Category Archives: Uncategorized

Green I could embrace

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Although it looks like you might need a rain forest. Or at least some tropics. Better than this, at least.

Via Creaky Pavillion.

Home alone

I’m glad to see that Mr. B., who is nine, has passed the age when it is against Texas law to leave him home alone, while I run a brief errand or two. Or leave him in the car while I go into a store, so long as the outside temp is not in triple digits. He dislikes shopping as much as most males of any age and sometimes puts up a fuss if he is expected to go along.

Mrs. Charm looked aghast when I told her, but she’ll come around. He already plays on his scooter on the sidewalk out front without us worrying. It’s even part of a trend, this independence. Not quite what it was when I was a child and would get scolded for staying inside too long. Some kids Mr. B.’s age even walk to school (which is only half a dozen blocks away), but he’s not quite ready for that. I was eleven before we lived close enough to school for me to do it.

Via Instapundit.

The Diamond Age

This was my first Neal Stephenson novel, but it won’t be the last. I did find the ending annoying. The book just seemed to run out of ideas and collapse into an easy lust. But it’s not hard to see some of society doing just that, when everyone (including the poor) have nanotech Matter Compilers and the Feed to draw on.

The nanotech, alone, is compelling. Some of it may even come true, though not, I suppose, in my or Mr. B.’s remaining lifetimes. I especially like Stephenson’s cities, his airships and his Vickys. The multicultural phyles make sense, if present trends continue. Hero Hackworth’s primer was more interesting, though, when Dinosaur, Duck and Purple inhabited it; less so when they were gone. But I’d still take the ride all over again, and may, one of these days.

Political corruption

It’s becoming pervasive, especially among our career politicians who’ve never done anything else. They’re bankrupting us as well as thumbing their elite noses at us. Short of armed revolution, the best we can hope to use to change it all is term limits. Since the skunks will never limit themselves, it will have to be done by voting out one bum after another.

Via Instapundit.

Texas is No. 2!

Yesss. It looked like the coach’s poll, dropping Texas to No. 4, was going to rule. Nada. Happy day. The question is: for how long?

High school Latin

Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor, wants high school students to have four years of it:

"…such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the ‘role model’ diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together. Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at Melos)."

He’s right, of course, though I don’t think I’d want to take four years of it. I only had to take one year, in 1960-61, and I still remember how cool it was to translate text so old yet still recognizable in its human concern. My grandmother taught Latin at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in the 1920s. But that was college. 

Bogus hopenchange

So far, judging by the transition team, Obamalot looks to be as phony as Barry’s lying, illegal fund-raising, vote-frauding campaign: dominated by the lobbyists who he claimed weren’t going to dominate. Even his projected appointments are the same-old, same-old. Let’s make him a one-termer, okay?