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.)