October 13, 2007
by infmom
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I spent quite a bit of time upgrading my other blogs to the latest version of WordPress tonight, but I don’t know if I can do that with this one. It seems that my theme may be incompatible with WordPress 2.3.
And I don’t want to give up my theme.
The cautions on it just say that it might be a problem. Whether I want to go ahead and try the upgrade, and then possibly have to take it all out again and put back the old version… well, not gonna do it tonight, that’s for sure.
October 10, 2007
by infmom
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According to the LA Times and other sources, Turkey is threatening to “cut off cooperation with the United States on a number of security fronts” if a resolution currently before Congress goes through.
The resolution refers to the deaths of more than a million Armenians in Turkey around the time of WWI as a genocide. The Turks claim it wasn’t anything of the sort, and besides, a lot of other people got killed at the same time.
If millions of people got killed at the same time and it wasn’t a genocide, what term should be used to describe it? Is Stalin guilty of genocide for having millions slaughtered in the USSR? Are the settlers of North America guilty of genocide for what happened to the native population?
Apparently the Turkish sticking point is that they don’t think they targeted Armenians in particular. I haven’t seen any statistics that show how many people of other-than-Armenian descent were slaughtered at that time, and I doubt at this late date that entirely accurate figures could be obtained… but still, if the Armenians were the majority of the victims, I doubt any rational person could claim it was just coincidence that it happened that way. Since when have Bush & Co. ever really worried about what anyone else in the world thought of us? Why is it all of a sudden so important to appease the Turks, when Bush policies have already pissed off so many other nations in that area of the world (and elsewhere)? Those guys don’t give a crap. The cynical person should wonder whose palm is being greased, and by whom.
Do we claim that what happened during WWII wasn’t genocide because it wasn’t just the Jews who were the target of Hitler’s insanity? (My grandfather and all his family died in a concentration camp, according to family tradition, because they were “Polish intelligentsia.”) Do we claim that the deaths of a huge percentage of the native populations in the Americas from the time of Columbus up to recent historical times was not genocide because so much of it was the result of ignorance rather than deliberate malice?
It seems to this outsider that the solution would be to let the resolution pass. It harms nothing to acknowledge something that happened nearly a century ago. Telling the truth sheds light on the problem And the current Turkish government should respond to the resolution by saying “That was then. This is now. The people responsible are long dead and we should let them and their victims rest in peace. They have received whatever reward or punishment they deserved. All we can do at this late date is to assure the world that nothing like that will ever happen again.”
Won’t happen, of course. I suspect the Turks and the Bushes have way too much in common to be logical.
October 8, 2007
by infmom
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It’s been brought home to me, over the past few weeks, that (like most people, I think) I expect at least a few things in my life to stay the same.
One of the things I expected not to change any time soon was my mother’s independence. Up to about two weeks ago, she lived a fiercely independent life–to the extent of turning down a serious proposal of marriage a few months back. She didn’t want to change her life to that extent, no matter how she felt about her boyfriend. (Seems strange to say “boyfriend” about a guy who’s 83, but what other term is there?)
All of a sudden, though, her short-term memory completely conked out. And now she gets panicky and frightened easiliy when someone’s not there to reassure her. The doctors can’t figure out what went wrong.
Mom’s had a stroke, a heart attack and bypass surgery. I had read that bypass surgery sometimes causes mental problems in the year or so afterwards, but other sources say that’s just coincidence. Certainly my dad went downhill after he had bypass surgery and eventually died of complications of Alzheimers. Is this what’s happening to Mom? She’s had every conceivable test and nothing has showed up.
She’s aware of the problem and aware of what’s wrong, and can talk quite lucidly on the phone (at least when I’ve talked with her) but not being able to remember anything is scaring her. Understandably so.
But what’s to be done? Only one of the four of us siblings lives nearby, and that one is working two jobs, putting four daughters through school, and on top of everything else moving in with his father-in-law who’s seriously affected by dementia but refuses to move out of his home. My brother just has nothing left to give.
Another brother has flown in from California to take care of Mom for the moment, but he has to come back and get back to work because while he’s in Louisville he has no income. He’s talked about bringing Mom back to California, but we all know that’s not practical. Outside of her familiar surroundings, who knows what might happen, and the cost of housing in California is ten times what it is in Louisville.
Mom begs not to be “put in a home.” Given that she would only have Medicare to pay for long term care, that’s a reasonable concern. But what can we do if it should come to that? The four of us together don’t have the resources to pay for anything else. Unfortunately, our parents’ legacy did not include either lots of money or the will to get into lucrative professions.
We can hope that somehow, she’ll get better. It’s possible that she had another small stroke, one that wouldn’t show up on any scan. If that’s the case, it might be possible to re-route the brain cells and make daily independent life feasible again. But no one’s counting those particular chickens before they are hatched.
So, things have changed. And how we all wish they had stayed the same. We have to think of something. Mom can’t.
September 23, 2007
by infmom
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Several years ago, when I was working at the library, I was browsing the stacks looking for something to read and happened upon Faye Kellerman’s book The Ritual Bath. The jacket blurb looked interesting, so I checked it out.
And then, of course, I had to go find all the other books in the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series and read them, too, in chronological order. Needless to say, I was hooked.
The books embody a lot of my literary favorites–interesting, real characters who develop and grow over time, intriguing stories, and, of course, excellent writing. The fact that Rina, the heroine, is a devoutly religious Orthodox Jew just added an extra bit of literary spice to the story. I’d read Harry Kemelman’s “Rabbi” series of books, and had begun to understand a bit about Orthodox Judaism (OK, Rabbi Small was officially a Conservative rabbi, but he and his family were Orthodox). Or at least as much as an interested heathen could understand.
Interestingly enough, though, when I have recommended the Kellerman books to friends, whether they like the series or not seems to depend more on their religion than anything else. Almost invariably, the more evangelical-Christian the friend, the less they like the books. And the comments boil down to the fact that they find the religion in the books too obtrusive.
And yet, if the protagonists had been evangelical Christians and every religious element was so familiar as to fade into the background like the sound of a ticking clock, I doubt my friends would have thought of the books as “religious” at all.
We all tend to let the familiar slide into the background noise without much notice. I grew up in a segregated Southern city where the “colored entrance” and segregated balcony in the movie theater was just the way things were. That didn’t impinge on my consciousness at all until after we’d long since moved away. So I’m well aware of how this works.
But still… why should the inclusion of religious elements make religious people uneasy? Isn’t it, as they so often tell me, all the same God?
I wonder.
And now I’m reading Faye Kellerman’s latest book, The Burnt House, and enjoying every minute, and feeling sorry for my friends who are missing out on these books.
Edited to add: In the end, though, I was disappointed in the book overall. The elements that make a Decker / Lazarus story unique were just kind of haphazardly used as filler. The story was good, the writing was good, the proofreading sucked big time. If Kellerman had started out with this book I suspect it would have been a tough sell.
September 16, 2007
by infmom
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My current book is Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest by Gerard Degroot. The subtitle, I think, should really be A Cynical Luddite Curmudgeon Looks at the Space Race.
I’m among the first children of the Fifties, and we grew up with the wonders of the “space race.” The people in our neighborhood, adults and children alike, gathered out in the street to watch Echo fly over. We saw the very first satellite broadcast from Europe (although I was royally irked that it interrupted a perfectly good rerun of “Wagon Train”). We read the Life magazine stories about the astronauts, and when Americans went into space, if someone’s parents had an extra TV they could spare for the day (not a common thing in those days) then our school classes came to a halt while we darkened the room and watched the launch, and sometimes the splashdown. (No TV available for Alan Shepard’s flight when I was in the fifth grade, but we listened to it on a transistor radio in class.)
Of course, it wasn’t all wine and roses. My father, a combat veteran of WWII, had absolutely no use for Wernher von Braun, and every time his name was mentioned, Dad would sneer “That Nazi.” Girls were told flat-out that they couldn’t be astronauts, and Valentina Tereshkova’s flight was airily dismissed as nothing more than a publicity stunt. (Well, it was, but that wasn’t the point.) Astronauts died in plane crashes, and of course there was the horrendous fire in Apollo 1.
But the idea of going to the Moon was magical, somehow, even if women were excluded and not much really came of it and most people don’t remember much about the Moon landings nowadays.
Degroot’s unwavering criticism of the whole affair proves quite soundly that even if the individual elements of an argument are true, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the argument itself is valid. He points out that the whole “space race” was built on a tissue of lies and disinformation (true) and that Russian technology wasn’t anything like the propagandists told us it was (true) and that even Kennedy, who issued the challenge to go to the moon “before this decade is out” wasn’t really that much of a fan of NASA (who knows; we’re not mind readers and JFK is long gone). He sides firmly with the people who felt that the billions of dollars spent getting a few men to the Moon ought to have been spent making lasting changes here on Earth (possibly true, but given the limited success of all the various Earth programs into which billions have been poured over the years…)
In short, he says, we wasted our money and we wasted our time. Wernher von Braun was an SS used car salesman, the directors of NASA were glad-handing idiots who knew how to work a crowd, and all the emphasis on “science and technology” really didn’t get us anywhere. Most of the inventions credited to the “space race” were actually products of the pre-NASA years, our focus on putting people in space made things needlessly complicated and costly, and we should have been trumpeting our achievements in areas of space other than the launching and retrieving of humans into the cosmos.
All true. But I don’t happen to think that we wasted our time or money. The journey to the moon did give us some common ground as a nation, in a time when all sorts of other world events were fracturing American society and driving wedges between parent and child, neighbor and neighbor, city and city, state and state. We needed something to spur our collective imagination. We needed to believe that we were indeed taking one small step on a much larger journey.
My own commentary: It shouldn’t have taken 20 years for American women to follow Valentina Tereshkova into space, but that mistake was a product of the Fifties mindset. The women who applied for the Mercury program did better than the men on the tests. It was only Eisenhower’s insistence that the astronauts be test pilots that screwed women out of any chance of equal standing. But that was the Fifties mindset. Eisenhower was born in 1890 and shaped by his upbringing and his military service. He wouldn’t have seen a woman as his equal if she’d run him over with a Jeep. It took 20 years to get an American woman into space because that’s how long it took for American space jockeys to grudgingly acknowledge that women could maybe actually do it. Sally Ride was a child of the Fifties too (in fact, she’s about six months younger than me). I’m sure she was told she couldn’t be an astronaut. I’m glad she didn’t listen.
Degroot’s argument comes across as a longwinded case of sour grapes.
September 13, 2007
by infmom
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A long time ago, I started making a list of things I wanted to do when I retired.
Didn’t expect to retire as early as I did. But then again, that gives me just that much more time to catch up on my list.
I wanted to grow my hair long again, since I think older women with long hair look good. And I’m no longer taking the medications that made my hair fall out, so that was two good reasons to quit going to the haircut place. It’s long enough to tie up with a scrunchie now, and while I haven’t come to a decision about whether it’s going to be OK long or not, I’m amused to think that the last time it was this long, scrunchies hadn’t been invented yet.
Another item on my list was “Take the shop classes they wouldn’t let you take because you’re a girl.” In those bad old pre-Title IX days, it was not only permitted but common to have classes that were strictly segregated by gender. While it made sense for what passed for “sex ed” in those days (tell the girls about menstruation and tell the boys about sperm) it most assuredly did NOT make sense when it came to assigning girls to home-ec classes only and boys to shop classes only. (Don’t get me started on sports; we’ll be here all day.)
I really wanted to take shop. My dad was not the kind of dad who Fixed Things. He didn’t have tools and he didn’t have a workshop and he didn’t putter around in the garage. He had a study, and he sat and read books in it. And when something went flooie around the house, he had to call someone else to come fix it. I liked fixing things. I liked building kits and reading about science and technology. And I would have been in heaven in shop class. But I was a girl.
So, now that nobody can tell me what I can’t do (other than perhaps invade the men’s room, and who would want to do that in the first place) I have started taking “shop” classes, starting with welding. I’ve now completed classes in oxy/acetylene and arc welding, neither of which is going to be particularly practical in my non-school hours, and I learned a little about MIG welding but there wasn’t time to finish that unit. So, this semester, I’m taking an “independent study” class to learn MIG.
Which, should I choose to do so, can be done at home with rented equipment. Once I learn how. I’m determined to learn how.
On my way home from class today, I got to musing about other things that have changed radically in schools since I went there. (Besides the business of the teacher leading us in the Lord’s Prayer every morning first thing.) When I was in school everyone had to by golly sit still and pay attention in class, all day long. (I was a bad kid. I had opinions and I was smarter than the teacher and I knew a lot of stuff and I talked. I’m the only person I know of who had to stay after school on the last day of school.) Nowadays, when kids are expected to sit still in class and behave, oh dearie me, it’s unfair to the boys, who don’t learn well when they have to sit still. (There goes how many hundreds of years of “sit still or I’ll smack you a good one” out the window?)
Truth to tell, I think that’s just backlash against the people who have insisted, for the last 40 years or so, that by golly girls ought to get an equal shake in school. Now, even being expected to sit still and pay attention is “girl oriented teaching” and therefore unfair.
You know what? Boo freakin’ hoo. It’s no longer legal to tell girls they can’t do things because they’re girls. Girls can’t be relegated to mediocre intramural sports or told they can’t take gymnastics (as happened in the second high school I went to) or kept out of shop classes and forced to take home-ec. (Equally, boys can’t be told they aren’t allowed in the home-ec classes nor discouraged from taking typing–keyboarding–or forced to take shop classes if they are not so inclined.)
My daughter took metal shop in junior high and my son took cooking. I cheered them both on with enthusiasm. They were doing the things their dad and I weren’t allowed to do when we were their age. That’s progress, no matter how many “conservatives” try to shout back the tide.
Once I’m done with the welding classes, I think I’ll take machine shop.
September 4, 2007
by infmom
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You’d think that eyeglasses would be the last thing one would want to order through the mail. Up till today I was pretty much of that opinion myself. But my eyeglass prescription had changed considerably over the last year in response to radical changes in the medications I was taking, so I definitely needed new glasses.
But there just wasn’t enough money in the budget to buy them at the moment, especially since we’d just paid for two pairs of glasses for F’zer (which he needed just as much as I did, probably more so because he wears glasses all the time and I don’t). I remembered an article on the Lifehacker web site about online eyeglass merchants and looked that up and browsed through it for recommendations.
It seemed that a company called Optical4Less got the best reviews. So I checked out their web site, and the ordering process was very straightforward. I prefer rimless glasses and they had a much bigger selection of lens sizes and shapes than any retail eyeglass store I’ve ever seen.
I was a bit unsure when I saw that the company was located in Hong Kong. But then again, this being a worldwide economy and outsource-loving country, I reasoned, who knows where any glasses you get from a store actually are coming from, unless you’re paying the super premium LensCrafters price to have them fabricated on site? So I decided to go ahead. I must admit I used my Amex card to pay for the purchase Just In Case.
I needn’t have worried. My glasses arrived today (with the “nice used Hong Kong stamps” promised by the web site) and they are absolutely perfect in every way. In fact, I can even see my computer screen clearly through prescription lenses for the very first time.
Ordering eyeglasses online might not be for everyone, but I’m here to say it worked for me.
August 30, 2007
by infmom
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In this day and age, when we see so many rotten people getting far too much attention, sometimes it’s best to remember the truly good people of the not so distant past.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.August 27, 2007
by infmom
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You know, I’ve been a Trekkie practically from day one. The first episode of Star Trek I watched was the second half of “The Menagerie” in its first run and I was a devoted fan from then on. (The really funny thing is that I never got to see the first half of “The Menagerie” till a good 20 years later–during the intervening years I always seemed to tune in one episode too late.)
But I was idly watching an episode of TNG the other day and was reminded yet again that the people who wrote the series weren’t really interested in science, per se. Now, focusing on the human element is not a bad thing. But if you’re creating a universe for people, it does help to follow just a few commonsense rules.
If you get an “intruder alert” you don’t send a security team down there to check it out, fool–you have the computer analyze the intruders and if they’re the bad guys, you beam them out into space pronto. Duh.
Oh, and somehow I doubt future space battles will be fought by people screaming orders at each other across the bridge–the computer will analyze what needs to be done and then do it, Nomad be damned.
You’ve just blown open the door to a room full of bad guys. What do you do? Apparently you don’t just spray the room and kill everyone in it–you STAND there in the doorway for dramatic effect. Of course, the bad guys don’t immediately vaporize you either, so it’s a Stupid Stalemate.
If you’re running through a dark hall with a weapon, you sure want one with a BIG RED LIGHT on it. Might just as well have a homing device for the other guys or a big red illuminated target. Oh, and you’re fighting guys who live in the dark, and the idea of just cranking up the lights to “kill off those snot bugs that got Spock a couple hundred years ago” intensity doesn’t occur to anyone?
Two starships run into each other in outer space. One’s bigger than the other one. Does one crunch the other? Riiiight. Later on, one tries to pull away by “thrusting” in reverse. The two ships separate. That sound you hear in the background is Isaac Newton spinning in his grave, and boy, is he pissed.
Your ship can detect “positronic” energy from light-years away, but you can’t figure out where Riker is inside the ship?
Why does TNG’s idea of an alien always involve a human with a bumpy forehead?
What kind of energy does a phaser use, that moves slower than a speeding bullet?
I could go on, and as more questions occur to me I probably will.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.August 27, 2007
by infmom
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The problem with putting a mailto: link on one’s home page is, sometimes, that people use it to email you.
Today I got a flame mail from some fuming punk who accused me of “trashing products” on Gizmodo. Didn’t identify the product, or why he was so hot under the collar about it, or give his name or business credentials. All of which leads me to believe that he was just scattering buckshot hither and yon for the sheer joy of doing so.
After replying to the email (which I debated deleting outright) asking Mr. Fume and Fuss exactly what “product” he thought I “trashed,” I went back and reviewed my Gizmodo comments for the past few weeks. Still can’t find any place where I “trashed” a “product.”
Some people have way too much time on their hands, and way too few manners to go with it.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.