This is the one with a bunch of videos

DC doesn't exactly have a million songs about it, so it's nice to hear the occasional one.



This song is also about D.C., but in this author's humble opinion kind of sucks compared to the song by the Postal Service, besides the chanting, which is obviously amazing.



And um, this final song isn't about D.C. it all, but qualifies as an effing awesome song from Ryan Adams, the dude who sort of got me through that rough patch in Michigan by reminding me that a long harmonica solo while staring up at bits of blue in a cold grey sky can get you through the tail end of winter and of crappy jobs.



Now let's look at some videos of a baby. Babies are cute little entities with large heads, short arms, soft skin and fuzzy hair. This makes them fun to watch on video for people of all ages.

Sadie can roll over. She is a good baby.



Sadie likes to jump in her jumperoo. She is a good baby. And yes, my approval is often desired at the end of a jumping session.



Sadie can eat...sort of. She is a hungry baby. Eventually she figured out how to eat properly.

Defining Things: On Accidents

Accident-
a) an unforseen and unplanned event or circumstance

Possible examples depending on things like faith tradition and belief in things like fate-The existence of sentient life in the universe. The universe itself. Duck billed platypus. Cars. The Cubs never winning the world series. People who are born gravely ill. Nascar.

Possible relevant quotes:

Nothing is an accident
Most things are not an accident.
Honestly, now that you're three I don't mind telling you that you were an accident.
Accidents happen.


b) lack of intention or necessity-Possible examples depending on the random vagaries of a mind that may set it apart from another mind-A chance meeting on a train with an old friend. A chance meeting with someone, who in the future becomes your spouse. However, that scenario can be called into question because obviously it's really more of a surprise rather than an accident.

2) An unfortunate incident resulting especially resulting from carelessness or ignorance

Possible examples culled from the day to day. The car accident that I got into today. Though I sort of bristle at the words like ignorance and careless. I'd settle for something more along the lines of, in a hurry as I took the time to look left and then right. However, when crossing six lanes of traffic, sans stop light, I guess it's probably best to look both ways twice rather than once because you may end up side swiping a person that's decided in between that first look left and then right to, you know, go, which results in a bit of a sideswipe as you accelerate to try and make it across five lanes only to be impeded by some serious metal. Relatedly I'm happy to report that my first question to the other driver was, "are you okay," this provided without any examining of vehicles or damages or trying to figure out just what had happened.

And for the next few hours as I was walking around work, picking up books, scrolling on the computer, I kept smelling her perfume as if she was still standing a few feet away from me, this unknown human being, saying, "I'm all right. I'm just shaking."

c) an unexpected and medially important bodily event especially when injurious-

Skiiing into a tree. Attempting to jump over thirty parked cars on a motorcycle etc.

d) (And thank god for d, to lighten the mood) used euphemistically to refer to an involuntary act or instance of urination or defecation. Author's addendum: Sometimes both.

Examples: Sadie accidented all over the wall. It, the accident, shot out like three feet.

3. A nonessential property or quality of an entity or circumstance

Examples: Being born in a particular country. Being born into a particular time. Being born into a particular country at a certain period of time that may have lead to a person being a grievous sinner or some kind of saint depending, at least in part, on circumstance. The accident of bad brownies.


Wikipedia
"An accident is a specific, unpredictable, unusual and unintended external action which occurs in a particular time and place, with no apparent and deliberate cause but with marked effects. It implies a generally negative outcome which may have been avoided or prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its occurrence."

Another failure for physics


How far back can I trace this. I went to bed at nine o'clock because I was exhausted from work/ child care. Therefore, I didn't set my alarm, which caused me to wake up late, at which point I was in a hurry, and therefore, kind of fudged it a bit when I was crossing five lanes of traffic rather than waiting for a complete opening. Though it's been said that according to quantum mechanics one object can occasionally pass through another. I am sad to report that this was not that occasion.

In a sentence

Everything that happened to him seemed to be an accident, and it was this attitude that had him lodging complaints well past the age when such complaints were even remotely paid attention to, rather, nothing was an accident, or so it seems, hadn't he read Taylor's argument on fatalism, two objects failing to obtain, the absence of free will, such a doctrine makes the very word accident superfluous does it not; he was not really reading a lot of Taylor in those days and so continued to perceive everything as an accident, even this curiously long sentence.

Wednesday: Picture this

Okay, so Wednesdays are supposed to be devoted a picture that creates a meditation. However, today's main news story was about not releasing pictures, so the whole project seems a bit misguided. Let's talk about the pictures. It's probably best to start where this blog left off a couple of days ago, with general unease about the jubilant reaction to the death of a fellow human being, giant caveats aside, and whether that was okay. Well, now we sort of took the debate a step further, asking it it was necessary to see pictures of that fellow human being dead in order to satiate our thirst for firsthand knowledge.

As an aside isn't it crazy to think that there existed a time in our country when people sort of trusted their government? Starting somewhere after WW 2, elucidated a bit below, we started to question everything and think in conspiracies. Ie, did we know if Iraq had WMD's or not? Anyhow, this sort of distrust is now part and parcel with engaged citizenship. I mean, after Watergate, Iraq, etc. you'd have to be naive to take at face value what the government sells you. That's why the death of Bin Laden is so odd. It seems calculated to raise the maximum amount of suspicion in the skeptical populous. No grave, no pictures, all wrapped up nicely.

Conversely, the arguments laid forth by our President seem to be pretty legitimate. By all rights presenting photos of the body or the body itself could certainly insight even more violence than has already been anticipated. And it is this inherent cynicism that leads a free-thinking citizen to question even the timing of the whole affair in regards to reelection campaigns rather than just taking to the streets and cheering. Caveats aside.

This is all really secondary to what I wanted to think about, death. A water cooler topic, I know. I wonder what we/I would have gained by looking at a picture of a dead Bin Laden. Would it have just seemed like one more picture on the screen? Eight out of the ten most popular television shows on cable currently feature corpses on a regular basis. What does this do to our psyche as a nation? Has it made us more comfortable with death? I'd argue no, on one hand, but I think death as televisual abstraction is a definite yes. Thus, other than for clearing it up for skeptics, I fear Bin Laden would have been one more dead body to look at. This, when we live in a culture that is extremely uncomfortable with death in reality. I'm including myself in this wholeheartedly. From the singularity crowd to pill popping elders and middle aged folks who keep getting younger we are sort of terrified of aging, of death.

Note: I think this is all more true for people in the civilian population. I think that military folks who face this sort of thing not as abstraction, but as reality, probably have a whole different perspective and generally carry around a bunch of internal shi- after having seen things that most civilian types are not just happy to avoid, but would avoid if a draft was ever reinstated. And this discomfort with death is it odds with the casual way that it is often presented to us in the abstract, referring to television of news clips as abstract here is probably fishy wording, I've not figured out our exact relationship to tragedy as viewed through television or pictures on a blog yet. I suppose this really started in WW 2 when people got pictures of the concentration camps, and we really had to begin to learn to empathize with people who were not our family, or friends, or neighbors, or friends of friends, or members of the same clan, state, region, country, religion, but just other human beings. This is terrifically complex, in my mind, and I mean to explore it more in relation to the earthquake in Japan and my own, sort of appalling and indifferent initial reaction to it. I think it has something to do with narrative.

Anyhow, in this case I guess I'm happy that the cynics, myself sort of included, did not win out. I don't think that seeing another human being's dead body splayed out on the ground for my own sense of pleasure, pleasure is being used here more as pleasure in "really" knowing something rather than just knowing something, though the word isn't chosen entirely by accident as I think it's more complex than simple knowledge, and knowing even if the image would seem recycled from endless versions of NCIS or Law and Order. (I feel it's important to reiterate that I'm not opposed even to these shows I'm just sort of curious what the preponderance of bodies at rest is doing to our perception of real death as portrayed through the same medium. I can say that in my, admittedly limited, experience it isn't doing much for our actual relationship with death, here meaning family, friends, et al). Being aware of all the above listed cynicism it's probably and housing much of it within my own heart I hesitate to say this, but I'd rather we all looked at pictures of kids smiling rather than a bullet ridden body. I think the former might do more good for our collective psyches than the latter. Note: It reminds me of that old argument about putting good food in your body instead of bad so that you get good results. A saying which I roughly translated during college as, "Put crap in, you get crap out." A quote, which my best friend pointed out was less insightful than supererogatory and that an adjustment was probably needed to make it strike home.

Civics from TPK



There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don’t understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have a profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. I’m talking mostly about economics and business because that’s my area.”

Q; What do we do to stop the decline?

“I have no idea what to do. As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, bit if we the government take away citizen’s freedom to cede their autonomy we’re now taking away their autonomy. It’s a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and to a government we expect to control them. Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.”

“I can see taxpayers not wanting to part with money. It’s a natural human thing. I didn’t like getting audited either. But shit, you’ve got basic facts to counterbalance that—we voted these guys in, we choose to live here, we want good roads and a good army to protect us. So you ante up.”

“That’s a little simplistic.”

“It seems like, suppose you’re in a lifeboat with other people and there’s only so much food, and you have to share it. You’ve only got so much and it’s going to go around, and everybody’s really hungry. Of course you want all the food; you’re starving. But so is everybody else. If you ate all the food you couldn’t live with yourself afterward.”

“The others’d kill you, too.”

“But the point is psychological. Of course you want it all, of course you want to keep every dime you make. But you don’t, you ante up, because it’s how things have to be for the whole lifeboat. You sort of have a duty to others in the boat. A duty to yourself not to be the sort of person who waits till everybody is asleep and then eats all the food.”

“You’re talking like a civics class.”

“Which you never had, I’m betting. What are you, twenty eight? Did your school have civics when you were a boy? Do you even know what civics is?”

“It was a cold war thing they started in the schools. The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Pledge of Allegiance, the importance of voting.”

“Civics is the branch of political science that quote concerns itself with citizenship and the rights and duties of US citizens.”

“Duty’s kind of a harsh word. I’m not saying it’s their duty to pay their taxes. I’m just saying it doesn’t make any sense not to. Plus we catch you.”

I don’t think this will be the conversation you want to have, but if you really want my opinion I’ll tell you.”

“Fire away.”

“I think it’s no accident that civics is taught anymore or that a young man like yourself bridles at the word duty.”

“We’ve gotten soft, you’re saying.”

I’m saying that the sixties—which God love them did a lot for raising people’s consciousness in a whole lot of other areas, such as race and feminism…”

“Not to mention Vietnam.”

“No. mention it, because here was a whole generation where most of them now for the first time questioned authority and said that their individual moral beliefs about war outweighed their duty to go fight if their duly elected representatives told them to.”

“In other words that their highest actual duty was to themselves.”

“Well, but to themselves as what?”

“This all seems pretty simplistic, you guys. It’s not like everybody that was protesting was doing it out of duty. It became fashionable to protest the war.”

“Neither the ultimate duty is to self element nor the fashionable element is irrelevant.”

“You’re saying that protesting Vietnam led to tax cheating?”

“No, he’s saying that it led to the sort of selfishness that has all of us trying to eat all the boat’s food.”

“No, but I think whatever led to it becoming fashionable to protest a war opened the door to what’s going to bring us down as a country. The end of the democratic experiment.”
“Did I tell you he was a conservative?”

“But that’s just a put-down. There are all kinds of conservatives depending on what it is they want to conserve.”

“The sixties were America’s starting to decline into decadence and selfish individualism—the ME generation.”

“There was more decadence in the twenties than there was in the sixties, though.”

Tuesdays with Sadie

6:45-7:45 A.M. Keep waking up once every ten minutes or so in anticipation of s waking up. When I finally wake up I feel like I've slept in forever, though I'm aware on some level that it's probably no later than eight or so. Such is the life of a parent. Of course, by three o'clock or so I'm entirely exhausted and still looking forward to an evening of work.

7:45-s is finally awake. We go downstairs for tummy time. While I'm fixing Sadie a bottle I decide to turn on an audio essay about 9/11. Sadie sits on the floor playing with toys and holding herself up admirably while the author talks about the CBS footage that they only aired once of the little specks, that turned out to be people falling from the sky.

At this point I'm not too concerned about what s can really understand, and it's a day that will live in infamy in American history anyway, so I figured she might as well start learning about it now.

9:32-She's wearing a little shirt with a picture of a ladybug on it. Ergo; I start calling her Sadie bug, and occasionally shortening it to just bug. On the porch I keep saying, "Do you see those bugs bug? while she leans over and tries to peer more closely at the chipping paint on our front porch.

Nicknames for kids are easy. You can pretty much call them whatever you want, and they don't know how to complain. However, sometimes as I'm mumbling bug, bug, bug, over and over I wonder if it's more for me or for the child. Am I trying to stimulate her mind or cover over the awkward and sometimes depressing silence that comes part and parcel with taking care of a person who is incapable of speech.

12:45-During a nap I take a Thesaurus into the side yard and read in the sun. I've decided that the precipitous decline in my verbiage has begun to take root, and that the only means of rectifying the situation is a very thorough reading of the thesaurus. Cenobium, execrable, autocthon. A more intelligent individual would have deftly wove those into the fabric of a sentence. I am certainly not that individual.

1:30-S has given us a new set of bottles for some reason or another. She always has some reason, but I believe it's because she likes changing things up on bug all the time, so that she never quite settles in. Anyhow, the new nipples, I said it, flow much faster than the old ones and s keeps choking herself as she tries to take it all down, and then she starts crying and attempting to sit up. This process is repeated over and over after about five seconds of feeding. It's episodes like this that exhausts parents in a way that is probably unimaginable to a person who has not spent any time taking care of an infant/baby.

2:30-I take bug outside to show her the Rhododendron, which is in full bloom. Of course, what I mean by full bloom is one weak looking flower starting to appear. Little white bugs zip about the leaves like snow falling from a globe. I'm not entirely certain that the thing will live despite the watering. I worry about whether I properly released the root ball.

In the yard bug snatches out her hand as quickly as I've seen it in an attempt to apprehend a passing insect.

During naps today, a trial in their own right, s generally takes a while to fall asleep sort of moaning to herself for upwards of half an hour like a crazy person. Anyhow, usually when I enter the room for an interrupted sleep s is sitting in her crib, nuk tossed aside, blanket either near her face or underneath her, and she is smiling, gaily, as if we're about to or have just had the most wonderful time of our lives. I jam her nuk back into her mouth and shut the door. It is time for sleep or, at the very least, a good deal of moaning to oneself like a mummy.

I listen to her whine for a while during her nap and then I hear the nuk hit the floor. And it's safe to say that it probably wasn't accidental. Welcome to this new phase of parenthood.

In the afternoon we sit in the yard and s tries to eat grass, and I pull up dandelions while the voices of children from the charter school in our neighborhood float by as if from the ether. After a time she gets bored and starts crying, and I pull her into my lap and tell her the names of all the things that she is seeing. Those are ants. That's a geranium. That's the chipped paint on the edge of the house. Those are oaks. All the while she vaguely looks at where I'm pointing trying to figure the whole world out.

MSN Mondays: 9 most subversive kid's books

But first, I believe the majority of world news was trumped by the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Ten years ago I remember rolling out of bed late, we were given the option of skipping as many chapels as we wanted during the second semester of our senior year, a policy which lead to me attending roughly one chapel, and the conclusion that I'm not so good at showing up for the parts of life that aren't mandatory, and my roommate asked if I wanted to know what was going in the world. Honestly, I didn't really know what the WTC towers were at that point in time, but I, like the rest of the nation, was horrified at the images that were being played time and again.

And we connected the attacks, eventually, to Osama Bin Laden, a man who became our generations version of Hitler or Stalin. A world super villain. And when he was killed people celebrated, and, particularly as a person of faith I was confused about how exactly I should feel about a person dying. Was it okay to feel jubilation? I certainly felt no regret and was okay with that, but was it a day of national celebration? Perhaps. I don't know. It seems to me that he got what he deserved; only he probably deserved far worse. However, I agree with a friend's post that said, "I pray for the soul of Osama Bin Laden." Even though if there's any sort of hell, fire, absence, loneliness, a person that comes by and eats one of your fingers or toes on a daily basis, he's probably got a nice seat there.

Within a few days of the attack a few of us left for a four day weekend. It was a standard type of big weekend event for the people at my school, and in fact it was the weekend that I first started to fall for the woman who was to become my wife a couple of years later. But what really struck me, was that on our trip, it was three guys, the girls all drove down separately, and we were having the greatest time. Which, you know, is the sort of thing that you almost feel guilty about in retrospect. How sad should I be? But the living just go on living and laughing and that's the way of things. It's really neither here nor there, but as we drove down the freeway a Ford F-150 pulled up on our right with a message painted on the back window of the cab that said, "Nuke the Dune Coons," and I remember the three of growing somber, and noting the wispy mustache on the driver and old trucker's hat. At that point we then had a good conversation about reprisal that I don't remember any of the details of.

Ten years later as I was sitting in bed feeling euphoric or just a small sense of closure. (We're still dealing with the fallout from that day ten years later. The death of Bin Laden is a small step in the direction of healing. Al-Queda is still a functioning organization and American troops are still slogging around in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is why I couldn't quite join in on the unalloyed joy; it seemed oddly misplaced or short sighted. And the argument that I'm just being a kill joy gets a little more complicated when we learn that a woman was killed who was being used as a body shield, and you start to think about the overwhelming number of casualties of this war on terror, these wars that have been inflicted on innocent people. I don't know. I can't say I'm happy. I can say that after I stopped wondering how I felt that I crept into my very small daughter's room and kissed her on the forehead, and I went back to bed happy that the world was, perhaps, a safer place for that little one.

MSN Mondays:

1) The Bible-The Bible is definitely one of the most subversive kid's books ever. It has all sorts of rack and ruin and mayhem and adultery and people being slaughtered because they set up shop on the Promised Land. A father sacrificing, almost, his son. Lots and lots of people drowned so that we can tell a nice story about an Ark. From the great book of Kings. Instilling a healthy fear of bears.

23 Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” 24 When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number.

Elisha getting back at the kids for calling him bald.

2) The Harry Potter Books-I think we can all agree, without having read them, that these books are probably the instrument of Satan and his minions. People doing magic has been a sign of the devil since time in memoriam. It doesn't matter if the kids a nerd. He's a witch.



3)The little Engine that Could-Why? Because sometimes it's okay to not be able to do something. My good friend Flannery O'connor once said that the one thing she regretted not doing more as a teacher was discouraging. The Little Engine teaches kids that it's not okay to fail, when in fact that's what most of life is about. Well, that, and for a time in college writing one page of a paper and then bitching to your friends for an hour or so about how you have this long paper that you should be writing until they ask you to leave and work on the damn thing.

That's right Lil engine, just grab a smoke break.

4) The Very Hungry Caterpillar-Why can't he just have been the reasonably hungry caterpillar? Did he really need that cupcake? This is the reason we're dealing with a massive diabetes epidemic in this country. Because kids have been raised to think that it'a all right to just stuff yourself to the gills because you'll come out a beautiful butterfly. False. Now where can I get my hands on some mauling bears?

Maybe just some light jump roping after your fifth course okay buddy?

5) Twitter-WTF? Why the face? I don't even know what the Twitter verse is but you can bet your ass it's subverting our kids by teaching them to express themselves in all sorts of monosyllabic ways that they'll later employ during their teenage years to punish us. This book should be banned.

It doesn't look so far away now does it?

6) Little House on the Prairie and Ann of Green Gables- I haven't read anything of either of these series, but it's safe to say that these families probably hated American Indians or they wouldn't have stolen their land, but there we go just teaching kids that it's all right to take something that's not yours if you're an American. That's why we have medicaid now. Am I right comrades? Comrades? Oh...awkward.

What? Oh, no this house has been here forever. Who are you anyway sir with your fancy hairdo?

7) Where the Wild Things Are-Everyone has read this book and no one really knows what the hell is going on. This book teaches our kids that taking drugs is okay because you'll just get to go to a giant island where all your friends look like giant cats and play with them. No LSD 1960's, stop pushing!

Just have another puff Max. You druggie!

8) Ping the duck-This book is racist. I can't come up with specific proof, but I always had the vague sense, even as a toddler, that the book was racist. I also read it every time we went to the public library, which just shows you how really subversive the damn thin is/was.

Racist.

9) Atlas Shrugged-Ayn Rand doesn't give a shi- about you. I mean, as a child, I had a really difficult time not sympathizing with John Gault, and I don't understand why droves and droves of three year olds are picking this up. Capitalism is not your friend kid's. It will mash you under the heel of its shoe in some thankless and boring job that you have to work because you have loans and needs and wants thrust upon you. Also, communists are great, that whole Russia and Cuba thing turned out well. Don't listen to Ayn; it's okay to share. But the next time your toddler bashes some other kid over the head with a truck and starts declaring that he farmed out the foreign labor that built this truck you can thank Ayn Rand for turning them into a jerk.

Okay, Atlas, you carry it for the first few hundred years but then I'm ready to help

The ants go marching...

When the weather gets warmer the ants begin to move in. The song says that they do it two by two, but they seem to be doing it in groups of three and five. They possess no real decorum as they crawl about the floor. Miserable creatures really ants if that's the best they can muster. One expects this sort of thing from worms and beetles, but I can't emphasize how much disdain I now have for those little soldiers of yore.

S spent the majority of the evening on her hands and knees spraying vinegar on bits of ants. I fear the woman will not be sane until they've been eradicated. She has a bit of a weak spot where things of this nature are concerned a sort of inability to leave the topic at hand. A problem from which I suffer very little. I am always ready to drop the task at hand and pour myself a cold drink or watch an episode of something funny. In fact, I disdain not only the ants, but those sorts of folks incapable of living with them. It's really a slight problem dear friends, I remember spraying hundreds of them with cans of Pledge as a child. Here we're only dealing with a few wagon trains full, making their way out to Oregon. I believe that for the next month or so, or as long as the little fellows decide to take up residence on our floors, I'll be hearing Hamlet-esque soliloquies on the ills of ants.

Suggestions:

Black Pepper-I believe I witnessed a pair of them carrying a bit of it off as if they'd discovered some old treasure and were eager to bring it back to their queen.

Cinnamon clove-We only have one, so even if they are deterred by the smell it is surprisingly easy for them to shuffle on by and find a new means of ingress.

Caulk-As it turns out ants are extraordinarily small, and caulking every spare portion of your kitchen only gives them new means to display their ingenuity. I fear they feel less an impediment and more a chance to show their talents.

Vinegar-I don't know if the vinegar is having any affect on them beyond delivering an impromptu bath, but I believe the swift hand of justice that follows bearing a wad of paper towels certainly does some sort of trick though I am concerned that one of them asked us for the way back to the bean stock.

Boiling Water-Yes. I've begun to try and repel them as if they were an army from the middle ages, flaming arrows are soon to follow, though I fear that setting the grass on fire may be an unintended effect. I read online, impeccable sourcing that, that it is kinder than pesticides. I suppose being burned alive is perhaps preferable to being poisoned, though at that point perhaps we are just splitting hairs. Anyhow, I dumped a pot of boiling water down the only visible ant hole, no doubt sending at least ten of them to their premature deaths while the remaining colony members quickly hastened from their lair outside and into a tunnel which lead directly into our kitchen.

Obsessphanie-This appears to be the most effective method because it deploys all energy and mental fortitude towards the task of exterminating said ants, disdaining all of the other comforts of food, drink, companionship, and sanity on a neverending quest to find and destroy ants.

Though the last is a passable home remedy if anyone else has suggestions they are certainly welcomed. Remember, we're not really dealing with much of an infestation here yet, just a few hundred travelers making what is perhaps a pilgrimage to portions of our kitchen and underneath the stove. I mean, if we could communicate and that's what the little fellows were up to I'd happily clear them a path to their weeping Madonna and sell water along the way. But until we are able to reach across the gap that spans our two noble species, chaotic marching aside, I fear that we will be at odds.

In which the author says some pretty terrible things which might not turn out to be all that terrible

In another blog.

In another life I'd have lived in Europe near a sunken courtyard, with wisteria and all sorts of other climbing vines, and perhaps a few hanging baskets.

Minimum number of people killed by CIA drone attacks in Pakistan last year: 607

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

My skin is at odds with the sun after our long absence. And yet, it's touch is so familiar and warm.

Number of those who appeared on a U.S. terrorist watch list: 2

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command


After a while, I became afraid that I didn't even know what a rose bushes' roots looked like, so I just started pulling everything up, figuring, to hell with it, we'll plant another one.

Average salary difference between a starting New York Public School teacher and a first-year private lawyer in 1970: 2,000

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.


After an hour or so it became clear that the original planter continued on for perhaps the length of the yard and to continue on my current course of action would lead to a large trench through our new landscaping. I desisted immediately.

Today: 106,000

And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

I was reminded today that all new owners want to put their touch on a house. S remembered thinking of how beautifully painted the walls were in a house we were admiring and how she thought that she might like to change them. This has something to do with limited presidential terms and the brevity of life and innovation. Perhaps.

Estimated amount spent by Britain's National Health Service to outfit London ambulances for obese patients: 341,000

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

In the afternoon we went to a play date for babies. At some point someone suggested that we put all of the babies on a blanket together and take a picture. A pile of babies. Why could my mind only conjure up thoughts of horrors past?

Minimum amount spent treating pet obesity in the U.S. 25,000, 000

Nothing beside remains.

I think what I keep trying to say over and over is think. But I could be wrong. I've been wrong more times than I can count on the thousand fingers of a thousand broken statues.

Percentage by which an American is more likely than a non-American to suffer from bipolar disorder: 100

Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

In the sunken garden we'd drink tea. No, no, wine, or something harder still, but mixed just right. We'd listen to the birds without having to name them.

Percentage of households whose head is nearing retirement age that have a 401K type of account: 60.

The lone and level sands stretch far away".

But then again, I am always talking of birds and wine when what I need to be reminding you of is that leaking faucet, the tax return, the aging slats on the roof. Or is that not why anyone turns to art? For reminders of decay?

Chances that such a household has adequate savings to maintain its standard of living into retirement: 1 in 10.

Ozymandia, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The light in the yard is best in the morning when one finds it easy to bend the spine of a book and forget, for once, about how one might be perceived.

Chances that a U.S. millionaire does not feel wealthy: 2 in 5

Chances that a little girl is upstairs crying because she lacks a blanket to snuggle to her face: 100

Average amount that he or she believes would begin to create such a feeling: 7,500,000

Or to put it more archaically

King James Ecclisastes

2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3 What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
8 All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.