Frenzied Daddy

We’re rough on keyboards here. My laptop has been down for a couple of weeks because I spilled coffee on it. Mopped it up quick, but the damage had been done. So I ordered a new one (yay for a hundred dollars) and when we got it, I went to replace it.
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I’ve told you that Spidey is my favorite hero, right? Well, here’s a picture of his “new costume.” And I just want to know … WTH is this? Click on the image in the linked page for a depressing closeup.

My elder daughter, Miss B, turned nine this month. To celebrate the occasion, we took fifteen third-graders ice skating. They were a bundle of energy that I’m still recovering from. Each one of these kids was terrific, awesome. gorgeous, smart and generous.

Watching them skate in circles (and in some cases pull themselves around by the wall), grinning like Jack in the Shining, I can only reflect on one thing; the average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice is about fifteen years. Whomever is placed on the Supreme Court this year, if they’re true to the average, will be sitting on the bench until Miss B is twenty-four and Miss K is seventeen; and their precedences and decisions will have repercussions throughout their life. It scares me that Alito would have control over my daughters’ bodies ( and other rights ) in their blooming adulthood.

This is the judge who said it was ok to strip search a ten year old girl. This is the guy who won’t state his position on RoeV Wade to his confirmation hearings.

Recently, the Bush Administration asked search engines to deliver some of their records; a random sampling of searches, essentially, so they could take a look at these searches and see how much pornography showed up in polls. Under the guise of “protecting our children,” they wanted a random sampling of searches done on the web. Nevermind that a good researcher would find out what sorts of searches kids do, and then do them themselves; the government wanted their work done for them.

The Supreme Court said this was unconstitutional, an invasion of privacy.

Only Google turned down the government. AOL, MSN, Yahoo — they all agreed and handed over their records. Google stood by their belief that the records were private. While I worry about google’s ability to combine and mine your searches, your email, your advertising links you click on, I respect that they stood up to the Justice Department.

But I can’t possibly see Alito standing with Google on this.

I semi-jokingly refer to the last Anchorage neighborhood I inhabited as “the Armpit of Anchorage.” On one hand, it wasn’t terribly bad. As kids, we had pretty free reign of the entire trailer park. One the other hand … it was a trailer park.

The trailer park had a small stream which ran through it. Not quite a river. At the upstream end, there was a telephone pole that was laid across the creek, and some cable or other ran across it. I suppose it wasn’t worth it to put the cable under the creek. The water meandered past a “playground” with a merry go round and a pair of concrete sewer tubes that we would race through, climb on top of, and leap from one to the other when we felt especially daring.

The creek meandered through the trailer park, and on the far end, it bordered a small birch forest and then passed under a busy street. This forest, about the size of a square block, we referred to as the “Forest of 1,000 Bees.” Because with our prepubescent logic, that’s where all the bees were- you could throw a rock into the woods from across the stream, and whack right into a beehive. You’d better be ready to run; because the odds of you outrunning a pack of swarming yellow jackets from the Forest of 1000 Bees were slim to none, mister, slim to none.

One spring, it occurred to us that, obviously there couldn’t be a thousand bees in there or we’d be hearing the buzzing all over the trailer park. So either they were all sitting down and being sneaky like, which they don’t have the brains for, or the woods were, simply, devoid of bees. So we armed ourselves with … ahem, lighters and hair spray cans “just in case” and donned some thick denim jackets, and invaded!

As it turns out, there was a trail right through this forest of 1000 bees. And it came to pass that we spent that summer whooping and hollering as we ran through the birch trees. We found a couple of strategically defensible places, and protected them from invading FBI agents, russians, and the occasional trenchcoated martian. We had places we could sleep, if we really wanted to spend the night out of doors in a trailer park that used to be a swamp.

The following summer, the trees and hills were bulldozed and condos were built. A not-so-memorable ending to a memory.

Here’s to the mythology of youth.

If you’re keeping score, the superfort is a totally awesome present for a nine year old who spend most of her seventh and eighth year destroying the house and salvaging sheets, blankets, furniture and cushions for her very own fort. It’s even pretty cool for a 36 year old.

This present was out of its box and wrapper in less time than it takes to say “Slaves! Make me a pyramid!” There was a veritable flurry of creation as one construct after another appeared. And even so, as Miss B built, her younger sister (Toddler K) would laugh with glee at this new house within a house. In fact, I put six of the flexible parts together into a tetrahedron (that’s 1d4 for those of you only slightly less geeky than me), set it on the floor, and Toddler K ran to it and leaped into it so that she could experience the power of the pyramid for herself.

It’s significant that Playfair toys, Amazon.com and Walmart.com are each out of this thing the weeks after Christmas.