions, which is going to affect everyone's insurance premiums. My own prediction is that the New Orleans area is pretty much finished; there will still be a New Orleans, but many of the evacuees are not going to start over again in that area because there is so little to start over with.

My wife is torn between despair and fury over the situation there, and I've told her if she wants to, to call the American Red Cross and see if she can volunteer in any way.

By the way, if you're reading this, visit the Mercy Corps web site and see what you can give. Yeah, it's money and not yourself, but it's something, and Mercy Corps is one of the best nonprofit organizations I'm aware of.

states picking up feds' slack

I read something yesterday that I found utterly fascinating. According to a recent article in The New York Times, nine Northeastern states have taken the initiative of enacting new restrictions on emissions. In doing so, they have joined a number of the larger U.S. metropolitan areas in getting on board with the goals of the Kyoto accord, which President Bush refused to ratify on the grounds that it would be inimical to American interests.

Air pollution in general and emissions specifically are the most significant items of interest in the ongoing discussion on global warming and what to do about it. Virtually everyone except the president and his administration acknowledge that manmade pollution is heating up the earth's atmosphere and effecting climate change on a massive scale.

It's ironic that this movement is happening now, during the Bush administration, not just because it shows how out of step Bush is with a large segment of the voting population, but because he unintentionally or inadvertantly has reminded us of a great truth I think most politicians would rather we forgot: We have the power within ourselves to effect change, even when they won't do it for us.

Bush, whose administration has more ties to the oil and energy industry than I have unmatched socks in my drawer, has been about as unsupportive of the environmental movement as you can be without actually clubbing baby seals. He's expanded the timber industry's access to the forests in our national parks, targeted the Alaskan Wildlife Preserve for oil drilling, put oil industry executives on the task force that helped develop our national energy policy, loosened the fuel efficiency requirements for auto manufacturers, refused to ratify the aforementioned Kyoto accord, and has granted coal-burning power plants leave not to clean up their acts, leaving East Coast states like New Jersey to deal with the acid rain caused by Midwest power plants. Oh, and he also issued an executive order countermanding one by President Clinton that would have required toilet manufacturers to design commodes that use fewer gallons per flush.

All told, while the Bush administration has been a boon to business and industry, it's been quite the opposite to the environmental movement. It's been bad enough that former New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman, who could hardly be described as an environmentalist for her eight years as that state's chief executive, resigned as head of the Environmental Protection Agency when she could no longer support his environmentally unfriendly policies.

But Bush is out of step with much of America on this issue, and I think we're going to see more evidence of this as time goes on. Environmental groups are applauding the Northeastern states' actions, because they think other states are going to follow their initiative and take similar steps to curb emissions from power plants, industry, and automobiles.

ant problems

Does anyone know how to get rid of ants with boric acid?

I ask because we're having a continuing ant problem in the kitchen and the bathrooms. Usually they're the itty-bitty ants I've heard called water ants, but on occasion I've seen larger models too. When we had an apparent nest inside a potted plant, it was easy to wipe them out with some dish detergent in water, but I can scarcely do that here.

I used the boric acid to great effect with a flea problem we were having earlier this summer, but my attempts at ant control weren't as successful. (I was told to mix it with sugar, get it wet, and soak cotton balls in the mixture. The ant would be drawn to the sugar and killed by the boric acid.) Ant traps also have been ineffective.

Raid and other sprays work on ants where we can see them, but I'm after something the ants can take back to the nests with them and kill the queen, so the whole colony will die. I'd also rather not spray poison around the kitchen.

So, any suggestions?

Happy birthday to me

We had a wonderful time on my birthday yesterday. My wife gave me a couple cardboard boxes and newspaper that the girls put presents inside, and they thought it was tremendous when I put a bubblewrap mailing envelope on my head for a "birthday hat."

The presents from the girls included a JMS Spider-Man trade paperback that reinterprets the death of Gwen Stacy, and reveals that she had children before she died, and a Simpsons Seaon 5 DVD set. Very nice, though I've been thinking lately how much I don't need more CDs or particularly need birthday presents.

Being married to my wife and having those two girls made this one of the best birthdays I can imagine.

And, as is customary for our marriage, I made dinner and baked my own birthday cake.

the rise and fall of the american empire

A friend of mine from my biweekly D&D sessions sent me a lengthy piece from CTheory that analyzes political, social and economic trends in the United States today, and looks ahead to the next fifty years. It's a fascinating essay, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what to make of it either. It's fairly lengthy and not as readable as one would wish for something this complex. I definitely see the power to what the author is saying, though, on several points:

• America has become a nation of consumers rather than producers. Our industry has been outsourced to other countries, and many "American" businesses are, more truthfully, multinational companies with assets so widely scattered it's hardly fair to say that they're American in the sense that originally would have meant. Our factories are in Mexico and China, our tech support comes from India, and plenty of other intellectual services, such as architecture, have been outsourced to places like Egypt, where the knowledge comes more cheaply than from a place here in the U.S.; and even our food is grown all over the world. It makes shareholders happy when the bottom line is blacker, but it makes us progressively less capable to provide for ourselves. As fuel costs continue to soar, we can expect the price of the goods we consume to rise also, and we'll have little alternative,since we've shut down our factories, developed our farms, and outsourced everything else.
• Our economy is riding an inflated bubble, and we're probably facing another Depression in the next ten years. Savings reached zero percent this year, and people are borrowing like crazy to get everything. It's a "standard of living" issue, but our standard of living is preposterous, with the things we "need." The writer notes -- and I agree -- that we've inverted the Protestant work ethic that made our nation what it is (or was). Instead of working hard with a delayed gratification, we've opted for a model of instant gratification where we get what we want now, even if we don't need it, and spend the next twenty or thirty years working our way out of debt. We do this not just with houses, but with cars, education, appliances, entertainment and pretty much everything else we buy. That's unsound economics, as anyone who remembers Black Friday in 1987 will attest.
• We're ignoramuses of our own history and culture. I actually thought this was an interesting stament in the piece you sent, since the author makes the point that our pop culture is recycling itself, with remakes of old TV shows, movies and TV shows as movies, a la "Dukes of Hazard." Part of this is the dimming of the American mind, to be sure, but it also hearkens back to the lost tradition of storytelling, where people would retell familiar stories from one generation to the next. What I gleaned from this point was that our new mass storytelling isn't connecting to our cultural heritage -- our history, Shakespeare, antiquity, the Bible -- it's connecting to recent stuff instead, and most of it fairly lightweight, like superhero movies or "Dukes of Hazzard." Rather than wrestling with the deep and troubling stories told by Shakespeare, Victor Hugo or Moses, we're going for the simple-minded morality tales of Batman fighting the Scarecrow, and the Duke boys getting the upper hand on Roscoe P. Coaltrain.

I'd have to say that I think a lot of the analysis here is dead-on, and it makes me think of a line from Alex Ross' "Uncle Sam" comic with Vertigo a few years back. Brittania, talking to Sam, recalls when she fell from glory and then adds: "Of course, when you fall, it's going to make what I went through look like a bloody cricket match."

And as the writer interprets from current events, it's not that the United States is going to fall. We've already started to topple.

alan moore's "swamp thing"

I don't know if you've ever read Alan Moore's run on "Swamp Thing," but if you haven't, I recommend it. In fact, even if it's available at the library, I'd go out and buy a copy. It's that good.

The only other Moore work I know from the 1980s is his "Watchmen," which I've never been able to submerge myself in completely, even though I recognize its importance to the medium and even though I can enjoy the artistry in some ways. (I'm guessing I don't have enough angst and despair to enjoy the darkening tone of the pirate comic, especially when it's buoyed up by Dreyburg's depression, the Comedian's nihilism, Rorshach's endless hostility and Dr. Manhattan's disinterest.)

"Swamp Thing" is just incredible. As the D.C. Universe goes, he's probably a C-string character, slightly more interesting than the Elongated Man, but not as engaging as Green Arrow or Etrigan. I know him mostly from the movie, where Alec Holland was working on some sort of growth formula to enhance plant growth, got covered in the stuff and became the anthropomorphic embodiment of swamp plants. Plus he had a guest shot in "Aquaman" while Peter David was writing it, and Neil Gaiman wrote a couple Swamp Thing-related stories that appeared in "Midnight Days."

In his first issue on "Swamp Thing" -- and it always feels funny to write about a personally new discovery that's actual twenty years old -- Moore reinterpreted the Swamp Thing's origin, much in the way that JMS later reinterpreted Spider-Man. I don't want to say much about it if you haven't read the volume in question, but it's fascinating. It completely redefines the character without really violating anything you've understood about him, and in some ways it even explains some of the impossibilities of his origins -- although as I noted to Natasha, you can't really do that without creating more absurdities, since you're trying to make the impossible seem believable.

Still, he redefines the character, and then follows that through brilliantly, creating a four-part horror story that works precisely because it deals with real horrors like the environmental devastation we've perpetrated in the last several decades. After that comes another three-part horror story that is also good, partly because of the thematic elements, but mostly because of those freaking twists and turns Moore puts his stories through in terms of expectation and plot. His stories can get so complex, it's fun to go back and re-read them just to see all the pieces lining up ahead of time.

I wish I could write that well. (Come to think of it, I wish Moore still wrote that well, but the "Tom Strong" books I've read have been a disappointment, and even "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" wasn't as good as this.)

And of course, as a "Sandman" fan, I got a kick out of realizing that Matthew Cable is none other than the pre-deceased Matthew, who became Dream's Raven in "The Doll's House." I had read that somewhere else, I think on an annotated Sandman web site I visited a couple years ago, but it was still neat to make the connection, and also to recognize a quote that Gaiman borrowed for "The Wake": "The night can make a man more brave, but not more sober." Ironic, I thought, that a comic book character was quoting to Matthew a line from a comic book where Matthew nearly killed himself while driving drunk.

Anyway, "Swamp Thing" is good stuff. I must remember to use my Barnes & Noble card to snag a copy at 20 percent off if the opportunity presents itself. (And for another good horror comic, check out "30 Days of Night," one of the all-time chillingest horror comics I've read, although it didn't give me nightmares.)

attack of the macrocephalites

I took the girls to the pediatrician on Tuesday. Evangeline needed a chicken pox vaccination before school starts, and Rachel needed a couple vaccinations herself before she can start preschool. That went fairly easily, despite their trepidation over getting shots -- Evangeline had just had four shots the previous week, one of them quite painful, and my attempts to get her in a positive state of mind by having her sing "I want to get a shot / Right in the butt" to the tune of "You Can't Get to Heaven" were ultimately unsuccessful.

I don't remember our last pediatrician doing this, but the nurse on Tuesday took a tape measure and measured the circumference of Rachel's head. When the doctor came in a few minutes later, she had a worried look on her face, and measured Rachel's head again herself.

"Let me guess," I said, "her head is bigger than normal."
"Well, yes," she said.
"In fact, it's off the chart."
"Yes," she said.
"And you're worried that she might have hydroencephalitis," I said.

The doctor started to laugh a little, since this was obviously familiar territory for me. Maybe she had noticed the size of my own head, which has been mistaken in the past for a three-story building.

"Well, hydroencephalitis or other related problems," she said. "Has her head always been large?"

"My wife thinks so," I said. "And she would know best. She calls it the Learn family head, and it is big enough for an entire family. She gets that from her father."

It turns out that Rachel, while she is only in the 25th percentile or so for height, is off the charts for head size. The doctor showed me the standard distribution for head size on children her age, and Rachel was well outside the norm, meaning she looks something like MODOK in the old Captain America comics. Still, as the doctor noted in the exam, Rachel was engaging in healthy imaginative play, responded to complex requests, had tremendous fine and gross motor skills, and was in no way impaired in her language ability.

In other words, she's a macrocephalite -- a fancy way of saying she has a big head, just like her father. Let's just hope she doesn't get the figurative big head that goes with it.

Also, as of Wednesday afternoon, I am one tooth lighter than I used to be. Now I'll agree I need to lose weight, but my mouth is not where I would like to lose it. Still, I had a broken molar and the dentists decided either they couldn't repair it or (I think more likely) my insurance company or their DMO policy said they couldn't repair it because they could just remove it instead, more cheaply. Worst of all, the smegheads wouldn't let me keep the tooth to put under the pillow and get a lousy 25 cents from the tooth fairy.

So now my mouth is lopsided because I have no lower right rear molar, but on the upside, my head is as big as ever.

a cardinal sin

Well, I did it again -- I have committed a cardinal sin in the world of homeschoolers, by failing to show proper solidarity with the party line. (And I bet you thought that happened only when teachers opposed the National Educators Association.)

I broke the first rule last year, when we decided to enroll Evangeline at an area charter school for first grade. I get a little touchy about this because I've encountered not once but several times a pervasive, defensive attitude among homeschoolers. We have to believe that homeschooling is better than school education, that our children are smarter, better adjusted socially, happier and just plain better off. With a few exceptions, there's a lot of resentment toward any insinuation that homeschooling is anything less than the best choice for every parent. Starting out as a homeschooler and then stopping -- that's just unacceptable. (I usually handle such reponses by asking them if they agree that the fundamental tenet of homeschooling is that parents know what is best for their children's education. Once they agree to that, I ask them to explain why they're faulting my decision when I'm the parent in question.)

Well, Thursday afternoon, I broke the second rule. I was at a park get-together with other homeschoolers, and somehow discussion turned toward the regulations in different states. New Jersey is one of the most generous states where homeschoolers are concerned. If I were to educate Evangeline all the way through 12th grade, all I have to do is send a letter to the school district, saying that we intend to educate her at home, and at that point, the burden of proof lies on the district to prove that I'm not educating her rather on me to prove that I am. There are no rules governing training or certification for me to homeschool, no rules stipulating what curricula I must use, and no evaluations of what my children actually do learn. I said that I think New Jersey is probably a little too lax on the rules.

About half the other parents there either took it in stride, or silently agreed with me. Who can tell, when they say nothing? The other half, though, wanted to know what I thought was wrong with the way things are, why I thought it would be good to have any sort of oversight, whose business was it what people teach their kids, and so on.

The thing is, I wasn't even discussing regulation as a means of catching people like the Jacksons, who allegedly abused or neglected foster children in their Collingswood home and used "homeschooling" as a means of avoiding detection at school. I did cite the Jacksons example, because they claimed to be homeschooling their kids and weren't. The alleged abuse is a different story, and the state Division of Youth and Family Services should have caught that abuse when its caseworkers supposedly visited the house. I'd say we have an obligation as a society to look out for the welfare of our children, and that includes making sure they're being educated. "Am I brother's keeper?" (Yes, Cain, you are.)

How you would evaluate, I don't know. I can't think anyone should object to a child mastering concepts faster than they would at school, and as noted, that's one of the biggest points of pride where homeschoolers are concerned -- how advanced our kids are, compared to the public school kids. So maybe there should be some sort of evaluation done -- though of course you run the risk of bias affecting how the evaluation is performed, and there's also the variation among children regarding their progress and development. Evangeline knew how to read before she was 5; other children don't want to learn until they're 6 or 7, which an anti-homeschooling administrator could see as a parent's failure. And of course there are "unschoolers," although I have to admit I'm a little suspicious of a Summerhill approach to education myself.

Part of the reaction -- and I'm speculating wildly here, so this part shouldn't be taken too seriously -- could stem from the individual's reason for homeschooling. Some people have a separatist motivation for homeschooling, a sort of "The district will teach my child horrible values and lead them away from the truth" thinking. Others, and I believe I lie more in this area than in the former, see it simply as a better means of education; i.e., "Public schools are going to fail my kids badly. They'll be better off if I homeschool them."

So I am falling rapidly from grace. The only thing left to do is to join the NEA.

getting feedback, and other events

I was talking to a friend last night who's on my "A Messy Faith" mailing list, and he told me had found my story about Daedalos to be haunting.

I was intrigued, since I haven't been getting much in the way of feedback on the list lately, and its membership hasn't swelled considerably yet. Not completely surprisingly, Brian didn't quite get the idea behind the story. He saw it as being about a man who had been courageous, lost his courage when he realized that he wasn't as in control of his life as he had thought, and then finally committed suicide.

That wasn't quite what I was aiming at. The ending was meant to be at least a little jarring, since you really don't know what's going to happen next, whether the wind carries Daedalos away from where he's been languishing, or if he's going to plunge to his death. I can see where he could get that interpretation, though I had thought the wind was a rather obvious symbol for what I had in mind.

Ah well.

Things continue as they have been, otherwise. We just got back from a weekend trip to visit family in Atlantic City, and are taking a slightly longer trip to D.C. this Friday afternoon, where we will visit my brother and take in the sights of the capital. We won't be going to visit the White House, alas, but we will see some of the other monuments, and let the girls see their first-ever protests outside the White House, I'm sure.

Just checked out a bunch of graphic novels from the library. As predicted, most of the Batman graphic novels were a disappointment. They've replaced Jim Gordon with a new police commissioner (Gordon retired), which makes for an interesting tension between Batman and the Gotham police; and for a few issues at least Batman had a female Robin sidekick, since Timothy Drake was grounded from superheroics once his father found out. A couple of interesting developments and changes, but the comics still lack any vision or drive that made Miller's Batman stand out. Heck, they're not even as well developed as Jeph Loeb's Batman, and I never thought he was that interesting.

On the other hand, I also checked out Alan Moore's "Saga of the Swamp Thing." First time I've ever read a Swamp Thing story (aside from a short story or two by Neil Gaiman), and it's by Moore, too. Does it get any better than this? It's an interesting read, and from what I can tell, it completely reinvented the Swamp Thing story, with a whole new interpretation of its origin. I'm still processing it, and will undoubtedly reread it a few more times before I return it. It's not due until the end of the month, like the others, but they're going back tomorrow.

Been re-reading Straczynski's "Rising Stars," too. More on that later.

Can we develop those alternate fuels now?

Dear Mr. President,

Maybe you haven't noticed, but the price of gas is getting cripplingly high for many of us in America.

It's reaching the point where we're reassessing not just recreational travel plans, but how much we use the car at all. It's driving up the costs of food, clothes and everything else that has to be transported from somewhere else to here.

It's bad enough for the middle class. I shudder to think of what it must be like for the working class and the unemployed who already are struggling to pay their bills. This isn't the time to drill for oil in the Arctic, or time to hope that freeing Iraq from Saddam Hussein so that Shi'a clerics can establish a harsh theocracy is going to bring new fuel into the country.

We're at the point that we should be using heavily fuel sources that require fewer fossil fuels or none at all.

Think you could spare a thought for us working families, instead of for your friends and campaign donors in the oil industry?

concering church membership

I had the following e-mail exchange today with the good people at The Wittenburg Door:

Dear Doorkeepers:

I am hoping you can help me resolve a quandary I am in, regarding church membership.

I recently talked with the pastor of a church I am interested in possibly attending. The last time I applied The Wittenburg Door litmus test to a pastor, he was excited to learn that you were still publishing, and it ended up being the best church I ever belonged to.

To my dismay, this new pastor has never heard of The Wittenburg Door. Should I rule out attending his church?

I await your response.

David Learn


Very slowly, so as not to arouse a fight or flight quandry, place a copy of the magazine in his cage and see if he:
(A.) tears it to shreds
(B.) urinates on it
(C.) Doesn't notice it
(D.) smiles

If it's anything other than (D.) go back to your old church.

In all seriousness, this new church seems intriguing -- for starters, it's based right here in the city where we live, so it'd be easier to get involved -- and I plan to attend one of their small groups next week, to see how it goes. If it doesn't seem like a good place, we'll stick with Zarephath Community Church a while longer.

But I hope The Door publishes my letter.

The artist finds her moment of homecoming

For about six months this year, Evangeline took art lessons over at the Art Academy of Hoover Point.

Today I had to zip by the academy to pick up some papers from the director for an arts festival I'm helping to prepare. I'm expecting a quick in-and-out affair.

Well, as soon as we pull into the parking lot, Evangeline lit up so brightly I could see it in the front seat. The car was no sooner parked than she had unbuckled her seat belt. By the time I had Rachel unbuckled, Evangeline was not only out of the car, she was ready to go inside.

Rachel and I got inside just in time to see Evangeline coming back from the rear of the art academy, where she had washed her hands and was now all prepped for a class that she wasn't signed up for.

The art director saw the look of dismay on my face and busted out laughing.

What could I do? It was a drop-in period where anyone can come in from off the street and do an art project. I picked up the papers I needed, then Rachel and I went off and left Evangeline to enjoy art class for the next two hours.

The summer program is much different from what I had expected, pricingwise, timewise and schedulewise, so Evangeline also appears to have wormed her way into regular art lessons over August, too. But I'll be damned if I'm taking her to a jewelry store when she's a teenager.

bragging rights

Since I've been staying at home with the kids, I decided to keep up with the homeschooling program over the summer, since it helps to fill the long and empty hours between breakfast, when Natasha leaves for work, and dinnertime, when she comes home and the day falls into the inexorable slide through our bedtime rituals. Yes, even though it's mid-July, Evangeline is getting no summer vacation from homeschooling.

I've been really impressed with her reading prowess. Natasha started her on the basics last summer, while I was still working at WCN Newspapers, leading her through a series of Bob books and a Hooked on Phonics curriculum we had borrowed from the library. Once Evangeline got the skills down, she's been reading up a storm. I usually have her read a Bible story first thing in the morning, and will read a history or science text with her before lunch, and so on. Though I lack the expertise to say for certain, I think she's reading on a third grade level, or possibly higher. Today, on her own initiative, she picked up her Spider-Girl comic book and read it for about 45 minutes, including time in the car. Wednesday night, I gave her the first volume of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" series, and explained how it was a true story about pioneers during the nation's westward expansion. (We've been reading about Lewis and Clark lately in history.) She read that for about half an hour, even though Rachel was watching TV in the same room.

She's also doing a bang-up job with math. She finished a math exercise book today that dealt solely with addition, but included double-digit addition and addition where you have to carry numbers into the tens column. She still uses her fingers, but she's getting probably about 90 percent of the problems right.

The area where I've been most impressed lately, though, has been writing. To get her used to putting thoughts to paper and to help her find a safe way to express herself (plus to keep her practicing her penmanship and related skills), I bought Evangeline a 100-page notebook in May. The idea was to have her write two sentences or so every day, about whatever she wants, and gradually steer her toward mastering different aspects of writing, like neatness, direction of letters, sizing and capitalization. I haven't cared too much about spelling, since I figure that'll come in due time and is less important right now than just getting used to writing.

I won't say I've been as diligent as I would have liked in having her write daily (though I've been much better this week), but even so, the change has been remarkable. Her first entry, dated June 3, 2005, starts off something like this: ZOO We EOWYNan. nOCk nOCK Who'S there? BO. BO WhO? BOPeP. MOMMY iS MY MOMMY anD MY SiSter'S MOMMy to.

Tuesday, though, she wrote this: Onse there was a happy Girl and the Girl was so happy that she Just went away. the end. I have to male my boy!

And today, she sat at the table and penned this entry:

A Girl Wanted an Ice cone but the Girl's mom woudn't let her only girl have any ice cones and only the girl's dad would let his only child have an ice cone any time she would want an ice cone! the end. A boy was with his mom evry bit of the day and the boy Slept with his mom evrey night!

It's a run-on sentence, to be sure, and she still needs to work on capitalization, but that's pretty impressive for someone the district considers too young to be in kindergarten. She's being more consistent about making her lowercase letters smaller than the uppercase ones, she's getting the spelling mostly right without asking us, and she's communicating fairly complicated thoughts in writing. (And I would be impressed even if the nice parent in the story weren't the father.)

Rachel and I meanwhile have experienced a renaissance in our relationship. Initially, Rachel took it pretty badly that I had become the stay-at-home father. She stopped taking naps even though she needed them -- she would throw a fit if I tried to get her to take one -- and we've had a few problems now and then with things.

Well, sometime last week Rachel started taking naps again. I ask her if she was ready to go upstairs for a nap, she picks a book for storytime, and then we lie down side by side on a bed for a few minutes, and she's out like a light. Tremendous. Last night, Natasha went to read her a bedtime story, and Rachel insisted that she wanted Daddy to read to her. It was a wonderful feeling, since there have been many times she would get upset if I tried to do anything with her while Natasha was around, even as simple as buckling her car seat for her. Once when we were playing hide-and-seek, she found me "hiding" on top of the bed, and even gave me a kiss, "to break the witch's spell," as she put it.

I was reminded today at the park at how different from her sister she is in some ways too. One of the playsets at the park is a blue plastic jungle gym with levels that I would have thought too far apart for her to climb. Shows how little I know. The little monkey climbed to the top of the jungle gym as fast as her sister, who is 3 years older than she. A little down from the jungle gym is a conifer that appears to have grown specifically for little children to climb. It has three main branches that at various points are practically parallel to the ground; elsewhere they slope gently upward, and are covered with short but sturdy branches that are perfectly suited for small hands to grab. Last week, when we visited this park for the first time, Rachel climbed higher on it, with no assistance, than Evangeline would climb on it with me standing right there and offering to help her.

And did I mention that she also likes Spider-Man? (Of course, that might not mean too much. She also pretends to be the Green Goblin, and just today had me draw a picture of her wearing a Green Goblin T-shirt and brandishing one of the Goblin's pumpkin bombs.)

So the girls are fine, Natasha is fine, and even though I am a mean, rotten-scoundrel parent, I am fine too. Couldn't be happier, actually.

The influence and reach of comics legend Frank Miller

I recently got into a discussion about Frank Miller with a friend of mine who is majoring in comic book illustration, in a roundabout way. Because Indigo liked the "Sin City" movie, I had sent her a news article about a fan biting the nose of somebody else who had seen it, when they couldn't agree on the movie's merits.

My friend noted that while Miller is held in high esteem in comic book circles, his work suffers from one significant problem: All his protagonists are tough guys with mental issues.

She's right. Miller does specialize in Macho Men with Mental Problems, doesn't he? Batman and Daredevil were relatively clean-cut, respectable heroes until Miller took the reins and started exploring what would possess a millionaire playboy and otherwise happy lawyer to dress up as a bat or in red leather, and go out and start beating people up.

Before "The Dark Knight Returns," Batman was about as dark as Bozo the Clown. The Caped Crusader gig was, at best, something millionaire Bruce Wayne did to hide his double identity as a detective. It also was often a pretty campy thing, not too far removed from the Joel Schumacher movies or the Adam West series.

Take a look at the odd villains in the Batman lineup: the Mad Hatter, a character taken right out of Alice in Wonderland; Solomon Grundy, taken from a nursery rhyme; the Penguin, an odd little man with a waterfowl fetish and not so different in appearance from his namesake; the guy, whatshisname, the ventriloquist with the dolls that came to life and control him; the Joker, a criminal prankster based on a playing card; King Tut, and so on.

Jim Starlin, I think, was writing Batman at the time of "The Dark Knight Returns," and his hero is decent enough, but not particularly intense. He's just Bruce Wayne in a suit, and he just keeps going because he's a hero. Miller turned Batman on his ear, and gave the character an edge never seen before.

In Miller's treatment, Batman was the real identity; Bruce Wayne was his cover. He wasn't a hero in the classic sense -- he was a man driven by anger and guilt over his parents' deaths, and trying to save them by proxy, by stopping crime in Gotham. Miller gave Batman a disdain for Superman and his simple-minded moral code of salute the flag, follow orders and eat lots of vegetables -- a disdain that would have been unthinkable before -- and completely redefined Batman for all time.

Even the villains who appear in "The Dark Knight Returns" -- Two-Face, and the Joker for example -- come out as actual menaces, not as, well, comic book chatacters. Everyone who's written Batman since has been writing -- or trying to write -- Miller's Batman, not Bob Kane's.

Up until last week, the only Miller Daredevil I had read with any great interest was the "Born Again" story arc, now available as a Daredevil Visionaries volume. As Indigo notes, Miller's Daredevil is also a tough guy with mental issues, but it's an interesting work because it's a story where Miller gives Daredevil's secret identity to the Kingpin, and invests Daredevil with a lot of Christ imagery.

"Dark Knight" showed Batman getting back into the swing in middle age; "Born Again" shows Daredevil falling out of the swing and getting run over by a truck. (It also has the single best Avengers cameo I have ever read.) Both treat their heroes as superheroes.

Still, while he might stick with one essential theme, Miller's seminal work on "The Dark Knight Returns" was groundbreaking, for the simple reason that no one up to that point had seriously explored the psyche of a superhero. Miller acknowledged right off the bat that to be a superhero, you had to be obsessive and have some serious unresolved issues.

Miller's "Dark Knight" and Alan Moore's "Watchmen" changed the direction of superhero comics for an entire decade, and everyone started to deconstruct superheroes and explore their dark sides, and churn out more and stupider antiheroes. (For this reason alone, most 1990s superhero comics are shit, and worth even less.)

Even "Ronin" continues with the tough guy with mental problems, since the Ronin is essentially the escapist fantasy of what the reader assumes is a minor, unimportant character -- and "Ronin" is also a groundbreaking work. Although Miller uses it to explore a couple ideas he had used earlier in "Daredevil" about a homeless community living in the sewers of New York, "Ronin" represented a completely new artistic style in American comic books, infused with cool greens and other soft colors. It's nowhere near as garishly bright as most superhero comics, and even his pencils are different, though as someone who's a writer and not an artist, I'm not sure I can do it credit in trying to explain. It's, I don't know, softer yet dirtier somehow? He doesn't use as many straight lines, particularly with the people out on the streets of New York and under it, to create the effect of a world in decline and rapidly approaching ruin.

The story itself also is unlike anything previously seen in American comics, and reflects the influence of manga and Japanese storytelling in general, at least a decade before manga started to have as large a presence in American comics as it does today.

It's set around a samurai who failed to save his master from death -- thus earning him the disgraced title of ronin -- who is reincarnated into a futuristic New York, where he is battling the demon who slew his master, amid a science fiction backdrop. There's nothing superheroic or Western heroic about the battle at all; it's a private grudge match, and when your average schlob gets involved, he's as likely to get killed as not. (Those average schlobs really add a lot to the story, by the way. They add a lot of color, characterwise.)

When you get down to it, Frank Miller has been one of the most formative voices in American comics in the past 20 or more years. He may have had one principal character whom he kept playing with in different settings, but he's done a tremendous job in the process.

take my dog's ... fleas

Remember that really cool ending to the inaugural issue of "Preludes and Nocturnes?" Dream has just escaped from Burgess' circle, and had his long-awaited confrontation with Alex. As it wraps up, he turns to Burgess and says, "But come, I have a gift for you, to repay you for your years of hospitality. I give you eternal waking."

I feel right now like Sandy has given us her own parting gift as a way of saying thank you for all the years of hospitality we extended to her. Despite a good flea bath, despite the Frontline advanced flea and tick protection, despite our use of flea collars, Sandy has left us a veritable menagerie of a dog's favorite pets.

Our house has fleas. Their eggs are in the carpet, and they keep hatching and getting onto us. I have a couple flea bites, Natasha has a couple more, Evangeline has some, and Rachel's legs look like so much raw meat. (I suspect that we had this problem growing up in Saunders Station too, since we had a dog there, but I assumed at the time, in youthful ignorance, that the bug bites were from mosquitoes.)

What to do? I don't want to bomb the place, because the toxins in flea poison can be even worse than the fleas themselves, but the things are bloody near impossible to vacuum up. I can get beneficial nematodes to treat the lawn with, and I suspect I will, though the ladybugs we have naturally are already working on the problem out there, I'm sure.

Earlier today, I made up a boric acid mixture and walked through the house, sprinkling it on the carpet. Boric acid is less toxic to humans than table salt is, and not very irritating either, but it does have the effect of acting as a desiccant, which means it should kill the flea larvae before they can hatch.

Here's hoping. Fleas are bad enough when they're on the dog. It's even worse when the dog is dead and they're still alive.

The Right's full-court press to control the Supreme Court

Why is it that people who call themselves his followers engage in it so readily?


Christ came to set us free. When the Religious Right presses court in politics, the goal is not to liberate people as much as it is to make people behave in a manner that they consider acceptable (no gay marriage, no foul language, no obscenity, and so on). Controlling people is not what Christ is about. 

Belief.net has a well-written article by Marci Hamilton concerning the push from the Religious Right to determine the next Supreme Court appointment now that Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement. Hamilton has articulated fairly well one of my chief concerns with the insistence of the Religious Right that nominees conform to a narrowly defined list of behaviors, beliefs and attitudes, without exception.

For that matter Christianity Today has another article, about Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and how James Dobson and others on the Right have accused him of not being insufficiently pro-life. The ostensibly pro-choice positions they are taking issue with are positions Gonzalez has taken based on his understanding of the law, rather than on his personal beliefs. 

That is, of course, how our government is supposed to work. Issuing rulings based on personal beliefs  and not upon the rule of law is what the Right calls "legislating from the bench" and takes a good deal of umbrage at.

rebuilding the temple

Just to inform those who have been watching with all diligence for the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem: There has been a slight change of plans. Reconstruction of the Temple began this morning, in my kitchen.

Solomon built the original Temple with stone from the finest quarries, and with nothing but the choicest cedars from Lebanon. The new Temple is being made from the finest Popsicle sticks available. They have been mined from Popsicles of many flavors and hues, and purchased at the local crafts store.

Solomon hired many craftsmen and spent years completing the Temple. We have employed the services of a 5½-year-old girl and her father. The girl is applying glue with due diligence, and her father is working on a way to get the walls to stay standing. When construction finishes in the next few days, we expect the Temple will have an outer court for Gentiles, an inner court for the Jews, and the Most Holy Place. I have no idea what will go there since the local crafts store does not sell miniature Arks of the Covenant. Perhaps we will place "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in there instead.

Worship will be very difficult for anyone who desires to entire the Temple and make offerings. We have heard rumblings among the Fischer-Price people and from the host of Polly Pockets that they may make the pilgrimage.

The occasion for the Temple's reconstruction? A certain 5½-year-old read her Bible today and learned about Solomon's Temple, and decided it would be a fun craft. I'm sure you're familiar enough with biblical prophecy to realize that the prophets said nothing about "arts and crafts" coming into play with the third temple. That being the case, if I can find one small enough, I'm going to sneak a purple hippo into the Most Holy Place and call it the abomination that causes desolation.

hitting the (comic) books

I took the girls to Barnes & Nible today to pick up the "Strangers in Paradise" collection "Molly and Poo" for Niki's birthday. (I tried getting it from Amazon, and they kept pushing back the shipping date, and then from Overstock, and they canceled it, and well ...) Naturally, since we there anyway, I checked their graphic novels section, and splurged on a Daredevil Visionaries collection by Frank Miller that includes the entire Elektra saga. I had never read it before.

Wow.

I was really impressed by it. Miller wrote and drew this when he was in his early 20s, and it holds up pretty well. There's a tremendous intimation of passion between the two, but he never really does more than suggest it. There are occasional exchanges -- a kiss or two -- but mostly it's suggested in the way Elektra tails Matt to protect him from one person or another, or the way she bandages him after he's been hurt -- and of course when she spares Foggy just because he recognizes her.

The story also has the sagas of Bullseye and the Kingpin interwoven through it. When he first appears, Bullseye is suffering from a brain tumor that is causing him to suffer a paranoid delusion that everyone is Daredevil. I don't know much of the backstory there -- I never cared much for Daredevil, aside from when Miller wrote it -- but apparently Daredevil had saved Bullseye's life in a previous story. Bullseye's growing obsession with killing Daredevil, plus his determination to "prove" himself to the Kingpin and the rest of the underworld, make him a much more compelling criminal than I had imagined from the little I knew before.

Kingpin was pretty interesting too. I think of him mostly as a Daredevil nemesis because of Miller's "Born Again" story arc, but I think I was mostly familiar with him from the Spider-Man comics. (Miller apparently made a pointed effort of borrowing or stealing as many Spider-Man foes as he could while he was on Daredevil, Kingpin being one of the most successfully stolen.) At the start of the volume, the Kingpin had left behind the criminal underworld but was being pushed back into it, unwillingly, by one of his assistants. By the end of the volume, he was back into it with a vengeance, making him a tragic figure. I can't think of him as a sympathetic character, but perhaps I should -- as noted, he had left that world behind for the sake of his wife, and was drawn back into it against his will. Interesting stuff.

I probably could say things that are more coherent, and I probably will once I've had time to digest it some more, and probably read it a second and third time. I always do that when I get a new comic, because I want to absorb it completely, and you can never do that in the first reading.

This also means I have a redundant Daredevil volume. The Visionaries collection includes the entire trade paperback "Gang War" or whatever it was called, which skipped over the Elektra saga, skimped on Bullseye and focused mainly on the Kingpin's return, even though some of the missing issues were essential to understanding a subplot involving Ben Urich and his investigation into a corrupt mayoral candidate.

At least I think it's redundant. It's possible that "Gang War" includes a few earlier issues, like the one where Daredevil gets his hide beaten by the Hulk and Urich figures out Daredevil's secret identity. (In a nice touch, Bullseye also figures it out and tells the Kingpin, but it ends up neither man considers a blind superhero to be a believable scenario. Later, in "Born Again," the Kingpin decides that Murdock is pretending to be blind after Karen Paige sells Matt's identity.)

Anyway ...

I also bought "Trinity," a graphic novel about the first meeting of Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman, just because it was written and illustrated by Matt Wagner. An utterly incredible comic. I love Wagner's writing. He gets the characters so exactly right. Batman's reaction to the invisible jet: "I want one." Superman's reaction to Batman's gadgets and subterfuge: "Bruce loves his surprises." And the initial meeting between Batman and Wonder Woman, where they nearly come to blows -- excellent. Completely believable.

Wagner also makes good use of Ra's al Ghul and Bizarro -- two villains I've never found that interesting. Ra's al Ghul seems to exist mostly to show how tough and clever Batman is, and Bizarro is, well, usually just a retarded anti-Superman. While I can't say I'm eager to see either one in another comic, I thought the interaction of them here was pretty good. Ra's al Ghul actually comes across as clever and resourceful, rather than merely thinking himself to be so, and Bizarro is a little comical, particularly the way he gets duped into thinking of Ra's al Ghul as his friend, and calls him "Racer Cool."

Aside from that, I bought myself a new Bible, since the old one is falling apart, and a copy of Philip Yancey's "Disappointment with God." I'm still reading the latter, but I have to say that he's given me plenty to think about, ranging from his description of the divine romance from God's side, down to "Disappointment with life should not mean disappointment with God."

Balloonmania at the public library

We just got back from a library event where Evangeline was happily occupied for about one-and-a-half hours, learning to tie her own balloons, along with about 25 other screaming children. (The only downside was when the balloon lady made only one Spider-Man balloon and didn't have time to make them for other children.)

Rachel and I stayed out in the children's section of the library and played with dolls, did puzzles and read a couple books. About 20 minutes before the balloon class ended, the librarian asked if Rachel would be interested in coloring a dragon scale for some sort of thematic display they have. She gave me a dragon scale too, because they really needed to get all the scales colored and illustrated, and all the children were busy with the balloons.

So for the next 20 minutes or so, I drew pictures of Violet and the other Incredibles, Superman, Spider-Man, Batman and Green Lantern. And of course I helped Rachel draw pictures on her scale too.

Still, it was kind of fun. I looked around for the finished collection of dragon scales when we left, to see if I could spot our artwork, but no look. Maybe when we go back.

a messy faith

I set up a new mailing list today on Topica, called "A Messy Faith." My idea was to great a mailing list where I would send out articles/columns/musings/whatever you want to call it, essentially insights gleaned from my own spiritual journey.

I suppose, like every other writer on the face of the earth, I labor under the misapprehension that I have something to say that needs to be expressed somehow. Hence my thought of creating a list where I present my faith-related experiences and struggles openly. (Well, more or less. Personal problems are no one else's business.) It creates a platform to share my inner thoughts on such things.

In some ways it's an outgrowth of my efforts at prayer-journaling. I find it helps me focus on my prayer to write everything down like that. I did something like that a few weeks ago and my editing skills kicked in and forced me to face a lot of constipated thinking and excuses I had just been accepting. So I figure, if I'm going to do this, why not let someone else benefit from it too? That ties into my teacher nature, and you never know — it might help me get a raised profile as a writer and get me some of the inroads I'd like careerwise. If nothing else, it'll give me clips. (I've decided to set up a separate blog to archive the posts.)

Disagreement with my thoughts, of course, is not only expected but welcome. I just don't want don't want to turn it into an e-mail version of CHRefugee, for reasons having to do with the diversion of time from family that such a thing would result in. I can set up a separate list for discussion, or convert this to one with moderated discussion, I suppose, but that would depend upon the interest levels.

born again?

When I get asked if I am "born again" or evangelical, I no longer know what to say.

One of the many times online I refused to describe myself as an evangelical and it prompted the usual litany of "What do you mean?" and "What do you call yourself?", I had the presence of mind to describe myself just as a sinner who had found the Cross and was clinging to it in repentance. People shut up in record time.

Sandy has passed on

We just had to put our dog down last Thursday.

The poor girl has been having trouble walking, her appetite has been fading, and she started having seizures last Monday. We only realized she had had a seizure Monday after she had another one early Thursday afternoon, and we noticed her condition afterward was identical to what we had found her in when we came downstairs Monday night. The vet, who was very sympathetic to our situation, believes Sandy had a brain tumor.

Losing Sandy has been a lot harder on Evangeline than I had expected. Yesterday, on the Fourth of July, we went out into the back yard, and she just quietly walked up to where we had buried Sandy, and stood there. Today she said she heard a dog snuffle here in the house, and that means that Sandy must be alive again.

Yowch.

We've talked a couple times now about death, and I've assured her that Sandy will be raised to life on the Last Day and will join us in heaven, but it still stinks to see her torn up over her dog's death.

I love America, but it frustrates me

I'm a patriot.

I love America. I am not ashamed to be an American, and there are many things my country has done of which I am justly proud, from the technological achievements that catapulted America to the forefront of world industry, and its concern with human rights and welfare, not just here but globally.

I love my country. There's a lot I could say, but it's been said better by many others.

There are things I don't like about my country. One is the assumption that anyone who criticizes our country's actions or finds fault with our country, its institutions, or its policies is not worthy of being an American, is unpatriotic, or even hates our country.

I love the fact that we have a democracy, and I love the idea that anyone can rise from obscurity to the White House, in that delightful "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" sort of way. I don't love the stupid two-party political system, and I especially don't love the incredibly ridiculous partisan bickering that we all engage in. I outright cannot stand how heavily stacked things are so the two entrenched parties can retain their power and shut out potential upstarts who might not only upset the apple cart, but take it away from them.

Here in New Jersey, voters have no choice in our primary elections. The county chairmen and chairwomen determine it all in the name of party unity, and the only bone that they throw to us is to ratify their decisions. This year we could have had a decent Democratic candidate for governor, but a millionaire with a kickass fund-raising prowess decided he would rather run the state than be a nobody in the Senate, and so Jon Corzine maneuvered left and right in early spring to lock up the party nomination before the rest of us could vote.

I did a write-in vote anyway, as a useless protest. I also had to get a court order allowing me to vote, but that's another complaint for another time. Suffice it to say that my children had an unforgettable civics lesson on how important our right to vote is.

As bad as our state and local elections are, national elections are even worse. U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) lost the GOP nomination five years ago because he wouldn't toe the party line. Bush lost by huge margins in Michigan and other states where they have open primaries, but he was seen as a better conservative image, so he was given millions more to waste on attack ads and dirty campaigning so he could win the party nomination.

I've thought of seceding, but secession doesn't have a very proud or glorious tradition in our nation.

I don't love that we've never had a woman or a black for president. I also hate it that politicians feel they must feign or profess deep Christian faith to win. The only non-Christians, at least depending on how you define the term, I can think of in our nation's history to hold the top seats were our Deist founders.

I hate that all this is true of our vice presidents, and for our congressional seats, as well. At least there are a few women in line to run in the primaries.

Hillary Clinton is going to seek the Democratic nomination in three years, although I think she won't succeed. The white Protestant male syndrome is pretty old.

I also really don't like having George W. Bush as my president. I didn't like John Kerry either, and I really don't like that we had only two viable choices for president. The fact that neither of them was a person I want to lead me is even more upsetting to me.


Some day, and I hope to see it happen, someone will run for office who will blow the two reigning parties out of the water because of an ability to inspire, because of a vision that we can all reach for, and because this person really is able to unite us, despite the thousand tribes that we have divided ourselves into. In the meantime, I wait.

And I hope that the office is still worth running for when that candidate does arrive.


Copyright © 2005 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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my daughter, the fangirl

Well, I'm proud to say that Evangeline is well on her way to becoming a full-blooded fangirl. That she enjoys being told tales from "Lord of the Rings" is no surprise. What is taking me by surprise is how far she's taking these things.

She made the connection between Mulan and her namesake last fall, which racheted up her interest in the Disney movie quite a bit. Last week, we were finishing our homeschool study on the American Revolution by reading a true story about a soldier named Robert Shurtliff. About halfway through the story, we discovered that Robert's real name was Deborah Samson. Evangeline's interest in the story leaped, and when I asked her why she thought Deborah Samson had disguised herself as a man and gone off to fight in the Revolution, she had an answer right away: "Because she knew that no man could hinder the British."

For our anniversary and for Father's Day, I received three different Spider-Man trade paperbacks written by J. Michael Straczynski of "Babylon 5" fame. Natasha has been reading these almost as fast as I have, and the past two days, she has been reading them to Evangeline including tonight, as a bedtime story. After we said our prayers, Evangeline confided in me that she's into Spider-Man even more than "The Incredibles" and would like to have a Spider-Man dress to wear.

What's a dad to do? Much of Straczynski's writing is either too mature or too advanced for her, so I'm going through my collection of trade paperbacks and figuring out which ones are safe for her to read. ("Sandman" is right out, as are "Kraven's Last Hunt" and "Maus.") Tomorrow I'm going to introduce her to Superman, via John Byrne's "Man of Steel" from the mid-1980s; and see if I can find some Spider-Man cartoons we can watch together over the weekend.

When I was a teen in high school, or even a college student, I never would have dreamed that I would marry someone who could enjoy intelligent, well-written comic books as much as I do. And now I have a daughter who enjoys them too.

amazon strikes out

I recently canceled an order for $49.42 worth of books. That's not a significant portion of Amazon's receipts, I realize, but I want to say why I did this.

Quite frankly, I've noticed a significant decline in the service that Amazon.com provides its customers. In three separate orders this year, I've been beset with problems as Amazon keeps shifting the shipping date further and further back, with no explanation, even though all the items are listed as "ships within 24 hours." On the Super-Saver Shipping feature, which is supposed to ship items within a week, I'm noticing shipping estimates of three or four weeks, and when I log in after a week has passed, I'm finding that the shipping date has been pushed back further.

That's more than just a little disappointing. E-commerce in general and Amazon.com in particular have succeeded by and large because of the convenience they present. When I first ordered from Amazon.com ten years ago, it was convenient knowing I could order a book and have it in a few days' time, for birthdays, Christmas or for my own pleasure. That assurance is gone now, and I'm learning to do my shopping elsewhere, either at Overstock.com, which is also cheaper than Amazon when it has the items in stock, or at the bookstores in my area, which while it might not have every book in the world in stock, still has a decent selection and has them for me to pick up right then and there. Best of all, when they don't, I know I can order it and have the book in my hand within a week.

With Amazon, I just can't count on that anymore. With three strikes in a row now, Amazon is out of the running where I'm concerned.

family values

A couple weeks ago, I decided the time had come to leave CHRefugee, a Christian humor forum where I have hung my hat as a moderator and regular contributor for the last three or maybe even four years.

My reasons for doing so are largely personal, so I won't get into them here, but I can't help but notice an interesting chain of events that began about two months ago. At the time, another forum moderator was having some marital difficulties and his wife asked him to leave the forum as a sign of his commitment to doing whatever it would take to save their marriage.

Here's how things progressed:

1. My friend's wife tells him he needs to leave the forum.
2. Moved by his farewell post, I start reassessing my involvement in the forum, and then leave.
3. Prompted by the departure of two other forum regulars, two other forum members, including a third moderator, each start re-evaluating the amount of time they put into the forum that could be spent on real-life relationships. One leaves the forum, and the other vastly scales back his Internet time.
4. Frustrated by the sudden departure of three forum liberals and the forum's ensuing tilt to the Right, two more forum members begin mulling their own possible departures. Not clear if that's happened yet, but judging by her blog entry and stuff she's written to me, Indigo is really frustrated.

It's looking at though my friend's wife single-handedly has managed to destroy a forum that survived being displaced by About.com, some pretty heated political debates, a number of forum-rocking personal crises, and a wide range of beliefs within the Christian spectrum.

As a side note, I can't help but be amused by one aspect of this: The Right usually claims to be the guardians and embodiment of family values, but it's all the liberals who are leaving the forum to spend more time with their families.

The gospels of Judith Christ

A friend of mine recently tipped me onto a new book making a stir with its assertion that Jesus Christ was a woman and not a man.

"Judith Christ of Nazareth: The Gospels of the Bible, Corrected to Reflect that Christ was a Woman" is a collection of the four canonical gospels with all references to Jesus changed to reflect this conceit. That's it. It's not a serious attempt at scholarship; it's a clever trick meant to make us examine our attitudes toward women, and that's about it.

I'd like to think most people think it's an interesting idea, contemplate it a bit and then move.

Unfortunately there are other people for whom moving on is impossible. To them it's not a tempest in a teapot, it's a shitshow in sackcloth.

Over at CHRefugee, which I visited recently to see if it really was getting as ridiculous as a friend said it was, people were gleefully pointing out that Judith is the feminine form of Judas, as though that proved something, and talking about the "translation" as though it were a heresy straight from hell.

The only fair criticism that I saw was that the Bible, when it uses a pronoun to refer to God, invariably settles on the masculine set, and there is no evidence that Jesus was actually a woman.

To the point of the book: What diffrence would it have made had if Jesus had come as a woman? Offhand I can't think of anything. God chose to work through a patriarchal society to reveal himself, but he uses some pretty blatant feminine imagery to describe himself at times. There's the prophetic utterance "Can a mother forget the child that nurses at her breast?" or Jesus' own statement, "Long have I longed to gather you as a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings."

The Holy Spirit, one of the three persons of the Godhead, routinely is described with feminine imagery, describing God as a comforter and a nurturer. The Holy Spirit's name in Hebrew, Ruakh Khadesh, is even feminine. My personal favorite is one of the names the Tanakh uses to refer to God: "many-breasted One." (I think that's El Shaddai.)

So why Jesus and not Judith? I would hazard a guess it's because of the culture he was in, and no other reason.

When I directed the church's Passion play one year, I wanted to cast my close, personal friend Anne in the role of Christ because she was the best actor available. Anne loved the idea, but didn't see how we could pull it off with a one-time performance, since by the time people got used to a female Jesus, the play would be over, with no other performances coming up.

As the father of two girls, I wish the Bible had more fully developed female role models than just Esther and Ruth. That no doubt is because of the culture the Bible was written in, but it's a shame that we don't know more about women like Priscilla, Lydia or Dorcas, Deborah or even Jael. All I can say about Priscilla is that Paul thought highly of her, she was a woman apostle and a contender for author of Hebrews, and a few other little tidbits like that. That's a loss for all of us.

If this is going to drive people batty so much, I'm tempted to scour the Bible for other men who were really women in disguise.

The best example would have to be Jacob, the father of the Israelites. Remember how he was smooth-skinned, Rebekah loved him more than Esau, he was good in the kitchen and had a voice that was noticeably different from his brother's? As a woman, Jacob even needed someone else to help him get his wives pregnant.

It would be much easier today, with fertility technology, but at the time he had help from two of the household servants, whom the Bible calls "maidservants" in an attempt to perpetuate the fiction that Jacob was a man.

In the end, these over-the-top reactions underscore the message of the LBI Institute responsible for publishing these tales of Judith Christ. There's a lot of sexism and misogyny in the church aimed at women. It's inconsistent with the liberating message of the gospel and ultimately counter to the prevailing message of Scripture.

God sees it, and man is she pissed.

sweet victory

Today I did what many dream of, but few ever accomplish: I beat the bureaucracy.

The cutoff date for kindergarten registration in our school district is Oct. 15. Children born after that are out of luck, and must wait another year to attend kindergarten. The same date holds true for children who are entering first grade. Since Evangeline's birthday is two weeks later, I have been assured by dozens of petty bureaucrats that she would be in kindergarten next year, despite having completed kindergarten in a homeschool setting.

Today I proved them wrong. I have lost track of how many people I've called, but they range from the guidance counselor at the Lord Stirling School, where she would have attended school, to an official in the state Department of Education. I read the riot act to administrators at the charter school, and I read it again to the administrators in the public school district, but I finally got my message through: She has completed kindergarten. There is no reason for her to repeat it.

They listened -- thank God, or bene swa l'etenal, as they say in Haiti -- they actually listened. I have a letter from the superintendent of schools in our district accepting her kindergarten experience as valid, which means that she qualifies for first grde.

She'll be the youngest child in her grade next year, I expect, but she'll be in the grade that she's ready for, and she probably will have had a better kindergarten experience than her classmates. She can read chapter books now, speak a little Spanish, and has read fairy tales from all over the world, as well as everything else we've done with her.

Thank God the fight is over. Thank God I won.

Now I just wish they didn't all hate me.

The charter school itself runs from kindergarten through eighth grade and relies on heavy parental involvement. It operates multigrade classrooms -- Evangeline's is kindergarten through second grade -- and it has a big emphasis on the arts. Students in the upper grades this year just did a movie in conjunction with a grant from Lucasfilm.

Essentially, the school combines the advantages of homeschooling, such as learning at your own pace, individualized curriculum and flexibility, with the economies of scale of public schooling, like having a larger support staff, greater resources and other children to interact with socially. I'm sure that it also creates problems unique to a charter school setting, but I don't know yet what those are.

A friend of mine whose son went to the charter school for a couple years tells me that the guiding philosophy of the school is humanistic, which really comes as no surprise to me. To be honest, as long as they teach the kids to think for themselves -- or if they don't encourage it but at least allow it -- I'll be happier with it than I would with a Christian school, which usually teaches a fair amount of arrogance and unquestioning accept-what-you're-told thinking.

I told Evangeline that she would be going there next year, but I don't think it's entirely sunk in. Still, when we visited the school a couple weeks ago for an arts show it had in the halls and we started to get a feel for just how great a deal this was going to be, she did ask if she could start going to school there the next day, which unfortunately was a Saturday, so the answer was no for two reasons.

In many ways, I'd like it if Evangeline could continue to homeschool, as she definitely has benefited from it this year. She's reading at a third-grade level, we think, writes well, and has pretty much mastered simple addition. She's about to tackle subtraction soon too.

We've studied botany, hurricanes, electrify and magnetism, and various on-the-spot things about inertia, Newton's laws of motion and other oddball science that comes to mind, plus the field trips we've taken to places of interest scientifically and historically.

She's learned a lot about the American Revolution, and has had a decent exposure to the Spanish language, and has received more advanced gymnastics and art training than she would have received in a public school kindergarten. Music is probably about the same.

All this was done without the benefit of an actual curriculum. If we had had the money to actually buy a copy of a used curriculum, I can only imagine what she would have learned.

Unfortunately, Evangeline hates being homeschooled. Absolutely hates it. She doesn't hate being with me, and she doesn't hate being with her sister. What she hates is not being with other kids her age. Evangeline attended preschool for two years at Somerset Presbyterian Preschool, and she loved that.

She thrived in the preschool setting, with the other children, and she thrives in the gymnastics and arts classes where she other children to interact with. She has complained on a regular basis that she would rather be with other children her age, sometimes quite vehemently.

And so we enrolled her in the charter school, and so I fought for her to be in a more appropriate grade, even though that grade marking largely will come into play only if we move at some point and have to transfer her records to another school someplace else.

It may be that partway through first grade, Evangeline will realize that she had it made in homeschool, and we'll have to discuss withdrawing her from the school for homeschooling in the second grade. I don't know. We'll have to see.

That she is going to the charter school for first grade, of course, does not mean that I am through teaching her. I am not. We're going to continue many of our activities, go on field trips and whatever else we can, particularly during holidays and the summer season. I wouldn't be surprised if we continue with some academic lessons after school ends. (I plan to continue stuff over the next three months while regular school is out, as it is, albeit with a fair amount of flexibility to allow for day-to-day summer activity.)

But that's all in the future. Today, we beat the system, and that's enough.


Copyright © 2005 by David Learn. Used with permission.

deep throat

I was excited yet oddly disappointed to learn the identity of Deep Throat this past week.

The enduring mystery of who provided Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein the information that established them and the Washington Post forever in the journalism hall of fame has been the best, most enduring part of the whole Watergate scandal for the past 30 years. The mystique of having a mysterious insider into an administration or a story adds spice to news coverage, and the power of the press, as demonstrated in Nixon's eventual resignation, is what inspired community journalists like me to look for signs of nefarious evil-doing in the choice of roads to pave and the allocation of money to buy laptop computers for the elementary school.

And now that we have a name to put on the mystery, Deep Throat is no longer as compelling and absorbing a figure as he used to be. Rather than a dark, shadowy figure in the parking garage, Deep Throat was nothing more than the second-in-command of the FBI. He has a name, a face, possibly inglorious motives, and the whole nine yards.

"Deep Throat" has diminished. Bob Woodward has diminished. Journalism itself has diminished.

It's possible -- just possible, mind you -- that the decision to pave Valley Road may have been legitimate after all.