Pledge of Allegiance, revised (meme?)

While driving my daughter to school this morning, I did a quick rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the republic
of which this flag is a symbol,
united by common principles,
dedicated to providing liberty and justice for all.

Other rewrites welcome....

This, I like

Saw a billboard (I think -- could have been a poster, it was a couple of days ago) putting a nice twist on some classic American language. If I recall this much correctly, it was advertising the Marine Corp.

"Life, Liberty -- and the Pursuit of Those Who Endanger Either"

Right on, as my brother would have said (about other things).

dog-walking haiku

Last night, I came up with this -- well, something close to it -- while walking the dog:

Because of the dog
I walk outside every night.
Moonlight -- a dog's gift.

That message ain't private

So Nancy Pelosi is pleased to have sent a strong message to Iraq. I guess nobody else would be so rude as to listen. Good thing, since otherwise, our enemies in Iraq and in the region would be hearing something like: "Hang in there! Just keep things messy for a while longer, and the Americans will bug out, leaving you to shoot innocents in the head or blow them to bloody scraps with far less hindrance. May the best future tyrannical enemy of America win!"

How loud can dogs...

...fart? I was just wondering. Our mutt can certainly release a stink bomb, but she doesn't make much noise. Whereas I have startled her a bit on occasion. Do we have an unusually discreet dog? If this is a basic species difference, what is the evolutionary basis for it?

I have a partial draft of a more literary post, but I'm too sleepy for anything that requires real thought.

A less unhelpful way to oppose the surge

I assume any readers I have are aware that Congress has been debating nonbinding resolutions opposing the troop surge in Iraq. ("Resolution" is an odd term for a way of expressing a lack of resolution. But I digress.) I take a dim view of this exercise. For largely domestic political reasons, the Congressfolk are strongly reinforcing the view, so prevalent before 9/11 and partly contributing to it, that the U.S. is a paper tiger.

However, there is a way that Congress and commentators could express skepticism about, and outright oppose, the "surge" without doing such damage. They could simply point out that Iraq is only one front in the larger war against resurgent Islamism, and demand that we move on to other targets. Point out that the situation in Iraq is threatening to us mainly insofar as it empowers or undermines other countries in the region, and argue for a focus on those countries instead. "On to Iran!" "On to Syria!" No paper tigerdom there.

Unrelated note: I gather this will be my last opportunity to post before attempting the switch to New Blogger. If I never post again, please assume it's due to technical inability rather than the also-plausible mental lethargy.

Vietnam

I grew up liberal in the 60's, which meant I grew up antiwar. The war was Vietnam. I marched with my parents in the streets of San Francisco, an event I remember as exhilarating rather than solemn. All my life, I've believed without questioning -- in that learned-it-in-church way -- that everything about our involvement in Vietnam was 100% wrong.

As we on the home front keep fighting about the Iraq war, it's been quite disconcerting to find myself wondering whether my views on Vietnam have been oversimplified, or worse. I doubt I'll come around to thinking it was an appropriate war to fight with draftees. But if we'd had an all-volunteer military. . . well, I won't list all the questions I'm finally asking, because they're pretty easy to guess.

One thing I don't know is whether the horrors of post-war Cambodia followed more from the war itself (that is, the American phase of a longer war), or from our manner of disengaging, or both equally, or neither.

Movie day

We recently signed up for Blockbuster Online, similar to Netflix. I think we'll be watching more movies as a family now. On Sunday we watched Art School Confidential, which my artist daughter (age 15) wanted to see. Younger Daughter still wanted to see a movie in a theater, so later the same day, the two of us went to We Are Marshall.

Neither is Art for the Ages, and each is predictable in its own way. I preferred We Are Marshall. Though it's based on real events, there are still stock characters -- but most of them are well acted and some well written. The movie tries to do justice to, and quite obviously believes in, such qualities as courage, determination, perseverance, and generosity. Art School Confidential wouldn't dream of messing with such stuff. There is nothing whatever redeeming about either the school, or the artist's life to which its pupils aspire. It's sophomorically cynical. Emotionally and philosophically, it's a one-note song.

Cloning isn't Enough

My husband of the ever-active intellect (aka Hoosier Gadfly) pointed out something that was obvious once he came up with it -- but I've never heard it discussed before. If you want to make an exact genetic replica of someone, start with the same biochemical building blocks that that person started with, it isn't enough just to clone 'em. You need identical mitochondrial DNA. He suggested inserting the regular (I forget what to call it) DNA in an egg from the person's mother's female line.

That could make it more difficult to clone people who've been gone a while, even if their DNA is somehow preserved. I guess one has to plan ahead and preserve an appropriate egg as well. . . .

stories, books, songs that helped shape me/you/anyone

Here's a meme, if anyone wants it: What stories, books, or songs had such an influence on you that they helped form who you are?

One story that made such a difference for me: well, I can't remember the title or author. Great. I'll update if I figure out either. The story was science fiction. The main character was a man who was mildly obsessed with the notion of being able to live in one's ideal world. He'd seen an ad claiming that such a process existed. He kept thinking about checking it out -- but the wife would give him a chore, or the boy had a ball game, or -- and so on.

The story ends when he wakes up -- from that life -- and is asked if his time in his ideal world was satisfactory. He answers that it was, very -- and asks to be notified if it becomes possible to make the transfer permanent. Then he hands over his payment -- a salami and some wire, I think -- and goes out to pick his way through the post-apocalyptic rubblescape to his bit of shelter, hoping to get there before dark.

The idea that ordinary life is good enough to be someone's dreamt-of ideal has never left me. I was quite tickled when a fairly recent country song -- "Another Day in Paradise" -- took up the same theme. (If an annoying pop-up ad with audio pops up, my apologies -- it did once,but not the second time I tried the link.)

Is God Messing with my Ipod?

I got my first Ipod (Nano, 2nd generation) for Christmas -- well, for some unidentified winter holiday (my folks didn't specify) -- and I'm a little weirded out right now.

(Sorry, somewhat lengthy) background: I'm a Jewish agnostic. I have a certain emotional tug toward belief in some sort of Involved and Caring Presence. I see no compelling intellectual justification for believing in the tenets of any religion I know of (despite the smooth and occasionally tricky arguments of C.S. Lewis).

One reason I'm not an atheist is my awareness of the dictum that you can't be angry at God without in some way believing in him. My parents are, by some definitions, Holocaust survivors (they fled just barely in time, and most of their extended families didn't make it). From the holocaust to tsunamis to horrendous diseases, I have a hard time believing in a God who is both good and anywhere remotely close to omnipotent. My own life, while not trouble-free, has been a very good one so far, and I sometimes feel, in relation to any God there might be, the way the favorite niece or granddaughter of Josef Stalin might feel. Grandpa Joe has always been loving and generous with me -- in between starving millions of peasants to death and so forth. How should I feel about Grandpa? How is it right to feel?

I must acknowledge the argument (was it Lewis who made it, or Jonathan Kellerman in Conversations with Rabbi Small?) that free will allows people to choose to do evil, and evil hurts the innocent -- that's what makes it evil. One can certainly find enough free-will choices behind the Holocaust, and various individual choices made the havoc wreaked by the 2005 tsunami worse, etc., etc. . . . I'm still not entirely won over.

So, finally, to the Ipod, which I'm playing mainly in my car (with a neat gizmo that uses the cassette tape player). I'm still learning how to use it. I accidentally turned off the volume during Tom Paxton's "Home to Me", and missed a few bars. I felt briefly wistful about it. Then I left the car and turned off the Ipod while Simon and Garfunkel's "Benedictus" was playing, and somehow messed things up so that when I got back to the car, the shuffle started over with something else. I was thinking about going home and playing "Benedictus" on the computer when the current song ended and up popped -- "Benedictus". Oy. Coincidence, or a tap on the shoulder?

A song or two later, along came -- "Home to Me". Alright, already! And the next song -- from Handel's Messiah, "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth." ALRIGHT, I GET IT!! Although, of course, I still don't know whether I do.

I have to admit that along with fear of being irrational, there is the fear of the implications of belief. . . .

The next song was Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay" -- which could be interpreted theologically, I suppose, but I don't hafta.

Note to Elder Daughter

To my teenage daughter:

On those occasions when I kick myself in the butt hard enough to make myself vacuum, it would be helpful if I could actually gain access to some appreciable portion of your floor, without needing to move papers and clothes about (possibly, in the process, noticing something you'd prefer to keep private).

(No, I didn't find anything interesting -- this time....)

Puppy and Puppy

When my younger daughter was about 9 months old, and going through the trauma of being required to sleep through the night, she attached herself to a stuffed dog. With our usual minimalist approach to naming things, this toy was named "Puppy". We have since acquired a backup called "Puppy's Sister", but Puppy reigns supreme to this day. Puppy is naturally somewhat threadbare, and stuffing-bare, and generally worn -- but is still recognizable and basically whole.

Our real live dog is now well past one year old, but we still tend to call her "the puppy" and to address her as "Puppy". She used to sleep in her crate in the guest room, but when we actually had guests coming for a change, we put her in my daughter's room, where she sleeps on the bed. The other morning, when I came in to wake girl and dog, Puppy was curled up next to Puppy. They looked very sweet together.

Our assignment from God?

My husband, the Hoosier Gadfly, has an interesting take on the question of life after death. He suggested the other day that if there is a God who in some manner created homo sapiens sapiens, he might be expecting us to figure out how to become immortal. He/She/It got us started -- the rest is our job. An exercise for the student, as it were.

We might, for example, figure out feasible procedures for the electronic storage of personality and memory, in programs able to interact with each other, with the outside world, and with other data storage banks. You can see this idea explored in depth in Frederick Pohl's Heechee Rendezvous and The Annals of the Heechee.

I thought my husband should blog about this, but he hasn't been blogging much these days. He has an excuse at the moment -- the all-too-common cold.

Morning conversation

On weekday mornings, I get up just after my 15-year-old daughter, mainly to make sure she makes it out the door on time. She has to be at the bus stop down the street by around 7:05 a.m. We often have a few minutes to chat while she drinks tea, though she is not always awake enough to talk.

One morning recently, we had an exchange something like this (I'm K, daughter is L):

(L) It was pretty spooky waiting for the bus yesterday. I thought there was a swirling vortex of death behind the trees. There was a lot of movement.

(K) It was probably a deer.

(L) Would a deer make loud moaning and hissing noises?

(pause)

(K, brightly) It might if it was caught in a swirling vortex of death....

Almost healthy, and well fed

The universe is being kind to me for a bit. It's unseasonably temperate and pleasant this week, and I can sleep later on the holiday weekend, so the day is not so cold when I first take the dog out. I suspect that's why this is the first day in some weeks that I've hardly coughed at all. (Little cough.)

We had Thanksgiving at a restaurant with a buffet -- hence no leftovers from the holiday meal itself. I took several steps to avoid feeling deprived: I had turkey and dressing twice at a local cafeteria earlier this week, and I made turkey (a breast and four drumsticks in the crock pot) on Wednesday and yam casserole and stuffing today. (Well, Alissa did at least half the work on the yam casserole, though she has no interest in eating it.) Tomorrow we make pumpkin pie. So there will be lots and lots of leftovers.

Only wrinkle was, after our restaurant feast, I had very little interest in leftovers, and not much in food. I resolved to clean out the freezer and make room for some turkey, yam casserole and stuffing.... However, it's been a few hours, and I can actually contemplate eating tomorrow, and even eating leftovers.

Chicken Soup

I have been sick. Quite. If it wasn't the flu, it was close enough. The up side was that my family was driven to be helpful in unaccustomed ways. My husband, who has not willingly relinquished the era when people let their dogs roam freely, finally took the dog out for walks on a leash.

My mother of course prescribed chicken soup. We had some packaged chicken noodle soup, but the instructions looked too challenging (in that standing, reading, and keeping track of anything were all beyond me at that point). I mentioned this fact to my husband. Shortly thereafter, my 10-year-old stood before me asking me how to make chicken soup. Turned out my husband had presented the girls with a choice: either walk the dog in the rain, or make Mom some chicken soup. I told my daughter that she'd need to figure it out with her big sister's help. Paul took the dog out; I went to take a shower, while sounds reminiscent of a Three Stooges routine floated after me....

Dog, husband, kitchen, and girls all survived (as did I), and the soup was the best thing I'd eaten in days. I ate almost all of it. (The dog got the rest.)

one of my creative daughters

I've thought of nothing to write for ages, but at least I have creative daughters. The younger one had pancakes at our usual Sunday morning restaurant, and took most of them home. On the takehome box, she wrote many rapturous slogans about waffles and how wonderful they were (including the claim "Chickens eat waffles!"). Then, in teeny-tiny print in a corner, she wrote, "This container does not contain waffles.". . .

In other news, Mom likes the dog

I never had a pet as a kid. I wanted a dog, but my mother -- raised in rural Poland -- saw dogs as farm animals, and we didn't have a farm. In our overlapping lives up until now, I only knew her to like one dog -- a beautiful Samoyed named Lapa, belonging to a family friend.

Well, my folks visited us for the first time since we became a family-with-dog. Davida is shy -- loudly shy -- of strangers. She barked at my folks for about a day. Then she settled down, except when she'd just woken up or they turned up in pajamas, and then she'd bark again.

A couple of days before they left, my mother announced that she would miss the dog! And when Davida would beg for food, my mother would tell her, "I like you, but no."...

Amazing! (Although Davida is a pretty appealing animal, I must say.)

MLF Lullaby, redux

In the short term at least, it sounds like good news that Japan may rearm itself in response to North Korea's nuclear saber-rattling. But I keep remembering Tom Lehrer's classic "MLF Lullaby". The MLF, or multilateral force, was a US proposal during the Cold War. Submarines and warships armed with nuclear missiles would be manned by international NATO crews -- including Germans. Quoth Lehrer:

Sleep, baby, sleep, in peace may you slumber
No danger lurks, your sleep to encumber
We've got the missiles, peace to determine
And one of the fingers on the button will be German....

Once all the Germans were warlike and mean
But that couldn't happen again
We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen
And they've hardly bothered us since then....

(Follow the link for the full lyric.)