I happened to come across this article earlier today and I left the window up on my screen all day, thus ensuring that I would note it and also ensuring I would forget how I came across it. In any event, 60 per cent of German men didn't shower today, according to the article. And there is a downright icky number of them not changing their underwear. Just thought people might want to know, in case they were making European travel plans this Summer.

Actually, this reminds me that during the late 80's, there was a similar survey done in Austria concerning teeth brushing. My wife told me about it once. If I recall correctly, some 3 out of 10 Austrians were not going to touch a toothbrush for their entire adult lives. Quick google search turns up nothing on point. I'll have to ask my wife for more details.

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My wife reported to me as follows. She and the children were out for the evening constitutional, while I was preparing dinner, and they ran into our neighbor who works at the school where the girl child is attending camp. Our neighbor told my wife that she was watching the girl child run through the sprinklers at camp yesterday and one of the counselors came up to our neighbor and said, "do you know that girl, she is so smart". I think she's smart, but I'm biased. It was nice of our neighbor to share that with us.

And just to round things out, last night, when she called me upstairs for the "extra hug and a kiss" that has become part of her going to sleep ritual, I simply popped right into bed with her, which caused her to give me a very bemused look, since I very rarely if ever do that when we are trying to get her to go to sleep. So, I'm lying there with her, and she looks at me with those huge blue eyes, and says, softly, "I missed you today". And I melted. I seriously considered not going to work today. Ah well, back to the coal mines.

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Long time readers may recall my post some time ago concerning Zimbabwe and the horrible political and social and economic situation there. I wrote about my disgust with the other African governments and their failure to even attempt to deal with this problem. Well, I came across this today in the NY Times: African Leaders Failing Zimbabwe, Prelate Says. Want to know why he said that?

Mr. Mugabe scored a diplomatic victory last weekend when the 53-nation African Union, meeting in Ethiopia, voted to table a sharply worded critique of Zimbabwe's civil-liberties record prepared by a committee on human rights. The report, which was leaked last week, accused the government of "failure at critical moments to uphold the rule of law" and of tolerating arbitrary arrests and human-rights violations.

Apparently, by the way, this report dates from 2002!

What a disaster.

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I posted a question yesterday: what happened to the moderates? I have been concerned for a long time about the coarsening of political discourse, not to mention simple every day discourse, and as I said in that post, Michele at A Small Victory wrote a great item about this lack of civility.

Well, I think we found the moderates. They were here on my comments board and I'm going to reproduce them for the general readership who doesn't look at the comments (and if that's you, you are missing some very good and thoughtful writing).

Amber writes:

I'm always afraid to attach myself to any single label for fear of putting myself in a box. I have voted both Democrat and Republican. I would call myself a conservative/liberal or liberal/conservative too.

I'm all over the place on the issues. No one party suits me, since I'm strongly for the death penalty and strongly for abortion rights. And I'm that way about all the issues.

I don't like the term "moderate" because I feel it's such a tame word...and I'm *passionate*. That's what I am: a Passionate! *grins*

I wish we didn't have a two-party system, I know that.
Amber | Email | Homepage | 07.07.04 - 2:42 pm | #

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As reported this morning in the Times, a New York appellate court has tossed out the law which permitted slot machines at NY ractracks. If you are curious, the 52 page opinion can be found here. This is a good thing. As the article reports, the Governor planned to use the revenues from these slot machines to make up for the imbalanced school aid provided to the public schools in New York city. Another court found the formula by which school aid was provided to be unconstitutional. So the State needs to find more money.

Let me be unambiguously clear about this, something I normally hesitate to do, I loathe the idea of lotteries and gambling being used to fund any State program or purpose. Such a thing is merely taxation by other means, indirect taxation if you will. Yes, I know that it is the choice of the participant to play and thus be taxed and if I don't play then I escape that tax. Still, that means nothing. Why? Because revenue raised this way is objectionable for at least two reasons. First, the unfair impact on those who pay. Second, I think that this form of indirect taxation defeats accountability by allowing the government to disguise the true costs of services it provides.

Unfair Impact: Who buys lottery tickets, for the most part? I believe I have read that it is the working poor and lower middle class. How do they buy them? With after-tax dollars, of course. So, if you agree that this is an indirect tax, then you will have to agree that those who purchase these tickets, and pay this tax, are doing so with money which represents a greater proportion of their after tax earnings than, say, my after tax earnings. $10 spent on lottery tickets is going to mean more to the person from a lower economic group than it will to someone in a higher economic group. I am certain that this is recognized by the politicians yet they do not care that the group least able to afford to dispose of their income in this fashion is doing so. And the politicians are abetting it. This is unfair. If taxes need to be raised to support a program, then doing it indirectly and on the backs of those least able to pay for it is unfair. And that leads me to point two.

No Accountability: I said above, "if taxes need to be raised to support a program. . ." If you fund a program from lottery or gambling monies, then you effectively remove from the public forum any reason to debate the need for the program or its funding level. Why talk about, after all, if the taxpayer isn't paying for it? I think of it as the governmental equivalent of an off balance sheet vehicle like Enron used. The result is that no one has to talk about it so no one will discuss whether what the government is doing is right. I think that governments abuse power when the possibility of open review is removed. We are supposed to have government in the sunshine and with freedom of access to information. Laws have been passed to that effect. If we as a people permit the government to sweep a program under the rug by financing public programs with tax money raised indirectly from those who can least afford to pay it, then I submit that we have a problem. Also, if there is no one to complain that the money raised is coming out of their pocket, who is going to complain that the money is not being well spent, which is an issue apart from whether the money should be spent. This system changes the oversight mechanisms built into our participatory democracy and I don't like it.

Finally, governments are like crack addicts -- they can't stay away from the cheap money. Once they go to that well, they'll keep going back. And no one will care enough to make sure it's proper. Well, my thanks today go to the Appellate Division, Third Department, of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, even if they did it for a reason other than the ones I've enunciated here.

Here endeth today's rant.

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The NY Times this morning ran a gushing tribute to Paul Rudolph today, one of the great modern architects. The article mentions how he was the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture and how he designed the "heroic" and "magisterial Art and Architecture Building at Yale, which has nine floors and some 30 different levels". I already said gushing, right? What does the article fail to mention? Well, how about the fact that the students hated the building so much that they actually tried to burn it down? That strikes me as a fairly pointed piece of criticism. How about how Rudolph placed the sculpture studios at the top of the 30th level with no elevator access to get sculpture materials, like, say, marble, to the studio. Or finally, how about how the building was covered with this rusticated concrete on which Rudolph left the imprints of the wooden molds which held the concrete while it dried, thus leaving the building with this sort of sinister and unfinished looking air. Actually, I kind of like that treatment, but many don't, and in the hands of an untalented hack it is pretty awful. I suppose that these issues would reduce the impact of the article some.

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What follows is a draft thought I had been kicking around for awhile and never got much further with:

Did he or she disappear? Is the moderate an endangered species? This is a question I have been pondering, off and on, for a long time. I have no answer but I have formed some thoughts I'd like to jot down about political culture and identity.

Identity. First off, I have identified myself before on this blog as a South Park Republican -- someone who combines the belief in the need for "a hard-ass foreign policy", is "extremely skeptical of political correctness”, but also is socially liberal on many issues. That's me. Not a true Republican and not a true Democrat. Somewhere in between. Perhaps a Liberal conservative. Or a conservative Liberal.

* * *

I was going to come back to this and write about the political culture side and expand on the identity section, but Michele at A Small Victory has done so today in a post that is just so good that I urge you to go check it out: A Social Civil War.

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I have not written a lot about the boy child here. He is 16 months old and has the face of an angel. He is exceptionally blond and fair with piercing blue eyes. He looks a lot like my wife's pictures at the same age. In other words, he looks nothing like me and everything like every picture of smiling, happy Norwegian babies you might have ever seen.

In that regard, by the way, I refer you to the beautiful Summer in Norway pictorial collection in Aftenposten, where the only picture of a child is actually a happy child of apparently Asian descent, which is not exactly what I had in mind when I sent you there. No matter, the pictures are still beautiful.

In any event, up until very recently, he has not spoken much beyond Dada, Na-na-na (for banana) and trying to say his sister's name. Now, he has begun to speak. A little, maybe, but still. If you hand him something, he looks at you and says, quite emphatically, "Ta". We are quite certain he is saying "takk", or thank you in Norwegian. He may not say much, but he is endearingly polite.

Also, last night, my wife responded to his cries of distress occasioned by his having jettisoned his blankets from his crib. His new game. However, he becomes completely disconsolate when said blankets are no longer within reach. He loves these blankets, which is nice because my mother knit them for him. My wife came in, picked up the blankets, and asked him to sit down. He looked at her, said "sitte", and sat down.

While I have been eagerly anticipating his powers of speech, my wife points out that the power to talk is the power to talk back. She has a good point, but then, she usually does.

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and took myself off to the NY Public Library to see the exhibit of the Thomas Jefferson handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence in which he underlined the bits taken out by the committee before its adoption by the Continental Congress. I posted about this exhibit before here.

I had a number of different impressions. First, I was surprised how legible his handwriting was. He clearly, at least to my inexpert eye, used a quill pen. Second, his spelling was conventional. He spelled the word course as course, and not "courfe", as the contemporaneous newspaper printings of the Declaration did. Third, the ink was brown and faded but packed an emotional punch. I can't explain it, but I was quite moved and actually blurted out loud, "oh, my", when I read the first sentence. Fourth, the draft penned by TJ actually contained a scathing denunciation of slavery and he blamed the King for importing the institution to the colonies and then for inciting the slaves to take up arms against the colonists. I thought it was interesting enough that I will type it out here from the copy they gave out at the library. It appears in the section of the document listing the colonists grievances against the King:


he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase the liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

If you are in or can get to NY, I highly recommend going to see this.

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"I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights, so it looks like I'm
the only one moving." -- Steven Wright

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I give you today's odd but interesting historical juxtaposition. Today:

in 1854, the first official meeting of the Republican Party took place in Jackson, Mich.

-and-

in 1923, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed.

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I received quite a nice sunburn this weekend. I had my shirt off, outdoors, for the first time in at least a year and I chose to do it while sitting in the kiddy pool with my daughter, without sun screen. Oh, I remembered to put sun screen on the girl child but forgot to protect myself. Result? A predictable bad burn on the shoulders, chest, and upper arms. I have been slathering myself with aloe, spraying myself with dermaplast, and stoically whining about it ever since to whoever would listen to me (that's you at this moment, gentle reader). I sit here now as my chest itches, and my shoulders feel like someone is occasionally sticking a pin in them. You know what, though? It was worth it. I heard from my daughter probably three different times over the weekend how much fun she had when I came in the pool with her. So, I'm going to do it again. Just with sun screen next time.

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Another good reason why you should always be careful with your wallet: you may end up married without knowing it. At first this seemed really odd, but upon reflection it makes a lot of sense. You need a residency permit, you steal the identity of a woman, you marry her, you stay. I wonder how often this happens.

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I came across this little snippet, about how the US time zones came to be created, in the NY Times this morning in an article about timekeeping in Grand Central Station and wanted to share it. I thought it was fascinating and I had never given it any thought before:

Indeed, timekeeping, as it is known today, was essentially invented out of necessity in the late 1800's by a collection of railroads, including the New York Central, a predecessor of Metro-North. Before the railroads, time was a local matter, set in each town according to the sun. Therefore, noon in Cincinnati, for example, would be slightly different from noon in Cleveland. But this was obviously a problem for railroads. Coordination of traffic on the tracks, as well as schedules for picking up passengers, depended on a standardized time system.

"A train could leave Syracuse at 12 o'clock and come into Utica, and it would still be 12 o'clock," said Pierce Haviland, a Metro-North employee who is also a railroad historian. "That wasn't working."

At first, railroad managers set up 100 different railroad time zones, but that proved too complicated. Finally, on Nov. 18, 1883, four standard time zones - Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific - were adopted by the railroads. At noon on that day, the time was transmitted by telegraph from the United States Naval Observatory in Washington to all the railroads in the United States and Canada. Twice a day thereafter, railroad clocks were resynchronized with the Naval Observatory's clock.

However, it was not until 1918, when Congress passed the Standard Time Act, that the railroads' time zones became the standard for everyone in the United States.

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I was thinking, off and on this weekend, about a letter I read in the Westchester section of the Sunday NY Times. A woman wrote in to complain that no one would give up their seat for her on a morning train going into the City when she was rather visibly 9 months pregnant. She closed her letter by asking whether chivalry was dead. Is it? Should it be? Should she have had any expectation that she would have been treated differently because of her sex? My answer is yes, it is dead and no, she should not have any expectation of more favorable treatment because of her sex.

Putting to one side the issue of the pregnancy, because I happen to believe that is not an issue open to discussion. Simply, she should have been given a seat because of her physical condition, just like you give your seat to a person with a cane, for example. That is based on disability. That said, I can recall numerous instances of offering a seat to a pregnant woman on a City bus or subway only to have them decline the offer. And, there is another school of thought that says you do not ask or suggest a woman is pregnant unless you are actually seeing them give birth. As in, what if you're wrong about the pregnancy? But enough, let us return to the chivalry question.

chivalry, at its beginning, was a code of conduct according to which Knights and the nobly born aspired to live their lives. There is plenty of information floating around about it on the internet and some of it might actually be correct. It included within it, the Courtly Love tradition, which had various rules for courtship and marriage and taking lovers. Chivalry has come to mean, I think, a manner of treatment of women by men. Women are exalted by virtue of the fact of their being female. I think that this is meant to memorialize the belief that women were the weaker sex and were to be treated accordingly, better really than the way men treated other men. So, we come back to our question: is it dead?

Yes, I think it is and it ought to be. First, the belief that women are the weaker sex is obviously false. They do not need better treatment out of weakness. Second, I think that the social contract has been redrawn over the last 30-40 years in the US. The playing field is much more level. Yes, I know that there are still glass ceiling issues and pay parity issues, but just the same, I think that women are competing fairly evenly with men now in the workplace, in school, on the athletic fields (at least since Title IX), and every where else. Such competition precludes any claim to chivalrous conduct. I think that it is somewhat a question of having your cake and eating it, too. I think that pregnant women does not deserve a seat on the train because she is a woman. Indeed, if she was not pregnant, she would have no right to complain. Her claim to that seat based on some outdated notion of chivalry rings false.

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As I mentioned below, I was feeling fragile this morning and I even slept in until 7:30, a good 2 hours later than usual for me. I was just finishing toweling off in the shower when I get a very demanding knock on the bathroom door and a little voice sings out cheerfully, "goooood moooorning". So I invite her in and she keeps me company while I shave. We then go to her room to take her out of her pj's so we can go downstairs. I wanted to be quick upstairs because I wanted to fix her breakfast. She asked me to so nicely.

So, we get into her room and it smells funny. Like sun tan lotion. I ask her, why does it smell like sun tan lotion in here? And she tells me. "Oh, I was just putting some on my animals yesterday". Why, I ask. "So they won't get sunburned. The flamingo got some on his toes and the pony got some on his nose and his sides". She was covering the vulnerable spots, I gather. It was very sweet, even if it smelled kind of funny.

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I would also like to thank the nomad(s?) at The Greater Nomadic Counsel for linking to me. Go to their blog if only to view the very cool painting they have chosen as their header. Otherwise, it is a very interesting and literate read.

I would also like to say thank you to Red at Red Said for her kind words regarding my post at the New Blog Showcase. I have not had a lot of time to page through her site but I intend to over the weekend. She is clearly a person of great taste and discernment!

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I was overserved last night. I take no responsibility for any of my actions last night and I blame the bartender and my so-called friends. It wasn't my fault. Ok, maybe a little bit.

We took a friend out for drinks and dinner for her birthday last night. We met for drinks at Aquavit. (I am compelled to share with you this picture of the urinal at Aquavit which I found doing an internet search for the restaurant. I had no idea that restaurant urinals was the subject of such fascination and I post this in order to squick you out, too. Share the joy.) Aquavit makes its own flavored aquavits -- I particularly liked the lemon/mint one and we had a couple of those. We then went next door to a private club and had a little bourbon. Then upstairs for dinner, where we had two excellent bottles of wine. One of the best things about dining at a private club is that the wines are not marked up like they are in a restaurant. We drank, at about 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of a similar bottle in a restaurant:

Volnay 1er Cru 1996, Caillerets Ancienne Cuvée
Carnot
Bouchard Père & Fils

and

Vougeot 1er Cru 1996
Les Cras Domaine Bertagna

They were so tasty. And the second bottle was even better than the first.

Then, home late, up early, and back at work where I feel somewhat less than my usual sparkling self.

Note to self: drink more water before going to bed after nights like last night.

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Sorry so quiet, we had no internet access from the office (from where most of my blogging takes place) until just now. It was giving me itchy fingers, too. The title of this post is, of course, a take on "no woman, no cry", which is the song currently playing in my head this morning.

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I have been linked to by some very smart people and I owe them a thank you note, which they will get, and a link on my page (because they are deserving, not because they linked to me first) which I will do soon. But, before I add them to my list, I want to thank them publicly and call your attention to them (in no particular order) as they are all worth a visit:


Irish Elk is a beautiful looking page with fantastic pictures integrated with smartly written text;

Zya's Ramblings is an interesting page written by a poet/accountant who is a Portuguese/American/Aussie going to University in Australia;

Hannah's Collection is the work of an American IT student living, studying, loving, and growing up in the Netherlands;

Indigo Blues is a page that veers from the comic to the searingly sad as this woman, cloaked in anonymity, writes openly, movingly, and beautifully about her life and struggles and hopes for the future;

Photojournaliste is a blog by a Canadian who works internationally as a photo-journalist.

Thank you all for finding me "link worthy"!

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