This posting is brought to you live from The Patio, my second home during the warmer months. Some 20 by twenty-five feet, screened on all but the side that adjoins the house, and with a view of the south end of my dominion, it is indeed a nice summer hangout – topped off with wireless internet and a stereo. Just to the east is a fifteen-foot square concrete pad for the smoker and grill, with an adjacent smallish shed that houses the freezer, golf clubs, etc. The previous occupant kept a hot tub in the shed, which she offered to sell to us at a reasonable price when we bought the house in ‘94. I am not a hot tub person, but Real Wife thought it would be splendid indulgence. That was until said previous occupant, a dowager well into her seventies, confided to us with a sly grin that she and a few of her friends from the local dowager club enjoyed spending time with hot toddies in the hot tub together – nude. Real Wife and I agreed that we simply could never bring ourselves to use it with those images in our mind. I still have nightmares. More »
No, I can’t say I appreciate modern contemporary art all that much, even though I work in two places that are full of stuffed full of it. Most of it leaves me… ummm, completely under-whelmed. Especially the three panel job in the hallway at the radio station, which looks like the worlds’ most incompetent dry-wall specialist had been allowed to cut loose with a 5-gallon bucket of auto-body filler and a dozen spray cans of silver paint.
Mind you, it is an interesting effect, and it would be very striking as a wall-covering; say, large panels of it interspersed with dark, stark modern Neo-Classical columns, and a plain ceiling and dark marble floor. As a wall-treatment, it might be quite impressive, in such a room as that, but as three large unframed canvasses covered in Bondo and silver paint, hanging in a corridor, it lacks a certain something. Like appeal, to someone who doesn’t have to pretend to see a deep meaning in it. The station had an art benefit auction a while back, of donated objects d’art, and we speculate viciously that the place is decorated in items that didn’t sell and that the artist refused to take back.
My parents had one of those framed oil modernistic things on the dining room wall, for years and years, mostly because it was done in very nice shades of blue (which matched Mom’s décor of the time) and a good friend had given it to them… no, not the artist. It was a bit of set property— the friend worked for one of the Hollywood studios; a lot of times, props were given away to the crews, rather than take up storage space. We were inexpressibly thrilled sometime in the late 1960ies to have spotted this picture, on a repeat of an absolutely ancient Perry Mason show… on the wall of the studio of an artist, supposedly the corpse du jour. It was actually a horrible pastiche, of a moonlight ocean, and some shoreline rocks and pier, with half of it being vaguely Impressionist, and half irresolutely Cubist. Cruelly, Mom and Dad used it to gage the artistic judgment and flattery-administering capabilities of anyone who remarked on it. Anyone lavishing compliments was instantly condemned — married couples have such a way of exchanging knowing glances. Another person, who would become a very dear friend, earned credit immeasurable from Mom and Dad, for finally asking if he couldn’t sit on the other side of the dining room table, just so he wouldn’t have to look at the horrible thing.
No, modern art doesn’t grab me at all, and if it tried, I’d slap it’s face and prefer charges of ungentlemanly behavior. The stuff that gets written up, and displayed everywhere just looks more and more like an over-the-top joke. It’s as if they are trying to top each other, on what they can get the so-called aficionados to swallow and come back for more, and somehow missing the whole point of art. That is, it should fill up a blank space of wall, intrigue or interest your friends and neighbors, and be something that you yourself can stand to look at every morning for a couple of decades. Or even, look at every morning for a couple of decades with a hangover. (Or make your dinner guests look at it, over the course of a fine meal.) Bonus, if the colors in it match something else in the room. Oh, and if possible, it should be something that appeals to you, and to you personally. Frankly, the average Jackson Pollock makes me think of nothing so much as the unspeakably disgusting sidewalk underneath trees where grackles have been roosting.
Say, that’s an idea!! I could get a grant from the NEA, and park huge canvases under the trees, and feed the flock something different every night that would turn their poop different colors! At the end of the week… it wouldn’t be enormous canvases covered with multicolored grackle poop, it would be Art with a capital “A”! Hey, if half a cow in formaldehyde can wow the art world, this has a better than even chance, especially if I can wrap it in layers and layers of vaguely progressive explanations, and slip in a couple of stiletto-slices at the bourgeoisie.
It is to giggle at, though, that the bourgeoisie— well, that part of it who has money to spend on art that they like and are past being dragooned into subsidizing something that they really don’t care for at all—- are buying Thomas Kinkade The Painter ™ of Light.
I don’t know if acres of cozy ginger-bready cottages sagging under the weight of sun-set colored icing are much of an artistic improvement over half a dead cow, or a an acre of multicolored paint splatters, but it must be easier to contemplate over a meal, unless you are diabetic. And at least, Kinkade has made a bundle selling what people actually, you know, really want… not begging for grants and sucking up to people with more money than confidence in their own taste, just to stick us all wish something that we don’t really care for. I predict that he will be this era’s version of a Rogers’s group; enormously popular, than drop out of fashion as something embarrassing and old-fashioned (you’ll be able to buy prints at yard sales for nickels) and then there will be a revival of interest in about 100 years.
They’ll last longer than grackle poop, anyway.
It’s part of the tourist attraction to San Antonio, besides the Riverwalk and the Alamo. Even though this part of South Texas is still a good few hours drive from the actual physical border between Mexico and the United States, the River City is still closer to it than most of the rest of the continental states. It falls well within that ambiguous and fluid zone where people on both sides of it have shifted back and forth so many times that it would be hard to pin down a consistent attitude about it all. This is a place where a fourth or fifth-generation descendent of German Hill-Country immigrants may speak perfectly colloquial Spanish and collect Diego Riviera paintings…. And the grandson of a semi-literate Mexican handyman who came here in the early 1920ies looking for a bit of a break from the unrest south of the border, may have a doctoral degree and a fine series of fine academic initials after his name. And the fact that the original settlers were from the Canary Islands, and all non-Hispanic whites are usually referred to as “Anglos”, no matter what their ethnic origin might be, just adds a certain surreality to the whole place.
San Antonio is in fact, about half Hispanic: surnames like Garcia, Martinez. and Gonzales with an s or Gonzalez with a z being so common they fade into ordinariness. In this bordertown, Garcia and Gonzalez are your next-door neighbors, or your co-workers, everyone knows what a quincianera is, and loves breakfast tacos, and faijitas, and believes with the faith of holy writ that the hotter the salsa is, the better, and knows a smattering of Spanish. Quite often, in fact, it’s the kids named Garcia or Martinez who have to learn it as a second language in high school… just another surreality of life in a city where at least one place on every block of every main avenue serves up takeaway breakfast tacos… and some of them feature drive up service.
The cross-border flow is neither one-way or steerage class, either. Mexican and American shoppers and entrepreneurs criss-cross every day… it’s pharmacy visits and surgical care in both directions, bargains on clothes and garden pottery, and high-end gadgets. North Star Mall, close by the airport has been for years a shopping destination for wealthy Mexicans. During Santa Semana, the Holy Week between Palm Sunday and Easter, you could walk the main floor from one end to the other, and not overhear a word of English in conversation among the throngs. The wealthy Mexicans who come and go sometimes mesh uncomfortably with the local middle and working class Hispanics; the mother of a friend of mine grumbled about how they were so rude, and left the sales tables in such a mess, and left rejected clothes crumpled all over the floor in the dressing rooms at Talbots. Local people most always made a stab at putting them back on the hanger, instead of assuming that someone would come along and straighten out the mess after they were quite finished.
There was a small protest, this week, by mostly high school students— just old enough to be aware of of the problem, but not old enough to grasp the very real ambiguities. We are all immigrants, one way or another: many of us can name the ancestor, and the country he or she came from, and make some intelligent guesses as to why they climbed out of the ancestral rut and lit out for the new territories, the new world, the frontier, the north . Most of us suspect that those ancestors improved their lot; if not immediately for themselves, then for their descendents. I know that my own immigrant grandparents certainly found much nicer weather and better plumbing than what they variously left behind in Three Mile Town, Reading and the Merseyside, and I can’t grudge some dirt-farmer or shade tree mechanic in Jalisco having a chance at something a little better in their turn. I can’t, I really can’t. What a country this must be, when they are willing to risk their lives in the desert, or in the packed back of an 18-wheeler after paying money to a coyote–a people-smuggler— all for a chance to work in the fields, or packing plant or stapling asphalt tile in the hot sun of late afternoon in a Texas summer… and how crappy is the situation they are leaving. Even if all they want is a couple of seasons to work in the North, and send money back home, why do they have to come north in the first place?
What is with Mexico, that they must bleed off their most ambitious and hardworking, but frustrated citizens to the North, that part with paved roads and factories? Why is there nothing for them, back where they came from in some dirt scrabble- village? Why do the “activists” at Aztlan demand that the Southwest be turned back to Mexico, when it was Mexico setting the conditions that made their parents or grandparents head north in the first place?
Tejanos, Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, citizens of the borderlands, call them whatever; they have pulled their weight always: a good proportion of the Alamo defenders were actually native Tejanos, and Juan Seguin might have been their commander, instead of William Travis. (It was an item of crushing historical stupidity and Anglo arrogance that the Alamo Tejanos and Seguin were never given proper credit and attention during their 19th century lifetimes.) They enlist in large numbers generation after generation; machismo is untrammeled, and makes for a large proportion of soldiers who are admiringly described as “crazy-brave”. Citations for battlefield heroism run well above the norm for other ethnicities. Mexico ought to be a military powerhouse, with all that raw soldiering talent, but somehow, that never works out. They did beat the French once, but then hasn’t everyone? The Garcias and the Gonzalezs come north, as they always have; the suspicion on this side of it, is that the Border is Mexico’s safety valve, bleeding off the potentially politically restless and/or economically ambitious.
And the fear has become, this, this year along the borderlands, and in other places, is that the situation is out of hand. Ranch owners along the border, who had heretofore dealt with the illegal transients by sympathetically looking the other way, are fed to the teeth with aggressive trespass, with gates being left open, taps left running and fences cut, with not being able to go about their properties after dark without being armed. Law enforcement along the border are similarly fed to the teeth with well-armed gangs operating across the border, apparently with the connivance of Mexican authorities, whether authorized officially or not, with finding dying border crossers in the back of trucks, and alone, dead of thirst and exposure in the desert. Hospitals in border towns are being driven close to bankruptcy by medical care which they must give to the illegal, and for which they are not reimbursed. And legal immigrants everywhere, who have gone through the hassle and expense of doing the proper paperwork, and waiting patiently in line, are apoplectic at seeing that not playing by established rules may be rewarded.
And so, that is where people of good intent are stranded. De Nile is the river that runs through Egypt… but Ambivalence is the other name of the river that runs through the Borderlands.
Jeff Harrell over at The Shape of Days has a great story about one of the Gunners from Gunner Palace who came back from Iraq and couldn’t get the kids out of his head.
After reading the emails from Sergeant Niece and seeing the pictures of her and the kids in Iraq, I can completely understand.
Don’t skip the story, but if you’re short of time, just go check out WAR KIDS RELIEF.
Looking back on Timmer’s post, Oh No They Didn’t: I see there are two issues at play here. The main issue is, of course, illegal immigration. And then there is the matter of the “student protests,” which, while they might make for great cable news footage, are little more than side shows.
To refresh your memory, Timmer’s post was centered upon an American flag being flown beneath a Mexican flag, and upside-down. By my own measure, while I find that incredibly stupid, I am not offended. However clumsily stated, I think I get their point.
And I think it was our Brit. reader, Al, that commented something like “it’s just a bloody piece of cloth.”
I’ve had this conversation with several Brit. friends in the past, I think I’ve got a handle on it. And here’s one key place where we Americans differ from our cousins across the pond. To the Brits, the Union Jack just represents the nation – it’s little more than a corporate logo. And this is true for the people of most nations of the world. But the Stars and Stripes is different for Americans Just as the United States is different from any other major nation of the world. That flag doesn’t represent a King on a throne, or 545 pompous egocentric blowhards in Washington D.C., a collective of the population, or even a really big chunk of real estate.
No, it represents something quite different: it’s an ideal, a set of principles, and a dream for a higher order of existence for all mankind. And many, many Americans believe (quite justifiably, IMO) that the ideal, and this nation, were divinely inspired. And, to them, the Stars and Stripes are as the Koran is to a Muslim.
But then, there are those (like these student protesters), who choose to denigrate or desecrate the Stars and Stripes. I will hazard a guess that few of them are saying they have lost faith in the ideal. What they are saying is that they think the actualization has fallen far short of the ideal. Pity we don’t have a flag for the government of the United States. POTUS has a flag, but Congress doesn’t – neither does the Supreme Court. We should have a flag for the federal government – wipe your ass with that one – you’ll likely get a cheering section.
But there are those in Congress, as well as various and sundry Statehouses, who are as fanatic about the Stars and Stripes as some Muslims are about the Koran. However, here is the paradox which certifies the Stars and Stripes’ divine nature: unlike the Koran, EVERYTHING that the Stars and Stripes represents is embodied in the individual’s right to do with it as they please – no matter how offensive it might be to some, or even all.
So, the day I burn the Stars and Stripes, will be the day a flag desecration amendment to the Constitution is ratified – hopefully, I will do it on the steps of Congress. Because that’s the day when the ideal will have been lost, and the Stars and Stripes becomes worthless.
Sgt/Cpl. Blondie stumbled across evidence of this, at a local chain grocery—the one I always call the Humongous Big-Ass Grocery. It is truly one of the glories of living in Texas, a local chain which has run practically every other big grocery chain out of town with a combination of unparalleled customer service, quite good prices on their house brands, and an unimaginable variety of fine grocery items for the discriminating foodie. I firmly believe that the Iron Curtain would have slipped off its’ rod and collapsed even sooner if selected members of the Politburo could have been given guided tours of the average HEB store… the sheer lavish glories of American grocery stores are legend, and HEB does that all one or two steps better. They pay really close attention to their local market. I have a theory that you can calculate the average per capita income in a neighborhood (before taxes) by counting up how many varieties of olive oil are on the shelves at the local HEB… so many varieties X so many $ thousands in income, and there you have it. I haven’t worked out the exact figures yet (I’m only an English major, you know!!!!), but the greater the variety of olio d’ olive, the higher the income. The HEB nearest Lackland AFB, I’ll have you know, had only 2, and one of them was that nasty yellow Pompeii brand drek, which was all that was on the major grocery markets for decades, before anyone acquired any taste in the matter at all.
Olive oil— it’s a small thing, but something I noticed, because of being in Greece, where it was the font of all civilization (according to legend), and then in Spain where Alcampo, the Spanish equivalent to Walmart, with every imaginable item under one roof, and at next to wholesale prices, offered an entire aisle of olive oil, of every quantity and quality.
I came home from Spain with six 1.5 liter bottles of a good and faintly greenish brand of the stuff, which lasted me for barely a year.
That’s the trouble with being stationed overseas a lot; eventually you sample the local stuff- something that is a local taste, and hardly ever exported, and when you come home, you are bereft… sometimes. A year or so after I came home from Japan, my friend Marsh (She of the marvelous engine-mount challenged car) were overjoyed to discover a small Japanese-American eatery that offered… Katsudon!
Katsudon; a dish all the more luscious because it is very good, and filling and cheap, and most marvelous of all— available everywhere. (And when you said it, the waiter/waitress understood it!) It was the hamburger, or the meatloaf of Japan, a bowl of rice topped with a breaded and friend pork cutlet, and a savory glob of poached egg and onion, all the juices seeping down to flavor the rice with sweet liquor. You could go— or so said the Japanese lady who taught the “Intro to Japan 1A— into any casual eatery in Japan, and ask for “katsudon” and get some variant of it. There is of late in one of my cooking magazines, a recipe for such, which shows how adventurous the foodie population may have become— two decades ago, practically no one who hadn’t done a tour in Japan had ever heard of it at all. People who have served overseas have heaps of examples— lovely and particularly local foods which they became addicted to, and could never find again, or if they could, at great expense, once they came “home”.
Which gets me back, however circuitously to HEB, and food items from Japan. Blondie found an import item at a local HEB store, and fell on it joyfully; a particular brand of Japanese soda. It came in very distinctive blue-green glass bottles, sealed with a blue-green glass marble in the neck of it. A bulge in the neck, and a pinch molded into the glass on one side kept the bottle from rolling back into the top opening if you drank it holding the bottle in a certain way. Vendors kept a particular punch at their stand, to open it by pushing the marble back into the neck— where it had otherwise made a tight seal against force of carbonation. The soda was otherwise fairly indistinguishable from ginger ale, or some other clear, mildly sweet and carbonated drink… but still. Neither of us expected to see it on the market here, but whattaya know. Here it is.
This pic of me (center) and two other girls from the barracks (Sorry, I can’t recall their names!) was taken during a local festival, about 1977, when all the traffic on Misawa’s main street was cut off, and it was decorated with lanterns and banners, and stalls. All of us have a bottle of this particular soda in hand.
Whittier area students from Pioneer, California and Whittier high schools walked out of classes to protest the proposed federal immigration bill March 27, 2006. The protestors put up the Mexican flag over the American flag flying upside down at Montebello High. (Leo Jarzomb/Staff photo)
Stolen from Malkin.
Ya know, up until this past week I’ve been pretty much for some sort of immigration reform that allows some way for illegal immigrants, especially from Mexico, to become legal citizens with some sort of ease. After seeing the shenanigans going on at the protests and especially after this incident, I’m starting to side with the folks who want to round ’em all up and shove ’em back across the border. Apparently these folks don’t want to become Americans, they’re trying to re-fight a war they lost over a century ago.
To: Those Insisting Upon A Death Sentence For Apostasy
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: The Case of Abdul Rahman
I would refer you to the matchless words of the “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom- 16 June 1786”: Read them, heed them, commit them to heart, for this is where we are coming from.
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do…. More »
Baldilocks points us to a UPI story about one of former president Bill Clinton’s chauffeurs.
Seems that while 3 cars were waiting for Clinton to arrive at Newark Airport, a Port Authority cop checked their license plate numbers. Turns out one car belonged to a Pakistani native who was a wanted man. He skipped out on his residency hearing six years ago, and has a deportation order against him.
Hmmmm…….
This from Different River:
Don’t they know that their city was named after one of the main founders of Christianity? And that by calling that person a “Saint” one makes a specific religious claim about that individual?
[…]
This is not “being sensitive” – this is implying that non-Christians are stupid and/or inconsistent and/or outright hypocrites, who are happy to live in a city named after a Christian saint, but offended by one little stuffed rabbit.
First it’s cartoon pigs, then fictitious rabbits. As Napoleon said, “from the sublime to the ridiculous, is but a step.”
Hat Tip: Clayton Cramer
I grew up surrounded by my mother’s family, which included eleven other siblings. Of the males in the clan, there were 3 Navy vets (2 in WW II), and two Marines. This is not about the military service though, but rather about another form of service that, in some respects, directly affected far more lives. It all started in 1947 when Grandpa was heading up the stairs of their modest home in upstate NY. My mother, then eighteen years old and a telegrapher at Western Union in Syracuse (where, by the way, she met my father a year later), was smoking a cigarette in the girls’ bedroom – a practice forbidden by Grandpa despite his proclivity toward cheap cigars every evening. To avoid detection she threw it out the dormer window whereupon it immediately started the wooden shingles ablaze. More »
…welcome our puppycat overlords.
One of the comments noted: “Feh. Call me when they make a dog that acts like a cat.”
Consider yourself called, sir. I have a dog that seems to think it is a cat; the Lesser Weevil spends a lot of time sucking up to the cats, attempting to get the cats to play with her, trying to curl her 50lb body up on the same surfaces and perch on the same spaces that the cats occupy, and spending most of the day sleeping and snoring/purring.
I can’t get her to use the damned litterbox, though. Pity
I’m sure you’ve heard it – as boring as the car itself:
“It’s always the same ones… the quiet ones… They sit in the back of the class – never ask any questions… And then the test comes…”
Alternate ending:
“And then they pull out an AK-47, and blow everyone in the school away.” Then we have a Lucerne spinning donuts around Lexus’ and Infinities. But, instead of Led Zeppelin “Cadillac’s theme music”, we have Def Leppard.
Yeah baby – that’ll build some brand excitement. 😉
I went to Boyo’s TaeKwonDo class at the Youth Center tonight to watch like I do on most Thursday Nights. Beautiful Wife watches on Tuesday Nights. We all enjoy that…for the most part. Other parents with smaller children often-times let their hellions run wild and they get in the way of the class and are generally disruptive. They’ve been talked to. Other parents have tried to calm the offending kids only to be glared at by the parents. It’s no worse than any other place with kids who can’t or won’t behave with parents who can’t or won’t parent, but yeah, it kinda sucks.
Tonight I noticed that there were a few parents in the snack bar and as I entered the gym I noticed there were no parents watching the class in there. One woman who is in the class and acts as a sort of liaison walked up with a letter on letterhead in her hand. She told me that parents were no longer allowed in the gym to watch the class. That was the solution. I found the Director of the Youth Center and told her that I understood, but I wasn’t happy about her solution. She looked annoyed that anyone would question her GS-ness and informed me that it’s ALWAYS been the policy that parents couldn’t be in the gym while class was going on. Okay, myself and other parents have been watching our kids for over a year in there and no one’s ever said a word before this, I knew I wasn’t going to get anything like a straight answer out of this self-important twit. She cited safety concerns and yadda-yadda and I stopped her and asked, “Why not just ban little kids who aren’t in the class from the gym and solve the problem? There’s like four kids who’s parents won’t discipline them, simply ban them.” She looked horrified. “We couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t do it across the board. Besides the instructors can decide on SOME nights that parents can watch.”
Okay, I was done. When they have an across the board hard policy that isn’t an across the board hard policy…
So because a few parents won’t discipline their brats, none of the parents can watch their kids in class anymore.
Crap like this makes me livid. Everything I’ve learned in 22 years of service about responsibility and culpability is trashed at the Youth Center. These are the people who are watching my boy after school. Don’t hold the responsible parties to a standard, simply punish all the parents and kids who want us there watching. The very last thing I expected from any organization on an Air Force Base.
Personal responsibility has always had a decent stronghold in the military, and it’s eroding at the edges.
Set a standard. Enforce the standard. When did this become hard?
The twist of lime to this story is that I found out today that it wasn’t even the brats in OUR class that caused the action. It was ONE kid in an entirely different class. One parent who wouldn’t control one kid completely ruins things for at least a dozen other parents.
I’ve been off-line since Sunday midnight, when a thunderstorm rolling through fried my Time-Warner provided modem. We have been waiting all day (and growing steadily more discontented with the service provided) awaiting the arrival of a skilled tech, with a replacement modem… who was cheerful, apologetic and competant, when at last he finally arrived.
I had sworn an oath in blood to find another internet and TV service provider, if we were not back on line by 9 PM tonight. Thanks to Orlando, I do not have to deliver on that threat. This time, at least
So, I’m back… did I miss anything?
As might be expected, from this post, I’ve been reading up on Social Security lately. Mostly it’s been focused on SSDI/SSI. But I believe that, in this case, similar rules exist for regular retirement.
Let’s say Joe Citizen gets out of high school, and starts earning wages – perhaps civilian, perhaps military, it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he’s earning wages, and paying FICA. Thirty years down the road (at the ripe old age of 48), Joe Citizen stops earning wages… perhaps he becomes a street bum, or perhaps he “retires”, and simply lives off pension and savings – whatever. (I would include going expat, but I believe the US is one of the few nations of the world which goes after its citizens for taxes when they are living, working, and paying their host nation’s taxes, in a foreign country.) What’s important is that Joe Citizen doesn’t pay FICA for twenty years…
As I understand it, when Joe Citizen turns 68, and goes to collect Social Security, it’s as if he had never paid FICA at all. Is this correct?
Trust Fund my ass!
… and put up a parking lot. Well, not exactly that, so far. Half of the green belt, in the back of my house is doomed. The first harbinger came months ago, in a notice about a change in zoning, affecting those homeowners who lived within a certain distance of an area where the city was proposing to change the situation to favor the establishment of… well, housing. Neither Judy, or I, or any of the other immediate neighbors could fathom what sort of housing was meant; small, free-standing cottages like our own? McMansions, with back bedroom windows that would command an intimate view of our backyards, and cut off our view to the sunset over the trees and grass, and the great marble faced Celtic cross put up at great expense by the congregation of St. Helena’s, the Catholic parish that owns the green belt behind all of our houses? Or some sort of apartment complex that would house an inordinate number of the rude, crude, low-rent and barely housebroken? Of such horrible possibilities are the stuff of suburban nightmares made. None of us are all that high-rent ourselves, but we do like our peace, and quiet, and a change in the status quo and view of the sunset over the greenbelt is not welcomed.
The presence of the greenbelt is precisely the reason I settled on this house, out of all those properties the realtor showed me, more than a decade ago; it was the smallest of the lot, about the most expensive, but the best-built… and that, over the fence at the back of the tiny house and tiny yard was nothing but green and open space. It made the place seem larger, oddly secluded, and very, very quiet. The greenbelt went all the way between the major cross-streets, with St. Helena’s floating in the middle of it like some great stone ship, the rest of it all empty and windswept. But it has all been nibbled away at the north, with short streets of development coming down to just short of the parish holdings, and now the southern part of it absorbed in one fell swoop; there is a fence across, just below Judy’s house, and everything to the south has been scraped, leveled, graded, terraformed and staked; I suppose to mark the eventual streets and house plots. The machinery of development has been hard at work during every working day for the last month; were I not at work during the day, the noise would drive me to distraction… that and the dust.
The dust blows in whenever the wind picks up— a fine, gritty grey coating on the floor and kitchen countertops. If I weren’t holding on to those precious weeks of cool evening temperatures, and low electrical bills, I would say the heck with that, close all the windows and run the AC; but the wisteria and the jasmine are blooming, the nights are cool— these are the days that I live for, all during the furnace-blasting heat in summer. I can’t possibly give it up. I just bought a formerly-expensive wind-chime (at a chain that provides up-scale goods at dollar-store markdowns) and I love to hear it at night, when the breeze picks up, and smell the jasmine, and hear the birds in the morning.
But the new houses are coming… not near to me, but close enough that I will have to see them when I look out at night, close enough to think about encouraging the hedge plants against the back fence to grow tall, and leafy enough that I don’t have to see them. The Lesser Weevil has trashed a lot of the back yard, after the December frost got to it first, but Blondie and I put up an electric fence to keep her out of the borders, and the construction company (from those nice people who did the roof last year) came today to pressure-wash the whole place, and tomorrow they will do some small repairs to the siding and trim, and over the next two weeks, Blondie and I and maybe Judy, and some of our friends, will repaint the house exterior. (Peach colored, with white and sage-green trim, for anyone who cares to know about fine details like that.) I have it in mind to Weevil-proof the back yard by fencing off a small part of it just for her, and doing the space that was formerly a patch of lawn in gravel and limestone pavers… with maybe a small water-feature in the middle—something modest, to trickle a small steam of water into a pool, in the middle of a collection of jewel-toned pottery planters full of herbs and lemon tree-shrubs… a private paradise.
Something dog-proof, anyway. It is shaping up to be a long, and hot, and dry summer, so making it xerioscape would be even better.
Do you recall the “rain forest” in Iowa from last year’s pork-laden transportation bill? Well, it seems as though all is not paradise with that project:
Yet despite the high profile of the project and Sen. Grassley’s generous boost, the Environmental Project has not raised a dime in private financial backing, at least none that has been announced publicly. Moreover, the management of the project has been widely criticized for missing numerous deadlines, switching architects in midstream and strong-arming the local government in Coralville over land-use and municipal-financing issues.
Meanwhile, the burn rate has been considerable. According to Department of Energy records, the Environmental Project has drawn down $3,735,558 in federal funds, as well as, according to Environmental Project Director David Oman (a former AT&T executive and one-time Republican gubernatorial candidate who earns a salary of $210,000), the entire $10 million donation by Mr. Townsend.
The growing perception in the state that the project was, if not a boondoggle, then a money pit, led Sen. Grassley to pull the plug on federal funds in November last year, passing legislation that froze further outlays until the Environmental Project raised $50 million in matching funds. If it fails to do so by December 2007, the grant will be withdrawn.
A very interesting article. But one caveat: author Michael Judge claims the funding for Alaska’s “Bridge[s] to Nowhere” has been terminated. It is my understanding that Stevens terminated the specific earmarks, but was able to get the same funding transfered to a general grant for Alaska’s transportation.
I’m currently watching the generally very good History of the Chopper on the Discovery Channel. And they just had this club, of mostly old-timers, from South Dakota. And their standards for membership include, “must have own bike, of at least 650cc, and it must be a chopper.” And looking at the clip of one of their rides, everyone’s bike had an extended fork and ape-hangers.
But is that what defines a chopper? I think not! One of my old detail clients was a very successful Jaguar mechanic in central Orange County. One of the things his success had bought him was a high-6-figure bus-based motorhome, with a custom bike, which resided upon a hydraulic lift in one of the motorhome’s luggage bays. This bike, by dictates of the packaging, if not the owner, had neither extended forks or ape-hangers – it was in the “drag bike” style. But few that saw it would doubt that it is a “chopper”.
But it did have a big cube, Harley-based motor. Is that a requirement? I think not! While a Harley V-Twin is virtually de rigor for today’s “choppers”, lots of customizers in “my day” were doing beautiful bikes based upon Triumphs, Hondas, and others. And no-one doubted that they were “choppers”.
So, just what constitutes a “chopper”?
Our local public radio station (which full disclosure impels me to mention that I am employed by their 24-hour classical sister station on a part-time basis) is advertising a special which airs this weekend on “border radio”— that is, a collection of stations located just over the Mexican border which during the 1950ies and 1960ie— joyfully free of FCC restrictions on power restrictions… or practically any other kind of restriction— blasted the very latest rock, and the most daring DJ commentary, on stations so high-powered they could be heard all the way into the deep mid-west… and probably on peoples’ fillings, too.
My parents were… umm, kind of stodgy about radio entertainment, and Mom kept the radio at home always tuned to the venerable Los Angeles classical station, with the result that I may have been the single “ most totally clueless about popular music” military broadcaster trainee ever to graduate from DINFOS. I knew about Elvis, and the Beatles, of course— JP played the “White Album” incessantly, and the Beach Boys were omnipresent in California… and I rather liked Simon & Garfunkle, but everything else… major unexplored territory there. Except for obscure and weird stuff like… umm, classical music. And the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. JP was a fan. I actually won money in tech school, betting on the existence of a band called the “Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band”. (They had a single in the AFRTS library— my winning move, going to the index file and triumphantly producing the card for “I am the Urban Spaceman”.) Otherwise, popular music, country music, all the rest of it was pretty much new news to me. I could be really open-minded about it all, which turned out to be a good thing, in the long run. DJ’s with strong personal inclinations about genre, decade and groups sometimes had a problem when it came to being ecumenical. (Weekend jazz… no problem. Midnight AOR.. no problem… just give me a couple of bottles of extra-strength Anacin. Afternoon drive-time… eh, no problem.)
So I managed to get to that point in my life without ever having heard of Wolfman Jack, the king of the border radio personalities. Raunchy, borderline profane, very funny, the Wolfman was about the most daring DJ in the regular weekly AFRTS package of radio programming for a good long time, which might have seemed even longer to station managers gritting their teeth and crossing their fingers that there might be nothing potentially offensive to the host nation in his show… this week, anyway. Master-Sgt. Rob, the first station manager that I worked for, at FEN-Misawa had been around for at least fifteen years before that. MSgt. Rob was one of the old-timers, who had served tours in South-East Asia, a clannish set loosely known as the “Thai Mafia”… so many of them had passed through a tour of duty at Udorn. Thailand’s reputation as a sort of sexual Disneyland dates from that time— although I swear Scouts’ honor, (fingers crossed here) that military broadcasters contributed very little to that. (Military broadcasters tended to be a little odd. I’d be willing to take bets that many of them had some degree of Ausburgers’ Syndrome). The Thai government was and is extremely embarrassed about this reputation, and sensitive of slight against national honor. So late one night, MSgt. Rob happened to turn on the radio, and of course, the Wolfman was on, and the first words MSgt. Rob heard was a joke:
“What’s brown and lays in the forest?” And the Wolfman answered his own question in that deep baritone that seemed especially made to relay the punch-line of raunchy jokes. “Smokey the Hooker!”
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This makes me nuts because I had a high school history teacher that pounded the Bill of Rights into our thick noggins:
CHICAGO – U.S. citizens are far more knowledgeable about the
cast of “The Simpsons” television show than they are about
their First Amendment Freedoms, a poll shows. The McCormick
Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago found 28 percent of people
are able to name more than one of the five fundamental free-
doms granted to them by the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution. But 52 percent were able to name at least two
members of the cartoon family. More jarring is that 22
percent of those polled can name all five characters —
Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie — but just 1-in-1,000
people surveyed — 0.01 percent — were able to name all
five freedoms.
From Bizarre News.
The First Amendment to the Constitution reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Although now that I think about it, if you actually spend time to read blogs you’re either smarter or more political than the average bear anyway so you already knew that.
The advent of spring brings with it the serious start of auction season. I only went to one or two auctions prior to taking up residence in the land of pigs, corn and soy beans, so I can’t speak much in the way of what they are like elsewhere. I suspect that because they are, in a way, a passion play that tends to be governed by human nature, they are pretty much the same no matter where you go. I’m not talking about the artsy fartsy auctions like Christi’s, or the charity type auctions where the only purpose is to provide a social means of funding something or another. I mean the kind of auctions where the auctioneers wear cowboy hats and the bidders are there for blood sport.
Real Wife and I traded a small two-bedroom bungalow for a large Victorian soon after our wedding and upon learning of the upcoming arrival of Red Haired Girl. As a consequence we needed lots of furniture. Keeping with the architecture of the house, we decided to hit the auction circuit and decorate the house with antiques. It seemed to us that if we bought carefully, we could obtain many pieces for prices equivalent to those of new ones, and that appreciation rather than depreciation would be the rule. Certain things needed to be new – Victorians were alien to the concept of a queen bed or comfortable living room furniture. So we bought some new and went auctioning for the rest.
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All of the celebrity culture folks I’ve heard to date have harped upon this “rift” that has developed “between these two former friends.” Well, I think these two media savvy New Yorkers know how to play the “any press is good press” game just as well as they do in Washington or Hollywood.
What do you want to bet that they won’t be kicking back together in a penthouse at One Central Park West in a week’s time, beatin’ back 40 year old Laphroaig, and laughing at the sheeple?
Many on “the right” seem to be considering former Harvard President Larry Summers as some sort of conservative martyr. This is a bit amazing, as he is hardly a “conservative” – more of a left-of-center sort of guy, really. They are lamenting that he is some sort of victim of a Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) “political machine.” The fact of the matter is, if there is a “machine” there, he enabled it.
Some think that Summers simply didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand-up to the FAS. I tend to subscribe to the opinion of Ruth R. Wisse1 (herself a Harvard professor):
In my opinion, the truly ghastly aspect of this whole affair is that the accused man actually believed he had committed an offense. Summers apologized not because, like Nikolai Bukharin, he was forced to, but because he was convinced he had done something wrong.
And what was that? “I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully,” the president wrote in a letter to his faculty:
I have learned a great deal from all that I have heard in the last few days. The many compelling e-mails and calls that I have received have made vivid the very real barriers faced by women in pursuing scientific and other academic careers. They have also powerfully underscored the imperative of providing strong and unequivocal encouragement to girls and young women interested in science. . . . I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women.
I see no reason to doubt Summers’ sincerity; he usually says what he means and means what he says. Taking him at his word, then, I conclude that he was not sorry for having offended liberal orthodoxy; he was sorry, genuinely so, for having given some sort of offense to women, for sending them “an unintended signal of discouragement.” Having first done our sex the courtesy of treating us as peers, he was now determined to treat us as a victimized species. Henceforth, he would tailor his thoughts to the ability of women to bear the hearing of them.
If Prof. Wisse is to be believed, Larry Summers is hardly the champion of free inquiry that some might make him out to be. James D. Miller thinks Harvard should hire him as President2. I don’t know about Jim, but I think a good model would be John Bolton, who is kicking ass and taking names at the UN. (BTW, with Bush looking rather “soft” now on international affairs, it might be a good time to renominate Bolton as permanent UN ambassador.)
And, for more from Wisse on the Summers ousting, check Coup d’Ecole: Harvard professors oust Larry Summers. Now they must face their students, in Thursday’s Opinion Journal. She seems to think that the student body, who broadly support Summers, will have some sway over the FAS. I’m skeptical. After all, Harvard is so rich, it’s been called “a hedge fund with a medium-sized university attached.”
1. This excerpt from her article “Dear Ellen”; or, Sexual Correctness at Harvard in Commentary, April 2005 (subscribers only), via Steve Burton at Right Reason. If anyone can forward me a copy of the full article, it would be appreciated.)
2. Hat Tip: InstaPundit
Granny Clarke was the mother of my mothers’ dearest friend from the time that JP and I were small children, from that time before Pippy was born, and my parents were living in a tiny rented cottage in the hills part of Beverly Hills… a house on a dirt road, with the surrounding area abundant in nothing much else but chaparral, eucalypts and rattlesnakes. Mom and her friend, who was eventually of such closeness that we called her “Auntie Mary” met when Mom began to attend services at a Lutheran congregation in West Hollywood, rather than endure the long drive to Pasadena and the ancestral congregation at Trinity Lutheran in Pasadena.
Auntie Mary Hammond was a little older than Mom, with four sons, each more strapping than the other, in spite of Auntie Mary’s wistful hopes for one of them to have been a girl. The oldest were teenagers, the youngest slightly younger than JP… although Paulie was as large and boisterous as his older brothers and appeared to be more my contemporary. They lived all together with Auntie Mary Hammonds’ mother, Granny Clarke, in a townhouse in West Hollywood, an intriguing house built on a steeply sloping street, up a flight of stairs from the concrete sidewalk, with only a tiny garden at one side, and the constant background noise and bustle of the city all around, not the quiet wilderness of the hills, which JP and I were more used to. But there was one thing we had in common with Paulie and his brothers— an immigrant grandparent with a curious accent and a long career in domestic service in Southern California.
It is a little known curiosity, outside Southern California (and maybe a surprise to even those inside it, in this modern day) that there was once a thriving and very cohesive British ex-pat community there; one that revolved around the twin suns of the old and established wealthy families, and the slightly newer movie business… united in their desire for employment as high-class and supremely competent domestic service, or just residence in a place offering considerably nicer weather. They all met on Sundays at Victor McLaughlin Park, where there were British-rules football games, and even cricket matches, all during the 20ies and 30ies. (My maternal and paternal grandfathers may even have met there, twenty years before their son and daughter resolved to marry their respective fortunes together).
All unknowing, my own Grandpa Jim and Auntie Mary’s mother, Granny Clarke, represented the poles of that lonely expat community. Grandpa Jim worked for nearly three decades for a wealthy, well-established Pasadena family of irreproachable respectability… and Granny Clark, for reasons that may be forever unknown, sometime in the mid teens or early 20ies of the last century, took it into her head to work for “those Hollywood people”. According to my mother, who took much more interest in Granny Clarke and held her in considerable reverence, this was an irrevocable career move. In the world of domestic service in Southern California in the late teens or early 20ies, once a domestic had “Hollywood” people on the professional resume, they were pretty well sunk as far as the other respectable employers were concerned. It is all rather amusing at this 21st century date to discover that the Old Money Pasadena/Montebello People looked down on the New Money Los Angeles People, who all in turn and in unison looked down on the very new Hollywood People… who had, as legend has it, arrived on a train, looking for nice weather and a place to film those newfangled moving picture thingies without being bothered by an assortment of … well, people that did not have their best economic interests at hand, back on the Other Coast.
So, while Granny Clarke might have been originally advised that she was committing professional suicide by casting her fortunes with “those Hollywood People”, it turned out very well in the end, for her, even though she appeared, personally, to have been the very last likely person to take to the waters of the Tinseltown domestic pool with any enthusiasm. She was a being of the old breed, a stern and unbending Calvinist, the sort of Scots Lowlander featured in all sorts of 19th century stories; rigidly honest and a lifelong teetotaler, fearlessly confident in the presence of those who might have assumed themselves to be her social and economic betters, honest to a fault… and thrifty to a degree that my mother (no slouch in that department, herself) could only genuflect towards, in awe and wonder. One of the first things that I remember Mom telling me about Granny Clarke was that she would carefully melt and re-mold the half-consumed remnants of jelled salads, pouring the liquid into an even smaller mold, and presenting a neat appearance at a subsequent meal. Neither Mom nor Grannie Jessie ever had felt obliged to dress up leftovers as anything else than what they were, but Granny Clarke was a consummate professional.
Her early employers, so Mom related to me, were so enormously and touchingly grateful not to be abused, cheated and skinned economically, (or betrayed to the tabloids and gossip columnists) that no matter how personally uncomfortably they might have felt in the presence of someone who was the embodiment of sternly Calvinistic disapproval of their personal peccadilloes, Granny Clarke was fully and generously employed by a long sequence of “Hollywood people” for the subsequent half-century. Granny Clarke managed to achieve, I think, a certain ideal, of being able to tolerate in the larger arena, while disapproving personally, and being respected and valued in spite of it all. She was painfully honest about household accounts, and ran the kitchen on a shoestring, buying the least expensive cuts… and with magical skill, conjuring the most wonderful and richly flavored meals out of them.
She was for a time, employed by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks at the legendary Pickfair mansion, before moving on to her longest stretch of employment, as housekeeper and cook for the dancer and star, Eleanor Powell. According to Mom, she only and regretfully left service with Ms. Powell after the formers’ marriage to Glenn Ford. The impetus was that Granny Clarke collected stamps and so did Mr. Ford, and after the marriage of Mr. Ford and Miss Powell, Granny Clarke no longer had an uncontested pick of the many exotic stamps that came in attached to Miss Powell’s fan mail. She went to work for James Mason, instead. Presumably, he didn’t grudge her the stamps from his fan mail.
In retirement, she lived with her daughter and son in law, and their four sons, which is when I knew her. We were all only aware in the vaguest way that she had been the housekeeper to the stars; that all paled besides the wonderful way she cooked, and the way she cosseted us smaller children. I wish I had thought to ask for more stories about Hollywood in her time, for she must have been a rich fund of them. One hot summer day, when we were at their house for dinner, Mom was not feeling very well, and when she confessed this, Granny Clarke said, sympathetically,
“Oh, then I’ll fix you some poached eggs in cheese sauce.”
It sounded quite revolting to Mom— I think she may have been pregnant with Pippy— but when Granny Clarke set down a beautifully composed dish of perfectly poached eggs, bathed in a delicately flavored cheese sauce, Mom was able to eat every bite, and keep it down, too. She had never tasted anything quite so delicious, and when she said so, Granny Clarke allowed as how her poached eggs in cheese sauce had been a favorite among certain guests at Pickfair. Those movie moguls and directors and that, she said, all had ulcers and stomach upsets, through being so stressed… but they were all, to a man, very fond of her poached eggs and cheese sauce.
I rather think it must have been something rather like this cheese sauce, taken from Jan & Michael Sterns’ “Square Meals” savory cheese sauce:
Melt 2 TBsp butter, adding 3 TBsp four, 1 Tsp salt, a dash of pepper, 1 Tsp prepared mustard and 1 Tsp Worchester sauce, and whisk until smooth. Stir in slowly;
2 Cups milk, and add 1 cup grated American or cheddar cheese. Simmer 5-10 minutes, stirring constantly until sauce is smooth and thick. Makes about 2 cups of sauce, enough to puddle generously around 4 poached eggs— two servings of 2 eggs each. Depends on how much you like cheese sauce, I guess, or how much you like eggs… or have toast fingers to dunk in the cheese sauce.
The trick to poached eggs is to break each egg into a small bowl, and to pour it into a pot of boiling water after you have taken a spoon and whisked the water to make a small whirlpool… or to use one of those patent egg-poacher saucepan inserts so beloved of outlets like Williams-Sonoma.
To: Ms. Jill Edwards, Ms. Ashley Miller, Student Body Senate, University of Washington
From: Sgt Mom
Re: “The University of Washington’s student senate rejected a memorial for alumnus Gregory “Pappy” Boyington of “Black Sheep Squadron” fame amid concerns a military hero who shot down enemy planes was not the right kind of person to represent the school.”
1. How very, very precious, and I do not mean that in a complimentary way, Ms. Edwards & Ms. Miller. It does not reflect well on the education for which someone is presumably paying a great deal of money, to be so casually dismissive of the qualities of someone who of someone who— along with a great many of his contemporaries— risked his life decades ago in order to make it possible for you to sit in a quiet, well-appointed classroom and pass judgment… and a factually misplaced judgment, at that.
2. I really can’t, at this distance, make out what you and your peers may have been taught or not taught in your comfortable, academic Eden, but it appears that history, ancient and modern, is most decidedly not on your personal study plan. If more than anything can be learned in a… ahem… a real history class, not the thinly disguised Marxist polemic so in fashion at certain establishments, it would be the truth of the old adage that “Peace is the dream of the wise, but wars are the history of men.” And by “men” of course, I mean humankind as a whole, not the gender in particular. So sic the Women’s Studies Department on me for not using the approved PC phrase du jour… like I give a flying F**k anyway.
3. Since war is lamentably a certain constant, much as we might wish and hope and pray otherwise, warriors are also a constant. Let me break it to you gently, Ms Edwards, Ms Miller, the common experience of a lot of your fellow humans down the ages has been that of being hapless, inoffensive, hardworking and peace-and-quiet loving… prey. Yes, my dear, sweet innocent student body senators, they wound up having their peaceful happy little agrarian communities or states smashed and ravaged, burnt and sacked, and themselves and their families murdered, raped and/or enslaved by every robber gang, army or larger, more un-socially aware human organization… unless the community, state or kingdom which they happened to find themselves resident in had the ability and the will to prevent this from happening.
4. Yes, my dear innocent students, peace is not the natural happy state of humankind… it is a rare and dear-bought commodity, purchased in blood for, and sometimes by the citizens of the state or city in which they lived. The first, and most original obligation owed by the free citizens of ancient Greece and Rome was their duty to defend their polis, their city, their community and their fellows and families with arms, as soldiers, according to their means. This, alas, was a necessary duty, for people who just want to live in peace and quiet, with their families, communities and livelihoods all secure. If you don’t believe me on this, just check any of the recent news stories about Darfur. Just because you are not interested in war, does not mean that war is uninterested in you.
5. Of late, in this age of specialization, we have tended to farm the job of military defense of the polis out to those who are truly interested in doing it, and who have a natural skill. There are, and have always been people who do not mind going into danger, and in fact rather enjoy blowing stuff up. They are good at it, for the most part. Warriors, like war, and the poor, are always with us; wishing it weren’t so won’t make it all go away. The whole purpose of a military, as I have written before, is to kill those designated as our enemies. Think of our warriors as another blogosphere essayist did, as they are our sheepdogs, protection against the wolves, the wolves that always threaten any community.
6. Yes, I can see why Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington would not exactly be the beau ideal of your pretty little campus: he was crude and rude, an unrepentant killer; a rowdy, undisciplined and brawling menace; a drinker and alleged wife-beater, cheerfully willing to go to China as a mercenary… not exactly anyone’s notion of a model citizen. He lived fast and recklessly, and was probably the most surprised of all that he lived long enough to die within a breath of old age; No, Ms. Miller, he would not have been your set’s cup of tea at all. Very probably in some vast imaginary late 20th century dictionary, there is a picture of him, next to the entry for “Politically Incorrect.”
7. And yet… there you go; he had a certain set of skills; as a pilot, a leader, and a warrior. For whatever his reasons, he served, in China and in the Pacific. He and his ilk kept the wolf of the moment from the door of the peaceful, the harmless and the inoffensive, in such security that they could begin to think their shelter owed everything to their own honest good will, and not the blood and dedication of those who secured such for them at such cost. For all his faults, and in company with his peers, “Pappy” Boyington might have done more to protect the defenseless than all the college senates and interest groups ever convened.
8. Frankly, I am enjoying a mental image of a statue of Colonel Boyington coming to life and delivering a good old-fashioned and profane Marine Corps ass-chewing. Such might be a truly educational experience to a student body which, lamentably appears to be a collection of sheltered, spoiled, candy-ass yuppy puppies… and one which seems to exist in ignorance of the means by which they can continue to be sheltered, spoiled, etc cetera.
Sincerely,
Sgt Mom.
(Link courtesy of The Belmont Club.. BTW, Cpl/Sgt. Blondie points out that most USMC Medal of Honor awards were made postumously)