Why I don't want to vote for Hillary

Reasons, rational and not, why I truly hope some other Democrat will get the nomination:

• Hatred of the cynical nepotism that motivates Party movers and shakers to back someone with name recognition over other, more qualified, candidates. This is what brought us the current President Bush. It also got Hillary her Senate seat in the first place. Perhaps one can't argue with elective success, but, given the current state of the world wrought by a dangerously incompentent President, how can one not oppose it?
  
• She says she voted to give President Bush authority to start the Iraq war because she trusted him. Presidents should be a better judge of character than that. They need to appoint lots of people to run things. When they screw up, will her excuse be that she trusted them? We've had enough of that from the current President. ('Brownie, you're doing a hell of a job.')
  
• If we had national health insurance, I'd feel a lot better about her. She should have anticipated the insurance companies' reaction to her plan. As Birch Bayh said, "It takes a good politician to make a good president."
• Feminist Idealism. I'd like the first woman President to be one who came to prominence through her own achievements, not that of her husband. Dianne Feinstein , Susan Collins, Nancy Pelosi, Christine Todd Whitman. Someone like that. Had Margaret Chase Smith run for president back in the 1960's, one could argue that she had originally won her seat because of her husband, but by then she had made quite a name for herself on her own. I don't think Hillary Clinton has the long expericence that justifies a run for the Presidency.
• If Hillary wins the nomination, we'll have to listen to that awful Celine Dion song until election day.
  

Sopranos ending

From the spoilers reported on NPR, it was a satisfying ending, at least for me. I've only seen a few minutes of the series. HBO was never in our budget. I noticed that the first season is on DVD at the Goffstown library, but we haven't decided whether to get it out. Even if we do, we'll still be six years behind everybody else. Rod says it's probably too violent for me, but he could be overprotective. We saw the first season of Rome on DVD, and liked it.

I haven't given up on watching the Sopranos some day. (It could show up edited on broadcast TV, as Sex and the City did.) So I like that there wasn't a definitive ending, because when I finally do get around to viewing it, the episodes won't be colored by my thinking "This is a show about a man who eventually..."

The spoiler I'm worried about is the day after the last Harry Potter book comes out. It's a wait to get those books out of the library. That hasn't mattered in the past.

Paris Hilton

I'm such a geek that I have to translate her into Cynthia Duchess from Stranger in a Strange Land in order to understand why we have to hear about her.

I prefer to get my entertainment from fiction. The main purpose of journalism in a democracy ought to be helping us decide how to vote.

3-can 'chili' recipe

Combine and heat in a saucepan:

• 1 can "mexican stewed tomatoes" (we use Stop & Shop brand)
• 1 can beans (e.g. black beans)
• 1 small can tomato paste
  
• frozen corn
• frozen spinach

Serve with rice, cornbread, grated cheese, whatever.

You can stir instant rice into the mixture, if you're really desperate for a quick one-pot meal.

Lloyd Alexander 1924-2007

http://sfwa.org/news/2007/lalexander.htm

Well, now I'm in mourning. I read his books over and over in childhood. Kind of in the transition from Oz to Heinlein, with lots of overlap. (Just finished a new novel by him last week, in fact.)
He's the only author I ever sent a fan letter to. He sent a very nice letter back, with a hello from his wife, Janine. Kind of romantic they died so close together. Still, sad.

Two novels by John Scalzi

(Spoilers Warning!)

It took me a long time to get through Old Man's War. Part of it was that I was writing a screenplay for the Nicholl's deadline of May 1st. But it was also that the story spent a lot of time in set-up. It moved in fits and starts until it was more than half over. I know I would have wolfed through a Harry Potter novel in a weekend, no matter what.

By the end of the book, Scalzi had introduced two interesting groups of characters. One was of the Consu, a highly-advanced race that has a religious need to war against the lower races, including our own, in order to raise them up spiritually. Without this religious need, they could just use their superior technology to annihilate everyone else. The other interesting characters were those in the "Ghost Brigades". These were soldiers created from the genetic make-up of army volunteers who died before they got to serve. Chronologically, they are children, but they function as adults--being able to communicate in English and fight battles within a few weeks of their coming into being.

When I saw that the next novel in the series was called The Ghost Brigades, I wanted to read it. I figured, the first novel was slow, but Scalzi has already set up the universe of his story--now we can get to the fun part. The novel did read a lot faster than the previous one. In that, it did not disappoint. The main character was likeable; it was fun to be in his head. The premise reminded me a bit of the cover blurb for Valerie Freireich's Becoming Human: "Can the clone of a traitor overcome his legacy, or will he be doomed to repeat it?" In Freirich's novel, you learn from the beginning that the traitor in question wasn't really a traitor, so the problem for the clone is growing up under the cloud of unjustified suspicion. In Scalzi's novel, a ghost brigade soldier is built to contain a recording of the consciousness of an escaped traitor, in hopes that the new soldier will remember enough of the mind of the traitor to provide clues as to the traitor's motivation and whereabouts.

The new soldier, Jared Dirac, isn't told about his progenitor's past, so doesn't have the cloud of shame with which Freireich's character had to contend. When he awakens with no memory of the traitor, he is raised as any ghost brigade soldier, and that's a delightfully interesting combination of childhood and basic training--over in two weeks. Then he's fighting wars, seeing things with a possibly more mature understanding than his peers. It's fun for the reader to note his perceptions and wait for more and more of the traitor's personality to surface. When the memories finally do return, then the hunt is on.

My problem with both books is in their endings. In the first novel, the main character, John Perry, finds a ghost brigade soldier who is created from the DNA of his dead wife. Perry has spent most of the novel mourning his wife, so it isn't surprising that he wants to meet her double, who is named Jane Sagan. The problem is that Jane is essentially a child, who has very little to do with Perry's deceased wife, or much besides soldiering in common with Perry himself. Scalzi should have left it as a bitter lesson: that you can't bring back the dead, you have to forge new relationships with the living. Instead, by the end of the novel, Jane agrees to go live with Perry on a colony farm, assuming they both survive their enlistments. The reader is left wondering, live together as what? Does he see the clone of his wife as a sort of daughter? Are they supposed to be lovers? He'll be eighty-five; she'll be ten. Does he expect the personality of his dead wife to surface? Well, at least there's the comfort that the odds of them both surviving are very small.

Ironically, I have the opposite problem with the next book--the characters' failure to bring back the dead when given the chance to do so. The traitor has an innocent daughter, named Zoe. Jared remembers the traitor's love for his little girl, and feels it as well. At the end of the novel, both Jared and the traitor are dead, but the little girl is saved. Jane orders her last surviving soldier during a battle to find and save a recording that had been made of Jared's consciousness. Then she later decides to destroy the recording, and thus the chance of bringing to life another clone who could serve as Zoe's father. This is judged to be a good moral choice--proof, even, that she "has a soul". The judge of this soul-quality is an alien from a race that has no qualms about butchering humans (including children) to cook and eat. But this judgement isn't presented as ironic.

Jane Sagan is told that both she and John Perry can get early retirement from the service, and go live on a farm, while raising Zoe as their daughter. She chooses to do so, and I think that is supposed to be a happy ending. But I am left wondering: Could there possibly be two people less suitable to raise a child? One of them, Jane Sagan, was never a child herself. That she even knew how to calm a frightened child strained my credulity. The other, John Perry, is a grandfather, who finished raising his children years ago, and wasn't sufficiently interested in his own grandchildren to stay on Earth to watch them grow up. Not to mention my doubts as to the stability of the home. Could Jane actually be happy on a farm and inside a slow, clumsy body, with its reduced abilities of perception, after spending the entire nine years of her existence as a super-enhanced human? Won't she start to miss the other "ghosts"--people like her? And does she really accept being out of the loop? She's survived nine years. She should be advancing into the upper echelon, toward becoming a decision maker in the power structure. Not shunted aside.

Yet this is considered a more moral solution than to bring back alive a clone who will have the memories of being a father to the child, and actual feelings of love for her. After some initial problems adjusting, Jared did seem to integrate his progenitor's memories with his new unique personality fairly well. Had Scalzi described more suffering in the process, the decision not to revive Jared would have made more sense.

In The Ghost Brigades, the soldiers are shown innocently enjoying a sexual orgy that is apparently the tradition following each battle. So now we know that they do have sex. They say that their commander, Lieutenant Jane Sagan, doesn't participate in the orgies any more, but that's OK, since they're optional. The reader is supposed to assume that Jane doesn't any more, because she's saving herself for John Perry, the geezer to whom she is quasi-engaged. That doesn't seem fair. Scalzi is called a successor to Robert Heinlein, but Heinlein wouldn't have done that to a female character. He would have had Jane enjoying the orgies right up until she's able to meet back up with her true love. For evidence of that, see Glory Road, about kicking the stranger's shoes away from his lover's bed when he's ready to come back to her ("but I would go see Star first, or soon anyhow, and kick that strange pile of shoes aside"), or Lazarus Long's mother's guilt-free willingness to have an affair while his dad was at war.

I get the impression that Scalzi is trying to give people what he thinks they want. He really failed in my case. Scalzi is not Heinlein. Heinlein's characters behaved in a way that made sense within their context.

Army Ranger Captain Jonathan Grassbaugh, killed by a roadside bomb

Here are different links to articles about a young man from New Hampshire, recently killed in Iraq:

• teaching at 10. His fourth-grade teacher spontaneously asked Jon to teach the rest of class long-division. He remembered the boy as being both a "math whiz" and a natural teacher.
  
• drummer boy at 14. The "28th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry", a Civil War Reenactment group, remembers him fondly. there's a cute photo of 14-year-old Jonathan dressed as a Civil War drummer.
• rings of jupiter - "His brother remembered a night Jonathan invited the family to the Grainger Observatory at Phillips Exeter Academy, to see a full moon and the rings around Jupiter."
• bicycle helmet & pizza stories, by Joelle Farrell of the Concord Monitor, reprinted in iraqnam.blogspot.com
  
• NHPR story on how he met his wife helping her move into dorm, post office, pledging in military fraternity, wedding video

I've been listening to NPR since the war began. They have profiled many soldiers who have died. This one has upset me the most.

marriage guidelines

Wisdom gained from six successful years:
(of course, we're way too disorganized to divorce)

1. Accentuate the positive.

   If the thought crosses your mind that you're grateful that he watched the kids or washed the dishes, that he looks cute, or has a nice smile, or how pleasant it is to hear his voice on the telephone, say so immediately.



2. Be diplomatic and constructive about the negative.
   

   Before you complain, think: What's going on with him? Is this a good time?
   
   Is there some weakness of your own you can admit to in preface to complaining about his? For example, "I know I left my clothes on the floor yesterday, but I didn't find your dirty socks under the bed until after I did laundry today. So if you want clean socks, could you please try to remember to throw your dirty ones in the hamper?"



3. Have sex as frequently as possible.

   It reduces stress, makes you feel closer together, and is probably a big reason why you got married in the first place.

   
   

Margie's surprisingly easy blender Latkes

(Vaguely based on Joy of Cooking, Page 410.)

Peel enough potatoes to easily fill the blender jar without them being chopped.
(classic Waring blender, if you're curious as to size)
Rinse the potatoes, slice them, put them back in the blender jar with a small onion.
Crack three eggs into the blender. (I happened to use small eggs.)
Blend.
Add a generous tablespoon of corn meal, a less generous one of all-purpose flour and stir.
Season with salt and pepper.
Pour a puddle of canola oil into a steep-enough frying pan & heat.
(setting of 6.5 to 7 out of 10 on our electric range)

Drop batter by tablespoons into oil. Wait patiently until you see pancakes browning around the edges. Turn. Wait for that side to cook. Drain on tea-towel or paper-towels.

Serve with good applesauce.

hero wins peace prize

(Here I am catching up on blog postings. Note I've given up on nprlistener blog to put politics into unjam)

Quite some time ago I heard public laments that people, especially the young, have no true heros any more. Since then, I've tried to keep a mental list of those I can call heros. A few months ago, I heard a Marketplace profile on Muhammad Yunus, who invented micro-credit. I forgot his name, but kept him on my heroes list as "the guy who invented microlending". Then last month I awoke to the pleasant news that one of my heroes had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Who goes on your heroes list?

Ed Bradley

I always thought CBS made a mistake in choosing Dan Rather instead of Ed Bradley to replace Walter Cronkite. Pundits talk about people wanting to hear a news anchor as the "Voice of G-d", but what I always appreciated was warmth and sympathy projected by people like Bradley and Cronkite. When there's bad news, it helps to have the told to you by someone who seems like a caring relative.

One profound change...

...since I became a parent is that I actually look forward to time spent alone in a doctor's or dentist's waiting room--if it means I can read something: a book I brought, or even a two-year-old New Yorker.

Reading time without kids, without cleaning to do or groceries to buy or bills to pay, reading time without guilt. A fleetingly short sweet time.

inside the music

I've just started playing piano again. I'm no better than I was in high school, which is not much better than I was in Junior High, and I'm not trying to play anything I didn't know then.

But it is so soothing to the spirit to be playing music again. I'd forgotten what it was like.

You could hire the world's best pianist to play for you whenever you wished, and it wouldn't give you what mediocre playing of your own produces--an ability to be inside the music.

Children, everyone, take up an instrument. It's really worth it.

supermarket smoke

There's no smoking allowed in the store, but employees sit just outside at picnic tables smoking. I have to walk my kids through the smoke. I have to breathe the smoke. Back in March, a grocery store employee was hit by an errant car while he was taking a break outside.

Supermarkets, please find a place in back of the store for employees to smoke.

coffee at the pump

I was at the self-serve gas station in the rain watching an electronic ad that said "come inside for a cup of hot coffee." I didn't want to go inside. That's why I'm swiping my card outside. I don't want to interact with a human. I don't want to lock up my car. I don't want to stand in line at the cash register.

The gas station that figures out how to serve a decent dollar cup of coffee at the pump will do a great business.

3 things from New Orleans

Three things I have left from a short 1990's trip to New Orleans:

1. Crescent City Brewhouse glass beer mug.
   
2. Small plastic bag with about a tablespoon of chicory, to sprinkle on top of ground coffee before it's brewed.
3. Fond memories.
   

Jewish Animism

An old boyfriend of mine once said to me, "I don't believe in G-d, but I believe that people have souls." That didn't make sense to me at the time. If you believe in souls, then G-d granted you those souls. But now I can see it as a difference in definition of G-d. You can believe there is no god separate from souls. If we have souls, then souls are part of a spiritual continuum that we call G-d.

I suppose I believe in souls. It gives me some sense of meaning to do so.
Too nihilist not to. Too much despair.

My father was a religious Jew and seemed to be always trying his best to be a good man for all of the time I knew him, and he died a horrible death. All the while believing in life and that it was worth suffering through any medical treatment if there was the smallest chance that it would save your life.

When I found it difficult to pay synagogue membership fees this year I had incentive to stop believing in Judaism. Without it I would no longer have that one debt, or perceived debt. A debt of honor, or debt to community. No U.S. legal enforcement, but it felt uncomfortable not to pay it. Unless I was no longer Jewish; then it wouldn't matter.

I didn't manage to fast through the entire Yom Kippur this year, nor to attend as much as the High Holiday services as I usually have.

I had been feeling more and more disassociated.

Still, a sort of litmus test of Judaism is for me to say, well then I don't have to be kosher. I can cook meat on the milk dishes and vice-versa; I can even have unkosher food in the house. But I have such a terrible aversion to thus sullying my dishes or my stomach with unkosher food. Kind of a not-being-a-virgin-anymore sense to it.

I do feel guilty and bad about the killing of any animal for food. I'm not vegetarian anymore, but I do find kashrut as a kind of penance for the sin of eating meat. I think it was even explained to me in Hebrew school as one of the theories for kashrut. Take away meat-eating, and keeping kosher is a thousand times simpler. You can eat meat after eating dairy products; but eating meat requires four to six hours penance before you may have an ice-cream cone afterwards.

And if I don't care about religion, then why don't I want my Catholic mother-in-law taking my children to church, and why can't we consider the local Catholic school as an alternative if the public schools seem lacking? There the aversion is to the betrayal of my ancestors and their relatives who suffered and died so that they could pass on Judaism to their descendents. My Catholic husband is from South America. Native South American lineage is written on his features, and on those of one of our daughters. Those ancient South Americans probably did not appreciate being murdered or assimilated by the Catholic Conquistadors. For their sake, too, my daughters can't become Catholic. For the sake of my ancestors, I must pass Judaism down to and through them, regardless of my ambivalence to all of its beliefs.

I know there are many who call themselves Jewish Buddhists, or "Jew-Buddh" for short. I don't know enough about Buddhism, nor am I shopping for it. I also suspect that I'm too high-strung to become a Buddhist. Of course some could say that's why it would be useful to learn, at least, to meditate.

I think the description for my set of beliefs--respect for the souls of the dishes, and of all people, and of my ancestors, and all the animals murdered for food--is called Animism. Jewish Animism seems to be the most accurate description of my religion.

"I'm a Jewish Animist," I tell my husband.

"There's no such thing," he says.

"But that's what I am," I say with helpless conviction.

The reason rich people are thin...

is that they don't have to clean their own kitchens. I walked into the kitchen tonight to do a few dishes. I finished off the pastry and walked out with an ice cream cone. If the dishes had been done I'd be asleep by now.

tv olympic coverage

RadioCanada is so much better than NBC. RadioCanada shows the event, with a few commercials. When we turn on NBC it is so often some heavy music and a profile or interview or commercial, almost never the actual sports. I'm sure these profile segments are expensive to produce and I so wish they wouldn't bother. I want to see the sports, maybe the winner smiling and the loser frowning at the end. I don't want the in-depth stuff alternating with commercials. And yes I'd like to see all the best competitors, not just the Americans.

February 24: NBC's skating coverage is even more annoying. Why don't they show the Figure Skating Gala early and all at once if they know it's what people want to see? Instead they parcelled it out in dribs and drabs between commercials and downhill events. I couldn't stay tuned for three hours until midnight to watch it. It's being nasty to viewers in an attempt, I suppose, to keep them for their ad revenue. Well they lost my pair of eyeballs. I switched over to a Monty Python special on PBS then went to bed.

nice vs mean tv shows

I asked someone the other day if she watched Gilmore Girls and she said no then asked if I'd seen Desperate Housewives because she'd seen a bit and thought it was funny. I've seen a bit also and thought some of it was funny, but I wasn't motivated to try to watch more, because it's hard to understand a show with a continuing story if you haven't been watching, but also because there's a sense of meanness to the show that makes me uncomfortable. I had a similar problem with Seinfeld, particularly in its later years. People who saw the last episode complained about the meanness of the characters and situation.

I started to divide up shows into mean and nice ones. Some wouldn't fit into either category, but most would. People can do mean things in a nice show and nice things in a mean show. The difference between the two categories is that a nice show has as a basic world view that people should be nice. I think most shows before Seinfeld had this world view. Abandoning the "nice" viewpoint is part of what makes some shows edgy modern and fun, but when it's overdone it can make it not an enjoyable experience. Of course, I was raised in the 60's and 70's. Maybe mean shows aren't a problem with the 18-30's target audience.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a nice show because the group of friends in it were very caring and heroic, and when they did mean things to each other they felt bad about it. Gilmore Girls is a nice show although the main character in it can be breathtakingly selfish and self-centered. Her daughter approaches perfection, however, and is possibly the moral core of the show.

Arrested Development has the edginess of a mean show but uses the main character of Michael as a moral core, which keeps it mainly in the nice show category.

I had no interest in Survivor because its basic premise sounded so mean: people all competing against and backstabbing each other. Had it been groups of teams competing against each other, with the winning team to share the prize, I think I would have tuned in. Obviously, most of America doesn't have my hangups about that--I remember during that first Survivor series how people would converse assuming you watched it, not even first asking if you did.

Other reality shows can fall into either category. Sometimes mean and nice can be in the way a show is advertised. Dancing with the Stars is nice, because the emphasis is on the nice dancing. Skating with the Stars is mean because the emphasis was on the bruises and injuries occuring to neophytes taking a crash course in skating. Perhaps it even implied revenge on the "Stars" for not being normal and poor like us. If the advertising spots showing the injuries had a star saying "It's all worth it because this skating has been so much fun" then the show wouldn't be mean.

My problem with mean shows is that they don't provide the escape and feeling of relaxation, that I've escaped, afterwards, as does the fantasy life of a nice show. When I've finished battling vampires with Buffy, escaping the evil government of Firefly, or living the total romance-novel life of Rory Gilmore, I feel like I've been put into a different reality, one where people have good luck, and friends are true. Perhaps there needs to be a cosmic reward for being nice. Characters can be nice and good friends in Desperate Housewives, but there seems to be cosmic vengeance out to get them anyway. That makes the show mean.

In real life, although people do tend to respect the good, there doesn't seem to be a cosmic avenger out on either side, nice or mean. That's why we need fiction.