Frenzied Daddy

Sadly, I’ve removed Mombrain from the blogroll- she hit an iceberg and sank. But in her place, I offer you a Librarian from Hell. Not the Librarian from Hell like the Bastard Operator from Hell — she actually works in Hell as a librarian. Just ask her!

Some people’s brains work at 451° F. That’s rumoured to be the temperature at which books burn. It astounds me that people can spend so much energy trying to keep these books off library shelves and out of the hands of mortals.

Books represent points of view; and if my daughters need to help solidify how they feel about a topic, I should hope they can get books that show a point of view that’s not necessarily mine. I want my kids to think for themselves and to feel that other people understand them. I want them to have context for historical events; I want them to be well-read. Because, as Lemony Snicket says …

And in my experience, well-read people are rarely evil.
The Slippery Slope, Lemony Snicket

Another terrific quote is from Lyndon Johnson: Books and ideas are the main weapons against intolerance and ignorance.

A shopping idea for you …
Say it with Cotton.

Miss B’s school lost two and a half teachers (FTE) this year due to budget cuts. This is the last year of the Multnomah County Income Tax, which benefits schools, and presumably they’ll lose another 2.5 FTE next year. This is frightening; I really like her school, it’s probably the best in the district, but it needs more money to survive.

One of the mechanisms they use to get this money is ’scrip’. Every week they send out a order list and parents purchase gift cards for face value. The stores supply them at a discount; so the school gets the difference. For instance, I know that we spend about a hundred dollars on groceries a week. I can budget that, write the check to the school for it, and get a $100 gift card. The school makes (maybe) four dollars for each one I buy. Not a lot, but with all families participating and buying all their groceries this way, they could make up some of those lost dollars (not all of them, however.).

Safeway uses a different mechanism. They are members of Escrip.com, which is online. You register for a (free) account, it takes a couple of minutes, and register your safeway preferred shopper card, and they track it and donate a percentage of your purchases to the groups you choose. And our school is one of those groups. So it’s fairly painless and transparent process; you register your card and shop at Safeway. There are hundreds of groups, and hundreds of stores participating. I think their ‘escrip mall’ uses affiliate programs to donate a set amount to the groups too.

So what I’m saying is, please sign up with escrip.com and register your cards to support our schools. If you want the group ID number for Miss B’s school, please email me or leave me a comment with your email address.

Thanks for reading this far.

Sometimes I’m saddened by the terrific picture I thought I’ve taken, which turns out to be so totally out of focus that Mrs B has to check and make sure she’s wearing her contacts. However, some of these images turn out to be fairly ok subjects to experiment with those awful ‘photoshop effects” you have in your menu. A lot of them I’m not sure how to use, or why my results look so bad. Even with starting with a terrific sharp picture. But this one came out OK. It’s out of focus, Miss B was “protecting” Miss K with a towel at the fountain this summer.

I was recently asked what I think the overall result of globalization was; positive or negative. Specifically, outsourcing IT jobs to India for programming and call centers. My response was kind of blah, I think. I don’t think much of it. I’m sure it’s good for the Indian, and his/her community. But the person in the US that could be hired, it’s not so good for them and their community. And then, thinking in an overall viewpoint, I’m not sure which weighs more, the good in India or the bad in the US, so I don’t know if the overall effect is positive or negative. I’m sure we can’t stop it, really, because it’s one of the options that Bosses have in order to cut financial costs, so rather than look at whether it’s positive or negative, I’m going to concern myself with how to help my “fellow human.”

However, when poor people in Manhattan make $0.02 for every dollar the rich make, that’s a little easier for me to examine. Globally it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t affect (well, directly, affect) the trade relationships between nations. These two cents highlight the disparity between the rich and the poor in the US. I’m not one who believes in trickle-down economics. Those two cents hurt the poor and the poor community a lot more than the dollar helps the rich and the rich community.

“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.”
Richard Feynman, Letter to Koichi Mano, February 3, 1966

I gave blood this morning, and decided to reward myself with a quick trip through the Charbucks® drive-through. In front of me, perched on his driver’s lap, a long legged jack russell terrier was staring through the open window at the order screen with a huge anticipatory grin. I noticed that he was wearing a harness of some sort. When the speaker crackled with life, to take the driver’s order, the jack russell ducked down and then bodily shot through the driver’s side window at the order screen.

He got about a foot or two out of the car, slowed down in mid air rather dramatically, then his torso stopped and his head and all four feet kept going another six or nine inches. He had a comical laughter in his eyes as he slowly came to the end of this arc, and then rebounded back into the sedan. I think the driver had him on a bungee cord.

No, just kidding. But he was a happy looking dog who didn’t really launch himself out of the window. Cuz a bungee cord would be mean.

Miss K is quietly sitting by the back door, absently twirling her hair with a finger, sucking on a bottle of milk. She’s still, and peaceful. She’s not chasing the cats or heaving her walker toy into my lap, or even dunking her sister’s Barbies™ into the toilet; she’s just quietly gazing through the screen at the unmowed expanse of crabgrass I like to call … the back yard.

She has her quiet moments like this, when I wonder what she’s reflecting upon. Other times, she’s a frantic bundle of freakish energy, our own Hurricane K (Gramma actually slipped and called her Katrina), leaving a swath of destruction in her wake.

But right, now, she’s gazing outside and, now, Perrin has crept up beside her to watch the cats (and make sure they stay out of trouble), and she’s talking to him and patting his head (and still playing with her hair.)

Cool; this site is aimed at dads who are trying to be better fathers to their (particularily) female kids. I wasn’t able to find out if it was religion based, but it looks interesting.

This is the most interesting thing I’ve seen all week. I had heard that a few privately-minded countries had objected to Google Maps because it showed current military bases and other secret information, but this was new. A computer programmer in Italy found a Roman Villa by looking at the satellite maps available on the site. He noticed a variation in the color of the fauna, and traced out some rectangular ruins. Neat stuff!

I’d link to his blog, but it’s in Italian. Go figure.