Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 643

Arizona shooting recap

Just for the record:

1.  I do not blame Sarah Palin for the attempted assassination in Arizona.

2.  I think that Sarah Palin's gun sight website was incredibly stupid, dangerous and represented an astounding lack of insight and wisdom on her part.

3.  Sarah Palin's decision to remove the website shortly after the shooting demonstrated her agreement with at least parts of my previous statement, but also served as an indication of her unwillingness to stand behind a position that she fervently defended for more than a year.

4.  The removal of her gun sight website also reflected a fundamental lack of understanding about the Internet.  Removing a website from the Internet in no way removes a website from the Internet.  Doing so only implies culpability and brings more attention to it.

5.  I actually support a surprising number of conservative ideals, but it is people like Sarah Palin and idiotic nonsense like this that continue to drive me farther and farther away from the Republican party.

6.  Palin's "blood libel" video was reprehensible.  It is chock full of trite Patriotism and a mish-mash of misplaced religious symbolism while failing to explain why she removed her sniper scope website an hour after the shooting. 

And she has yet to agree to an actual interview from any print or media outlet. 

And she reads her remarks rather poorly at times as well, not seeming to know where to pause.

I know that's nitpicking, but c'mon.   

7.  And for those who are not on Twitter, this tweet has become a "Top Tweet" for what I believe are obvious and incredibly salient reasons:

Old school verbiage

Heather Carreiro wrote a post entitled 20 Obsolete English Words that Should Make a Comeback, and while I don't think that all of them are worthy of my time, a few struck me as amusing and potentially useful enough to try to bring back.   

Here are my top 3:

3. Corrade

Verb trans. – "To scrape together; to gather together from various sources" – I'm sure this wasn't the original meaning of the word, but when I read the definition I immediately thought of copy-pasting. Any English teacher can picture what a corraded assignment looks like.

4. Kench

Verb intr. – "To laugh loudly" – This Middle English word sounds like it would do well in describing one of those times when you inadvertently laugh out loud while reading a text message in class and manage to thoroughly embarrass yourself.

10. Freck

Verb intr. – "To move swiftly or nimbly" – I can think of a lot of ways to use this one, like "I hate it when I'm frecking through the airport and other people are going so slow."

Susan Patricia McKenna: 1950-2007

Today is the four year anniversary of my mother's death.  I wrote a post on the day that she died on a blog that no longer exists. 

Some rotten people actually tried to use the posts about my mother's death against me shortly after her passing, thus confirming their inhumanity and despicable nature.

A story I may share with readers one day. 

But I saved the post from that day, and wanting to preserve it for posterity, as well as spit in the face of those who dared to disparage her name with their cowardly attack (as Mom would have undoubtedly encouraged me to do), I am reposting it on this sad day.

____________________________________________

Mom passed away this morning.

Ironically, I spent last night in ICU with her watching an episode of Little House on the Prairie, a show that we watched together religiously while I was growing up. Mom never regained consciousness after entering the hospital four days ago, so Elysha and I did more watching than she did, but is was still nice.

It brought back a lot of memories. Good ones. And who knows?  Maybe she was listening a bit.  I hope so. 

Mom once worked in that same hospital while I was growing up. She was a pharmacist until the day she slipped a disc in her back while pushing a drug cart. O ne disc led to another and to another until she could no longer sit for prolonged periods of time. Trying to avoid paying her workman's compensation, the hospital put her to work as a security guard for a year, hoping that she'd quit.

Just imagine my mother, whose weight exceeded 100 pounds just once in her life (while pregnant with me), working security.  In the dead of winter, management had her patrolling he grounds outside the building.  She wore socks equipped with batteries in order to stay warm but still could not. 

I hated those people who ran the hospital, even though I has never met them. 

It was the first time I can remember wanting to punch someone in the head and knock their teeth out.  

But mom stuck it out a year and the hospital finally relented, allowing Mom to retire on disability.

But this week she returned to the hospital for one more visit.  She died in the same building where she once cared for and protected patients.

I wish that I could've spoken to Mom just one more time before she died, but just being there by her bedside, letting her know that things would be alright, and telling her how much I appreciated the job she did as my mom might have been good enough.  The last time we spoke was on Christmas Eve, after spending the day with family.

I never suspected that we were saying our final goodbye that day.

I wish I could remember the last words she spoke to me as I kissed her goodbye, but I can't.

I thought we had so much more time together.

One definition too many

I can't bring myself to use the word seminal. 

There are moments when I have wanted to refer to a seminal moment in my life or the seminal idea of a story.

But every time I try to use the word in this way, reflecting the OED's fourth definition of the word (highly original and influencing the development of future events), I get stuck on the first definition of the word:

"pertaining to, containing, or consisting of semen"

And I just can't do it.

How much does Clara love Daddy?

She reappeared with this.

She spent about an hour cursing the sewing machine, and she was significantly less chatty for a couple days last week (almost disappearing entirely for a period of time), but once again my wife has amazed me. 

The photographs don't do it justice.  The larger bag is actually a drawstring backpack, and the smaller piece is a crayon holder.  It has individual pockets for each crayon, and once full, you roll it up, tie it off, and you're ready to go.

All this was made for the birthday boy of one of Elysha's close friends.

My manuscript is seven months old.  Last night I passed 90,000 words.  It has already sold in 7 different countries even though it is not finished.    

I still consider Elysha's creations a more remarkable bit of creation.   

 

Jumper-talker-downer for hire

I considering entering the field of jumper-talker-downer. 

You know, the guys who talk people out of jumping off buildings and bridges. I think I would be pretty good at it. 

I like pressure. I have no qualms about being the determiner of life and death. I have great perspective based upon my personal life experiences. I am quite convincing (one former student recently stated that my ability to get a class to follow my lead is "magical"). I don't mind working odd hours. I don't get cold very easily, so sitting on a rooftop or hanging from a suspension cable in January wouldn't be a problem. I have a powerful voice (no bullhorn needed). I could simultaneously offer my life coaching services to someone clearly in need. I am not afraid of heights. I compartmentalize well (for those less-than-successful days).

Before taking the job, I would have the following questions:

What is the pay like?  Is it an on-call rate, a per-jumper fee, or something else? How is job performance measured?  Is there a rate of success that determines year-end bonuses?  I can't be expected to save everyone.  Right? How much credit will I receive when I save someone, because up to this point, these guys have not been getting enough publicity?  Oh… good idea.  Does the department employ a publicist, and if not, can we look into hiring one?

Other than that, I'm good to go.

Fear not the tree.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, in writing about the Jewish conundrum of how to handle Santa Claus and the Christmas tree with their impressionable children, writes:

"One needn't be virulently anti-Christmas to experience the seasonal anxiety felt by parents who want their children to enjoy the winter holidays while avoiding religious indoctrination."

I find the statement terribly flawed.  Rather than be concerned about "avoiding religious indoctrination", I think Lithwick would have been more more accurate had she written about her desire "to avoid the unraveling of the purposeful religious indoctrination that we have already begun with our children.

Does she really think that Christmas trees and stockings hung by the fireplace are anymore indoctrinating than the average parent, Jewish or otherwise, who imposes his or her religious beliefs on their child's unformed mind?

Lithwich does not want to avoid religious indoctrination.  She wants to avoid the wrong kind of religious indoctrination, which comes down simply to the kind that she does not prefer, which in reality is the kind of indoctrination that her parents' parents' parents' parents did not prefer.  Christmas trees and Santa Claus are not the the determiners of religion, nor will they sway a properly indoctrinated child.  For most people, religion is passed on like a gene, determined long before the current or recent generations were ever born and influenced primarily by geography.

Consider this:  Almost all of the Christians and Jews born in America would be Muslim had they been born into a family residing in Syria.  Almost without exception.

Regardless of one's transcendent belief in Jesus or the words of the Torah, Christians and Jews would be worshiping Mohammad had they been born somewhere else, as much as they may not want to admit it. 

Geography and genetics, for most people, are the primary determiners of religious belief.

Lithwick has little to fear from a fat man in a red suit. 

Fellow Slate contributor Mark Oppenheimer weighed in on the subject by writing:

"I'm not saying that a Christmas tree always represents some effort at assimilation. I am saying that the sooner a Jew learns to think it's terrific that she has her own traditions—even if they are flawed traditions, or aesthetically inferior, or hard to explain, or meaningless, or, like "the Hanukkah Bush," just a weird urban legend—the sooner she can shed the big roller-suitcase of baggage that a lot of Jews carry. That's possible to do with a Christmas tree in the house, but it's surely harder."

Did Oppenheimer really claim that it is hard for a Jew to feel special when his traditions are kind of sucky and pointless, especially while basking in the light of a kick-ass Christmas trees and the thoughts of eight rockin' reindeer dragging a sled full of toys through the stratosphere. 

I think he did.

And it makes me wonder:

If your traditions are "flawed, aesthetically inferior, hard to explain, meaningless, or weird," why not fix them?  Improve them? 

For a people who's worldwide population is close to zero percent (13 million out of a overall population of almost 7 billion), isn't it time to make the religion more inviting to potential converts?

I have been working on a 12-point plan to improve Judaism for a long time.  In light of Litchwick and particularly Oppenheimer's comments, it may be time to debut my list. 

iCarly trumps Robert Frost and Val Kilmer

I am reading Shakespeare's Richard II to my students. 

On Friday we came across the phrase "rue the day" in the text.  I was prepared to tell them all about Frost's poem Dust of Snow:

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

… as well as the excellent "rue the day" reference from the 1985 film Real Genius. 

But when I asked if anyone knew what the phrase "rue the day" might mean, almost every hand in the class went up.

Had they studied Frost in fourth grade?

Did they recently view a Val Kilmer film retrospective at the local college theater?

No.  They had all learned the phrase from something called iCarly, which I initially thought was a videogame.  Apparently an episode of the program featured the phrase rather prominently.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

A land of ice cream and death

Last night I dreamt of a world made entirely of ice cream. 

Nice.  Right?  Not like those struggle-to-the-death dreams that I so frequently have. 

Except, of course, the ice cream was melting.  The world was caving in on itself.  People were dying.  I had to struggle to stay alive amidst torrents of runny, chocolate goo and collapsing vanilla mountains.

Only I could spend my night battling the apocalypse in a dream about ice cream.