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The Upbringing I’m Not Regretting

April 7, 2023

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), nature, Oregon, politics, Recreation, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), travel, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Upbringing I’m Not Regretting

Department Of In Praise Of Religion

Yeah, I know – from moiself ?

 

It’s not what it sounds like, ma’am.

Confession: this post isn’t really about praising religion.  As we approach the weekend of the most holy Christian festival (in which, as with most Christian holidays, the ancient rites and myths of paganism and other spiritualities were incorporated into the Christian myths) moiself  thought it would be appropriate to write a wee bit about how I am, in some ways, grateful for the religious upbringing I had.

 

 

* I am grateful to have been raised in a moderate Christian family, whose parents were members of a moderate Christian church. And by my moderate I mean they were a members of a mainstream denomination (Lutheran), and not fanatical, tongue-speaking Holy Rollers.  My church experiences allowed me an education into the dominant religious thinking of our country, of that time. Translation: I saw how the sausage was made, so to speak, which is why I became a vegan religion-free.

 

 

As soon as I was able to formulate such ideas to moi’s younger self,  I was able to understand religious traditions (all of ‘em, not just my family’s own) for what they were: failed hypotheses originating from primitive/pre-scientific peoples who were trying to understand/explain their world.  Although I had that understanding as far back as I can remember, like most atheists-skeptics-freethinkers in this culture, I did not “come out” until much, much later, when it was safe (well, safer) to do so: as in, when there was a critical mass of Freethinkers and their allies to provide a buffering from the, “You can only be good with (a) god/nonbelievers are going to hell, etc.” attitudes which religions are highly effective at promoting.

 

 

* Not only did my religious upbringing provide me with a good cultural education, I appreciate that it allowed me to experience and observe how nice, well-intentioned, and otherwise seemingly reasonable people can accept the unreasonable-ness of religion for a variety of reasons.  I learned that people can note the logical flaws, improprieties and downright batshit crazy inanities of beliefs and practices of *other* religions, while *not* applying the same analytical skills to what they have been taught (i.e., they critique Judaism and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, et al on the respective scriptures, principles, teachings and merits of those religions, but accept the claims of Christianity on “faith.”).

* My religious upbringing allowed me to see firsthand the danger of the complacency of accustomization, which the adult moiself  eventually formulated into this truism: 

The ridiculous is no longer ridiculous when it is the familiar.

Favorite example:  Decades ago I heard two (white, Christian) women talking about a new (to them) religious festival, which they’d read about in a newspaper article about local Hindus  [1]   celebrating the Hindu Festival of Holi.  Among other activities, Holi celebrations involve adherents dancing in the streets and throwing colored dye and/or powdered paints on each other.  One of the women offered a weak defense of the color-flinging (“Well…maybe…it’s kinda like dying Easter eggs?”),  but both agreed that Holi  seemed…ahem…rather silly, not to mention primitive and nonsensical for a religious rite.

 

 

Their comments indicated that they were totally oblivious of how downright bizarre and even grotesque their own Christian ritual of symbolic (or in the case of the Catholic flavor of Christianity, literal   [2] ) cannibalism, celebrated in the Christian rite of communion, can seem to people of other religious faiths.

 

 

 

* My religious upbringing was an educational experience I tried, in part, to impart to my own children…which is why MH and I joined a Christian church (the most liberal denomination we could find – the United Church of Christ, aka The UCC).  We remained active members for years, until MH and I were honest with ourselves about not being able “…to do this anymore.”   [3]   This coincided with our children (son K and daughter Belle) being old enough and comfortable enough – despite liking both their church friends and many of the church’s social activities – to send the same honesty *our* way:

“Why do we go to church when I don’t – and it’s obvious that *you* don’t – believe any of that stuff (i.e., Christian theology)?”

Footnote which deserves more than a footnote:  [4]   Looking back, K and Belle were both open about their views long before MH and I were.  It seemed to me that their school peers talked about religion – read: regurgitated what they were taught in their parents’ churches – much more frequently than I could remember my peers doing when I was in grade school.   [5]    And while my offspring never initiated such conversations (they weren’t “afraid” of the subject; they simply had little-to-no interest in it) they would answer honestly any questions posed to them.  Perhaps because he was older,   [6]  K was subjected to this more than his sister, and was subjected to denigrating comments from certain classmates who were obviously being raised by very conservative religious, creationist-leaning parents.

 

If only the Jesus kids listened….

 

Although I was both happy with (and relieved by) my children’s inclination toward freethought, I wanted to be sure they understood that they must not be like their peers who criticized them –  I wanted K and Belle to own their own viewpoints, and not just hold the same opinions as MH and I did, without considering the issues for themselves.  When, for example, K shared a story about an outrageous and/or inane or just plain ignorant religious statement a kid had made, I would defend the kid (“He probably heard that at home/in church”), then question K further, trying to get him (and Belle) to practice the art of understanding a different POV:

“Why do you think someone would ____ (say/believe/think that)?

Can you think of any reasons why someone might ____ (say/believe/think that)?”

I did this consistently, until one day, K replied, with an insight (and sigh of resignation) beyond his years:

“The thing is, Mom, you know that *their* families are not doing the same.”  [7]

When classmates made anti-science/pro-religion comments, K would respond with his own opinions….which led to him receiving the “godless atheist” label.  I was proud of the way he handled himself, even as my heart cringed to see him mistreated by ignorant and mean-spirited Jesus bullies.  What was worse, IMO, were the friends who didn’t join in the abuse but who also didn’t stand up for him (some of whom, I eventually surmised, felt the same way as K but didn’t want to become targets themselves, and thus stayed silent).  

 

Belle had less school drama re her (lack of) religious beliefs.  And there were two major incidents which made me realize that she was fully capable of standing up for herself in that regard.   The first involved the last year Belle went to summer camp.

Both of our kids attended several seasons of the UCC’s summer church camp. Camp Adams is located in the temperate rainforest of Molalla (Oregon), with lots of fields and trails and creeks and a swimming hole – an ideal camp locale.  For the younger ages, Camp Adams was more camp than church.  For the older kids, starting around grade 5, the counselors and camp staff introduced more “churchy” things, including basic Christian theology (as seen through a liberal UCC lens).  This gradual morphing from all-camp-fun  to camp-fun-plus-Jesus-is-the-reason-we’re-here  is a typical progression, as I remember from my own years of church summer camps.   [8]

So: For several years in a row Belle had enjoyed going to summer camp – she even claimed to LOVE the camp’s food.  But Camp Adam’s mashed potatoes weren’t enough, the last year she went to camp.

 

 

A preview of coming attractions for that last-year-of-camp: when MH filled out Belle’s camp registration form, after the requests for standard information about family, emergency contacts, medical concerns, food allergies, etc. there was an open-ended question asking parents to list anything they thought “ …the camp counselors and staff should know about your child.”  MH wrote, “Belle will probably have little interest in the churchy or theological (religious) aspects of camp.  And that is fine.”

Both MH and I drove Belle to camp; I picked her up at the end of the camp week.  When I asked her how this year’s camp was she described a couple of amusing pranks the campers and counselors played on one another, then said that the rest of it was not the same fun as it used to be, and she wasn’t going back next year.   When I asked her to elaborate, she told me the following story:

Unlike in previous years, the camp had fireside “churchy” services every evening, which Belle found irritatingly pointless.  One day near the end of the camp week, the camp’s chaplain asked to meet with Belle privately.  He told her she wasn’t in trouble; rather, he was concerned for her: the camp’s counselors had noticed Belle sitting through those services making little attempt to disguise her disinterest.   [9]  The chaplain flipped through the pages of a bible on his desk, reading aloud several scripture passages he’d marked, passages which told of the Christian god’s love for his people and the importance of loving that god in return.  He then asked Belle what she thought about them.

 

 

I was surprised to hear this – throwing bible verses at a nine-year-old was not something I expected from a UCC chaplain (but I said nothing, and let Belle continue her story).  And Belle simply but firmly disagreed with him. She told him (in her 9-year-old vocabulary) that she did not find those verses – or anything in his bible – profound or relevant to her in anyway.  Despite being interested in all kinds of mythologies, she did not believe the stories about the Christian god were any different or factual than those of the Roman, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, and other deities she was reading about.

“Good for you!” I crowed, as I concentrated on *not* driving off the road (I was dancing in the driver’s seat with delight).  What an intimidating position to be in – for anyone, let alone a child – and she was able to stand up for herself.

 

So where do kids get such ideas?

 

The second incident occurred around the same season, when MH’s parents came to Oregon for their annual summer visit.  MH and his father were out running errands; I was also out, driving MH’s mother and Belle…somewhere.  Belle was in the front passenger’s seat; for reasons I cannot recall her grandma had insisted on sitting in the back seat, and then for reasons I really cannot fathom but remember as being totally out of context, Belle’s grandmother began talking to Belle about “god things.”  I gritted my teeth but said nothing – my MIL was talking to Belle, not me.  And Belle handled it with steely grace.

“I don’t believe in a god,” Belle calmy stated.

“You don’t believe in God?!?”  Belle’s grandmother spoke with shock and dismay, and if Belle had just said that she liked stomping on baby hamsters. “I feel sorry for you.”

“Well, I feel sorry for *you,*” Belle replied.

Once again, I thought my seatbelt would burst with pride.  That’s a difficult thing for a child, to stand their ground with a beloved relative who is criticizing and/or disapproving of you.

 

 

It was a long time ago and I’m unsure of the exact timeline, but at some point I thought, my work here is almost done, and I stopped attending our church.   [10]

I had wanted K and Belle to have a religious literacy, because at that time, religious thought seemed to rule the world (or at least the US of A).

 

 

I wanted them to be familiar with the dominant religion of our culture, which had figured strongly in both of their parents’ backgrounds, so that they would know what it was that they were “rejecting” (to use their grandmother’s language), and also so that they might be inoculated against religious proselytizing.  [11]   But, I wanted them to be exposed to all of this via a denomination/church where they would *not* be subjected to abhorrent doctrines which taught that, no matter what kind of life they’d led, post-death they would be sorted into either a rewarding afterlife or one where they are subjected to anguish and torment, depending on whether or not they had subscribed to certain theological abstractions.

 

 

(Excerpts from Tim Callahan’s review of Dinesh D’Soua’s frothy book of apologetics What’s so great about Christianity):

“…(religious moderates) claim that fanatics represent nothing more than a lunatic fringe.  However, we nonbelievers repeatedly encounter…egregious behavior among the faithful.  Often, those claiming to be among the Christian ‘saved’ are gratuitously rude and loutish.  Sometimes it’s only their casual arrogance that offends.  Or perhaps it’s the cosmic death threat.  D’Souza writes (p. xi)

‘Death forces upon you a choice that you cannot escape.
You must choose god or reject him, because when you die all abstentions are counted as ‘no’ votes.’…

Implicit in this statement is the threat of eternal damnation, not based on whether or not you have lived a good life, but rather whether or not you have adhered to what my wife refers to as the ‘loyalty oath.’  According to the ethics and ideology of the ‘loyalty oath’ we’re all such wretches (as in the hymn Amazing Grace) that no amount of decency in how we live can make up for our unbelief.  Conversely, any degree of depravity seems acceptable, so long as you’ve confessed your sinful nature and continue to affirm your belief in the (specifically) Christian god.  It is surprising that we take offense at this?”

 

 

And so on this weekend Christians call Easter (even though most Christians have no idea why, and the word is not in their scriptures),  I am celebrating the spring equinox, and reflecting on the ideas of renewal, and on the good fortune I had as a child and the even better fortune I chose to make for myself (and, I hope, model for my offspring) as an adult.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [12]

 

 

*   *   *

May you reflect on an aspect of your childhood which was enlightening in ways you did not fully understand as a child;
May you detect the fine lines between the ridiculous and the familiar;
May you find an excuse to celebrate…something…which involves throwing colored paint on your fellow celebrants;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Several local high-tech companies employ a substantial amount of East Asian engineers, who brought their cultural and religious traditions with them and were beginning to be more “open” about their festivals and beliefs.

[2]  “Transubstantiation – the idea that during Mass, the bread and wine used for Communion become the body and blood of Jesus Christ – is central to the Catholic faith.” (Pew Research Center)

[3] As in, the intellectual dishonesty finally got to us, despite our wish to support a progressive, open & affirming congregation.

[4] Which is why it is there, and not here.

[5] Which was a large part of my inspiration for writing my juvenile novel, The Mighty Quinn.

[6] Belle is three years younger than K, and from what I heard her classmates didn’t talk religion as much as the older kids did.

[7] As in, those kids were not being encouraged at home to understand K’s POV – they were just being told that peop0le like K were wrong and/or going to hell.

[8] and is why K opted out of camp several years before Belle

[9] And apparently ratted her out to the chaplain.

[10] It took MH a bit longer to feel comfortable with being open about his beliefs; he kept attending services for a few weeks after the kids and I stopped going (I told the kids it was totally up to them if they wanted to go to church or not – even if MH and I were no longer attending, we would take them to church – any church – if they wanted to go).

[11] In my experience, some of the easiest converts, whether to mainstream denominations or cults (and what are cults, really, except for religions with less money and PR  than the mainstream denominations?), are people who’ve had no religious background at all and are naïve prey for slick proselytizing.

[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Self I’m Not Controlling

March 24, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, Recreation, science, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Department Of Listen To This, For Something Insightful To Consider
Chapter 347 In A Never-Ending Series

What could be more appropriate for Spring, the season of growth, renewal and new beginnings, than to consider what we think about, and how we pursue, happiness and contentment?

(intro to) Hidden Brain Podcast:  Happiness 2.0: The Path To Contentment.

“The conventional way most of us go about accomplishing anything, is to work hard at it.  When it comes to happiness, many of us say, ‘If this is something I really want, I need to go out and get it.’

This might be especially true in the United States, where the Declaration of Independence celebrates the ‘pursuit of happiness.’  The problem is, pursuing happiness can have the paradoxical effect of chasing happiness away.  Trying to elude unhappiness can be similarly counterproductive.

(in this episode we) kick off a month-long series we’re calling Happiness 2.0. We talk with psychologist Iris Mauss, who explains why happiness can seem more elusive the harder we chase it, and what we can do instead to build a lasting sense of contentment.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Commander In Chief

What would moiself  do without podcasts?   [1]

Can’t remember where I heard this (a podcast, most likely), so moiself  apologizes for the lack of attribution….

Research into human nature  (aka the full employment strategy for psychologiss) has led to the tactic of *reframing* negative or tricky situations, which can be an effective solution to understanding and solving them.  For example, take the words self-control and self-command.

 

 

Talking about “self-control” seems to have fallen out of behavioral science vogue. What is become more popular is attributing bad habits and harmful behavior patterns to a combination of genetics, environment, etc. Certainly, these are all factors for any situation, positive or negative.  But if you have a problem with the concept of self-control (or even with the term itself), try reframing it to this: self-command.

But first, we at self-command central  [2]  need to define a term that is used in subsequent paragraphs:  Dead Food.

 

Oh, do you really?

 

 

“ ‘Dead food’ is the newest title given to food that has had the life packaged, preserved, or cooked out of it, to the point where it has become sadly void of virtually all nutritional value. Dead food refers to processed food or food without nutrients. It is called dead because it has been refined to a point that it is bereft of minerals, vitamins, and fibers.

These types of ‘foods’ are not foods!!!  Rather they are a series of synthetically derived ingredients that are mixed together into something that tastes OK, has a long shelf life and actually does more harm than good to our health. In recent times these health depriving ‘foods’ have become quite popular and often a staple in the Standard Western Diet. As such, we have seen an incredible rise in modern diseases like diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, infertility, cancer and more….

 Live foods are foods that are consumed fresh, raw and/or in a condition as close as possible to their original, vibrant, living state. The basic idea behind all live foods is retaining the very best that natural foods have to offer, including live enzymes, antioxidants and other nutrients.
(dead food v. alive food, deepH.com )

 

Yep, I’m out to ruin Girl Scout cookies for you.

 

“There are numerous ways to classify food—low fat, high sodium, low fiber, high sugar, clean, gluten free, vegetarian, lactose free, to name a few. But what if you were told the path to good health was to eat only ‘alive’ food and avoid ‘dead’ food?

So, what exactly is a ‘dead’ food? If it can sit on your counter for days or weeks and not go bad, then it’s a dead food. These foods are refined, highly processed, often synthetic and have little-to-no nutritional value. Think about foods like cheese-flavored crackers, meal replacement bars, fruit snacks and flavored beverages. Chemicals? Check. Artificial colors and flavors? Check. Ingredients on the label that you can’t pronounce? Check.

Unfortunately, these processed, chemical-rich foods are pervasive in the American diet. We want fast, convenient and tasty food and there’s plenty on the supermarket shelves that fit the bill.”
( Alive food v. Dead food, ACE certification )

*Most of us know about (or are at least familiar with the concept of ) the nutritional ideal of the “perfect plate,” which consists of 50 % veggies and fruit, 25 % whole grains, and 25 % a lean/high fiber protein source.  [3]

* Most of us know, or at least have heard, that we should not drink our calories, and that sugar-laden soft drinks, milk shakes and sports drinks – even allegedly healthy smoothies – are awash in calories but don’t make you feel full, and that diet sodas and artificially sweetened beverages are no better than their full sugar counterparts and in fact are also linked to increased food cravings for high calorie foods and Type II diabetes    [4]….

* Most of us know, or at least have heard, that (as per the AARP’s phrasing) “ Your sainted mother  [5]  was wrong — it’s bad to clean your plate. The iron rule: Exercise more; eat less….”

 

Damn right I’m gonna eat more than one slice at the office potluck because I * deserve* it, and besides, my co-workers are all jerks….

 

*   *   *

 

We don’t necessarily let our meals be dominated by simple carbs (bread, white rice, white pasta, sugar, chips) and soft drinks, and all the synthetic snack foods, cereals, and other dead foods, because we’re lazy or incompetent or greedy.    [6]

But it’s likely we’ve  stopped commanding you own lives. Who is in charge?

Advertisers for the industrial/fast/dead food industries are trying to get us to eat when we’re not hungry, and to think that we’re hungry 24/7.  The entertainment industry wants us to park your badonkadonks on the sofa from dinner time to bedtime, stream our brains out and then brag about it later.  Remember when the word “binge” did not have positive connotations (“We ordered in and binged all episodes of ‘Housewives of Chernobyl’ last night…”)?

Self-command.  Who is calling the shots in your life, and what are the areas in your life  where the commander is anyone, anything, but yourself?

 

*   *   *

Department Of Back to Happiness and Contentment:
In Praise Of Simple Pleasures

There is simple yet insightful essay (recently referred to by  The Washington Post Columnist Carolyn Hax) that, although written some 18 years ago, addresses some of what we now might call gratitude awareness and mindfulness before those concepts got into the mainstream.

When I read the essay I was reminded of a phone call in January with daughter Belle.  After catching up with her goings-on, Belle asked MH and I about what we were doing, and I couldn’t really think of much to say, other than something like it was just another “uneventful normal day.”

Many “normal days” in a row, are, as the essay’s author points out, the bulk of days for most people.  Thus, since “most of life *is* normal days, to be in love with them is to be in love with life.”

To be in love with normal days is to be in love with life.

 

 

However much we await the arrival of fantastic things, or dread the tragedies and anticipate their passing…it all does pass, or at least change.  Meanwhile…

“How many of us pass our lives in anticipation? Of the larger homes, smaller bodies and fattened bank accounts of our dreams; of the losses and disasters of our nightmares? We’re so focused on what we pray will happen or on what we hope never will happen that we’re blind to what is.

What is, for most people, is normal days.

Days when you’re aware of being neither particularly sick nor well. When your relatives, friends and partners waver between buoying you up and sitting on your nerves; when you’re too busy to notice much of anything — except that you’re too busy. Days when people ask, “So what happened today?” and you pause, think and come up with squat.

Those are days worth loving.”
(excerpt from “The Dog’s Wet And Life Is Wonderful,”
Donna Britt, The Washington Post, June 16, 1995)

I found the essay both sweet and profound, and hope y’all check it out.

And in praise and recognition of simple pleasures, moiself  will confess to the first one that sprang to my normal (well, for me) mind:

I love it that my family knows I will appreciate (and use) a jar of “farty putty.”    [7]

 

*   *   *

Department Of The Secret To Eternal Youth

Dateline: Monday, North Coast Pinball.  I am playing one of the arcade’s newest – as in, most recently acquired – games.    [8]   A ~12 year old boy, whom I’d seen earlier playing some of the games, was playing chess with his sister (? they look like fraternal twins),  at the arcade’s games table, which is a few feet from the pinball machine I’m playing. He and his sister get up to leave, and he approaches me.  He looks at me shyly, glances down at his shoes, then looks up and smiles the sweetest bright-eyed smile I’ve seen in years.  He holds out two tokens in his right hand, and nods at me.

“For me?” I ask.  He nods again, and blushes.  I take the tokens and thank him.  The two kids leave the arcade, and I inform WI, the arcade owner, of this encounter.

“Awww,” WI says, raising his voice two octaves.  “ ‘Will you be my valentine?’ “

“It was so sweet,” moiself  gushes.  “Like being asked to go steady.”

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week 

“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.”
 (Author E.B. White )

 

 

*   *   *

May you expeience the emotional equivalent of being asked to go steady;
May you strive to be in love with the life of normal days;
May you find a way to work the word  badonkadonks  into your next conversation;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Plenty, actually.  Just like I did, and continue to do, before this genre of news and entertainment existed.

[2] Okay; there’s no such thing, but I’m working on it.

[3] Plant-based, ideally!

[4] Artificial sweeteners lead to a reduction in the hormone that inhibits appetite, increase the risk of Type II diabetes and obesity (Multiple sources, including NPR 10-7-21

[5] Or grandparents, who lived through The Great Depression and had it hammered into them that you never know when (or if) your next meal is coming so you must eat all of whatever is offered to you.

[6] Or, perhaps a brutally frank self-assessment and/or some sessions with a trained counselor might indicate that, maybe, we *are* and now that we have identified these tendencies we can work on overcoming and/or managing them.

[7] Which is why I found one in last year’s Christmas stocking.

[8] Bally’s World Cup Soccer.  I love it when the machine’s voice yells, “GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAL!”

The Label I Was Not Assigned

February 17, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, family life, games & puzzles, politics, TV , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Department Of A Man’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do

Dateline: Sunday, 10:30 am-ish.  MH sits across from moiself  at our breakfast table, with his copy of Saturday’s NY Times crossword puzzle.  He’d started it yesterday but stopped when he couldn’t finish a small section of it.  As he’s revisiting the puzzle he tells me he’d made a mistake with one four letter answer, whose clue was “____ stage (concept in psychosexual development),” and that fixing that one answer allowed him to figure out the rest of the puzzle:

“I had to switch from oral to anal.”

I look up from my own (KenKen) puzzle; MH pauses for a moment, then says,

“I need to rephrase that.”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Only A Certain Kind Of Geek Will Get This One

Good name for a punk band:

Edith Keeler Must Die.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Space, The Vinyl Frontier     [1]

MH and I – and MH and I translates as, MH – did a clearing-out-space-in the-attic project at the end of the year.  A significant portion of space-which-needed-clearing-out was taken up by a dozen or so crates of LPs. MH moved them to floor the Cat Wall Bedroom ®…

 

 

…where we could sort through them.  In the next couple of weeks, hundreds of albums were whittled down to a select eleven, set aside by MH and/or moiself  for sentimental reasons.  [2]  Almost all of those eleven you can get somewhere else…but since, for example, there’s no guarantee of finding this gem of mine online or elsewhere, it stays:

 

 

The LPs are gone, given away/donated, and the bed in the Cat Wall Room is now covered with hundreds of CDs awaiting a similar culling process.  We haven’t had a working turntable in two decades; up until a few years ago I’d still play CDS, but my new laptop doesn’t have a disk reader.  It feels like the end of an era, of sorts, as we’ve belatedly acknowledged that we no longer “consume” (shudder) music in the same ways we used to.  We still attend live music shows but listen to recorded music in different ways now.  [3]

Side observation:  as we were going through the records MH noted that the digitization of the everyday makes gift-giving more difficult:  it used to be that an album or a book was an easy and “safe” bet for a friend’s birthday present.   [4] 

There was one LP I came across which surprised both MH and I, as in, neither of us had *any* idea it was in our collection.  I have no memory of “making” this record   [5]  and MH has no memory of receiving it.  Its front and back covers:

 

 

The bean/peas theme, I assume, comes from a running joke between us, from our dating days.  One day, early in our courtship   [6]  when we were out driving Somewhere® on our way to do Some Thing, ® MH pointed out to me a bumper sticker (on the car ahead of us) which read, Visualize World Peace.  He said that whenever he saw or heard that slogan his mind turned it into, “Visualize whirled peas.”  Apparently, so did entrepreneurial others, for not long afterward I saw (and bought for him) a t-shirt…

 

 

…which he has to this day.

But wait – there’s more.

When I saw the album I’d made for him, moiself  removed the record from its sleeve and discovered that I’d also altered record’s label, with track listings fitting the cover theme.

Side B  

  1. I’ve Bean Working On The Railroad (Pete Seeger)
  2. I’ve Bean Lonely Too Long (The Rascals)
  3. You’ve Bean In Love Too Long (Bonnie Raitt)
  4. I’ve Bean Searching So Long (Chicago)
  5. I’ll Bean Back (The Beatles)
  6. Could This Bean The Magic? (Barry Manilow)

 

 

Side P

  1. Give Peas A Chance (John Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band)
  2. Peas Of My Heart (Janis Joplin)
  3. Peas Train (Cat Stevens)
  4. Peas Peas Me (The Beatles)
  5. (What’s So Funny About) Peas, Love & Understanding (Elvis Costello)
  6. Peasful Easy Feeling (The Eagles)
  7. Peas Come To Boston (Dave Loggins)
  8. Peas Peas Peas (James Brown)

 

 

I’d done that at least 35 years ago. At this point, attempting to remove the labels and the album’s covers might damage both the alterations as well as what lies beneath; thus, it’ll have to remain a tantalizing mystery as to what record I bastardized blinged to make that compilation.   [7]    However, if we find a working turntable on which to play it….

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of A Worthy, If Unsettling, Read

“The New Puritans,” by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic.  The article is over a year old but moiself  just got around to reading Applebaum’s thoughtful and disturbing thesis – on how mob social justice tramples democratic ideals and threatens intellectual freedoms. The article begins with a recollection of The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne’s classic tale of Hester Prynne, a woman who bears a child out of wedlock.  Prynne is subsequently exiled by her Puritan peers, many of whom themselves are guilty of the same sin for which she is scorned: (excerpts from the article; my emphases):

“We read that story with a certain self-satisfaction: Such an old-fashioned tale! Even Hawthorne sneered at the Puritans, with their ‘sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats,’ their strict conformism, their narrow minds and their hypocrisy. And today we are not just hip and modern; we live in a land governed by the rule of law; we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.”

 

 

“Except, of course, they aren’t. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are *accused of* having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.

Yet despite the disputed nature of these cases, it has become both easy and useful for some people to put them into larger narratives. Partisans, especially on the right, now toss around the phrase cancel culture when they want to defend themselves from criticism, however legitimate. But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake.…..

…Hawthorne dedicated an entire novel to the complex motivations of Hester Prynne, her lover, and her husband. Nuance and ambiguity are essential to good fiction. They are also essential to the rule of law: We have courts, juries, judges, and witnesses precisely so that the state can learn whether a crime has been committed before it administers punishment. We have a presumption of innocence for the accused. We have a right to self-defense. We have a statute of limitations.

By contrast, the modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors.”

 

 

Journalist/historian Applebaum has previously studied and written   [8]  about how the political and social conformism and oppression of the early Communist period and other totalitarian dictatorships was the result “…not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure,” along with the fear of what will happen to you and your family if you violate the norms, and of how such fear leads to intellectual stifling.

But, the author notes, you don’t need government coercion to obtain the same results.  In our country, Applebaum writes, “…we don’t have that kind of state coercion. There are currently no laws that shape what academics or journalists can say; there is no government censor, no ruling-party censor. But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes. How many American manuscripts now remain in desk drawers—or unwritten altogether—because their authors fear a similarly arbitrary judgment? How much intellectual life is now stifled because of fear of what a poorly worded comment would look like if taken out of context and spread on Twitter?”

In her article Applebaum goes on to write about the people whose stories she investigated, whose violations of the sudden shifts in social codes in America led to their professional and/or personal “dismissal or…effective isolation.”  It is a disturbing read, to see what happens to a variety of disparate persons, whose only commonality is that they have been accused of breaking a social code, and subsequently find themselves at the center of a social-media storm because of something they said, or supposedly said:

“… no one quoted here, anonymously or by name, has been charged with an actual crime, let alone convicted in an actual court. All of them dispute the public version of their story. Several say they have been falsely accused; others believe that their ‘sins’ have been exaggerated or misinterpreted by people with hidden agendas. All of them, sinners or saints, have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without the ability to make a case in their own favor.”

 

 

The cases Applebaum cites show that cancel culture/mob condemnation can happen on all sides of the political sphere, and evince a tangible, nonpartisan lesson:

“No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else…. Gotcha moments can be choreographed. Project Veritas, a well-funded right-wing organization, dedicates itself to sting operations: It baits people into saying embarrassing things on hidden cameras and then seeks to get them punished for it, either by social media or by their own bureaucracies.

But while this form of mob justice can be used opportunistically by anyone, for any political or personal reason, the institutions that have done the most to facilitate this change are in many cases those that once saw themselves as the guardians of liberal and democratic ideals. Robert George, the Princeton professor, is a longtime philosophical conservative who once criticized liberal scholars for their earnest relativism, their belief that all ideas deserved an equal hearing. He did not foresee, he told me, that liberals would one day “seem as archaic as the conservatives,” that the idea of creating a space where different ideas could compete would come to seem old-fashioned, that the spirit of tolerance and curiosity would be replaced by a worldview “that is not open-minded, that doesn’t think engaging differences is a great thing or that students should be exposed to competing points of view.”

(Excerpt from “The New Puritans,”
by Anne Applebaum, 8-31-21, The Atlantic, my emphases )

 

Three cheers for the old Puritans.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Things That Make Me Smile Number 892 In The Series
Sup-Department Of Things That Make Me Love My Fellow Snarkers

From “The Week” 2-10-23, a section of news blurbs listed under and heading Good week for/Bad week for:

Good week for:
Plain English, after the Associated Press amended a policy, advising staff to avoid “dehumanizing ‘the’ labels, such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French…”
Online wags had wondered if people in France should be called “people experiencing Frenchness” or people “assigned French at birth.”

 

Experiencing Frenchness Support Group.

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week   [9]

 

 

*   *   *

May you enjoy a trip down the Memory Lane of your own storage space;  [10]
May you steer your social justice passions clear of the New Puritanism;
May you, at some glorious point in your life, experience Frenchness;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Sorry, but after the previous Star Trek reference I think I am owed at least one bad pun as a segue.

[2] Son K stopped by to take a few, thinking he might get a turntable…eventually.

[3] I for one still listen to music on my car’s radio.

[4] However, most people will still “tolerate” actual/physical books, as MH put it.

[5] Although of course it is something I would – and apparently did – do.

[6] I never would have used that word then but for some reason it’s fun to use it now.

[7] Probably/hopefully the album was one I found at the bargain bin at Tower records, an album for which I paid no more than $1.25 for and which deserved to be papered over, ala The Best of the Osmond Brothers or Havin’ My Baby – The Worst of Paul Anka.

[8] Her website and bibliography is here.

[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[10] An actual street in my actual hometown.  Actually.

The Slip I’m Not Adjusting

September 2, 2022

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, extended family, family life, games & puzzles, general ruminations, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, science, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Slip I’m Not Adjusting

 

Department Of It Didn’t Happen

Dateline: yesterday, September 1.  For as long as I have lived in Oregon,    [1]  something has happened on September 1.  Whether or not I’ve been aware of the date, on the first day of September when I go out for a morning walk (or just to pick up the newspaper, back when we subscribed to four “dead tree” news sources), the air is…different.  Not only the temperature, but the air *feel,* and the smell.

After the first eight or so years of this happening, I’d think to moiself, Oh yeah – today must be September 1.

On September 1 we still have three weeks left of (technical) summer. But, even if the next day we go back to August air temps and “feels;” and even if this going-back continues for another two days or two weeks…something about September 1 is a gateway to autumn.

But not yesterday.

Yesterday morning felt like the previous morning, and the morning before that:  a warmer than usual August day.  Is this a September 1 an outlier?  Or another global warming harbinger?  [2]

I was 30 minutes into my walk before my phone buzzed and I looked at it, saw the date, and realized it was September 1…and something was missing.

 

l

Autumn on Sweet Creek Trail, Oregon Coast Range  [3]

*   *   *

Department Of Random Acts Of Oddness

Dateline: last Friday afternoon; a local grocery store.  I’m slowly pushing my mini-cart down an aisle.  I stop for about thirty seconds, no doubt sporting the Scanning The Shelves For The Item I Cannot Find,® blank look on my face.  Then I hear a voice:

“The slip – it just keeps slipping up.”

I turn to look behind me and to the right, from whence the voice, and behold the woman who just uttered those nonsensical profound words, apparently, to moiself  (there is no other human in this particular aisle).  Her left arm is resting on one of the store’s standard-sized grocery carts, which is about 25% filled with various items.  She flashes me an ample, somewhat sheepish smile as she points to her hips and tugs at…something below her waistband, with her right hand.

“My slip; it just keeps slipping up.
It’s supposed to be down, but it keeps coming…up.”

Slip Woman is clad in a white blouse, a navy-blue shirt, some clog-like shoes, and her wavy brown-going-gray-hair is pulled back in a ponytail.  Although she looks a little frazzled,   [4]  she doesn’t have that street person vibe about her.  Nor do I recognize in her the kind of eyes that stare at you but don’t really see you – eyes that stare *through* you, as in, when a Certain Kind Of Person approaches you (and by you I mean, moiself ) and starts in with the non-sequiturs…which has happened to me quite often in my time on this planet, particularly in my after-college years, when I was automobile-less and rode public transit.

 

 

It happened to me so often that I once asked a friend, as I was preparing to take a bus to a job interview, to check the back of my jacket to make sure there wasn’t a neon sign affixed there which flashed some version of the following message:

“Are you angry? Lonely? Irrationally exuberant? Confused? Tired?
Frustrated with politics or sex or irresponsible chihuahua owners?
You *really* should tell this woman all about it, RIGHT NOW.”

At one point I thought that, unbeknownst to me, moiself  must have ridden a bus wherein Weird Al Yankovic was a passenger, and as Weird Al observed what happened to me he was thus inspired to write Another One Rides The Bus – his parody of the Queen song, Another One Bites The Dust.

 

 

Once again, I digress.

 

 

Okay: Slip Woman keeps tugging at the waistband of her skirt and repeats her line about how troublesome it is that her slip won’t stay…wherever it is supposed to stay.  Since I deem her *not* to be a Crazy Person Who Talks To Strangers ®, I think that perhaps her slip was indeed riding up and she was trying to fix it as she turned her cart into this aisle of the grocery store, where she saw me and suddenly became self-conscious about adjusting her undergarments in a public place…  As in, she is assuming – incorrectly – that I’d noticed her doing so…and now she has to explain herself so that I don’t think she’s just randomly tugging at her hindquarters.

 

 

Still, no matter what “sense” is behind her statement, it strikes me as an odd thing to say to a stranger.  So, I decide to not be a stranger, for a moment.  I make what I hope is a knowing, reassuring, Ahhhhh noise, followed with a comment about how “these things” always happen in public places, don’t they?

And I smile and push my cart up the aisle, on to another part of the store…when what I really want to say to her is,  “You’re wearing a slip…really?  Why?”

As I walked to my car in the store’s parking lot, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Who wears slips anymore, anyway?  Is that still a thing?  [5]

 

 

I can’t remember the last time I wore a slip; I can only remember the last time I *didn’t* wear a slip…and someone thought I should have.

 

 

 

Thank you for asking.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,    [6]  moiself  was attending the wedding of my older sister’s eldest daughter.  The wedding was held in a chapel in the Irvine hills, on a brilliantly sunny, So Cal afternoon.  After the ceremony, as I was standing by the pew where I’d been seated and had begun chatting with a family member, a Well-Meaning Church Lady Friend ® of my sister’s sidled up to me.  WMCLF® leaned her mouth close to my ear and, with a deadly serious sotto voce,– as if she were warning me that I should not panic but please be advised that a tsunami is headed this way and we’ve all five minutes to live – earnestly informed me that, standing as I was (with my back to the blinding sun which streamed in through the chapel’s floor-to-ceiling glass walls),

“…you can see your legs through your skirt!”

 

 

 

 

I’m not sure which of the following three things disappointed WMCLF® the most:    [7]

(1) My somewhat laconic reply (“Uh…yeah…I do have legs underneath my skirt.”);

(2) My somewhat not-hiding-the-fact-that-I-didn’t-consider-her-telling-me-that-to-be-the-equivalent-of-sharing-our-nation’s-nuclear-launch-codes, lack of enthusiasm as to the importance of her observation, which she thought was so urgent to share;  [8]   

(3) There was no third thing, somewhat or otherwise;

(4) No fourth thing either.  However, if WMCLF® had known the least bit about me, she would have realized what a big deal it was for me to actually be wearing a skirt.

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department of Causes To Fight For

How can moiself  be so petty as to devote almost an entire blog to stories about a superficial piece of a  women’s undergarment, when there are so many pressing social, political, and cultural issues to be addressed?  Such as, my beef with the NY Times word game, Spelling Bee.

Along with Wordle and Quordle and a couple other NY Times games, Spelling Bee is a game I enjoy playing in the early morning.  Spelling Bee  is a word game “…that challenges players to construct as many (minimum 4 letters) words as they can using pre-selected letters. Each word must include the center letter provided in the puzzle.”  The game’s creator uses a “curated list” of words, as I discovered over a year ago when, although among that day’s SB‘s seven letters were C A L R, I constructed “caracal,” only to be told that that the name for that magnificent African wildcat was not acceptable.

 

 

What word nerd of a hairball doesn’t think I’m acceptable?

 

 

I was so cheesed off about it that I wrote to the editor/curator, who replied with the lame excuse  reasonable explanation about curating a list so as to reach a wide audience.  I’ve noticed that many words I try to use in SB which have a biological or scientific meaning are rejected with SB’s “not in word list” message,  [9]    which makes me think that the editor/curator has rather low expectations re his target audience’s educational and curiosity levels.

Apparently I’m not the only person who takes issue with the curated list policy. Under the Spelling Bee site’s FAQ is this exchange, between a player and the game’s curator:

(SB player):
Occasionally I spell a legitimate word, but the Bee rejects it.
What deems a word unacceptable?

(Sam Ezersky, journalist and NYT Puzzles Editor):
Two dictionaries I use are the built-in Apple dictionary, which is based on New Oxford American, and Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. I like using Google’s News tab, so if there is a technical word, I’ll see if it’s being used in articles without much explanation.
Ultimately, the decisions can seem arbitrary because every solver has a different background and vocabulary….
I can understand the frustration, but my mission is not to be a dictionary. I want to do my best to reflect the Bee’s broad audience and the language we speak.

 

 

 

 

What kind of broad audience doesn’t know – or would benefit from knowing – about the magnificent caracal?

And earlier this week, I reached my next-to-last straw with SB:  included in the seven letters were U T R and D, so naturally one of the words I entered was turd, only to receive SB’s negating response, “not in word list.”

Oh, come on.  What kind of humorless turd will not allow that word on his list?  Thus, my blog’s coveted, rarely bestowed   [10]   Golden Turd Award ® goes to you, Mr. Ezersky.

 

 

 

 

*   *   *

Punz For The Day
Dressing Up Edition

I was about to go to a fancy party dressed as a can of anti-perspirant.
My husband stopped me and said, “Are you Sure?”

So, I reconsidered and put on this real slinky dress…
I looked great going down the stairs.

Which music star is known for her rapid onstage wardrobe changes?
Tailor Swift.

Not all fashion designers are conservative,
but I think most of them are clothes-minded.

What do you call a nudist who will angrily don clothing when it’s required?
A cross-dresser.

My friend arrived at my Halloween costume party dressed like a bank vault.
”Wait,” I said, “I thought you were coming dressed as an apology?”
She said: ‘Well, I thought I’d better be safe than sorry.”

 

 

“Six bad puns – you really found it necessary to torture us with six?”

 

*   *   *

May your acceptable word lists always include “turd’
(with or without the modifier, “festering”);
May you, sans shame or explanation, freely (and discreetly) adjust any undergarment
of yours that needs adjusting;
May we all have such untroubled lives that stories like those I have shared here are the worst of our worries;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

 

*   *   *

[1] Some 32 plus years.

[2] Ha!  Harbinger, as in “omen or indication”?  Too late for that.

[3] Photo credit: Hasegawa Takashi via Flickr, The Fall Foliage At These 10 Places in Oregon Is Incredible.

[4] But then, what did I look like to her, I wonder, in my needs-laundering yoga pants and wrinkled t-shirt?

[5] Asks the woman perennially clad in a tie-dyed t-shirt and off-white capris.

[6] Or maybe 18 years ago.

[7] And from the look on her face, she was disappointed.

[8]  In other words, I didn’t give a flying fuck that anyone could or would be able to see my legs through my skirt.  Now, had I just exited the bathroom with my blouse tucked into my underpants or with toilet paper trailing from my shoe, then by all means, sidle up and whisper to me.

[9] As well as other words that might have more than one meaning, with one of the meanings being a derogatory slang word, such as coon.

[10] I think it’s been several *years* since moiself  has seen fit to give out this dubious honor.

The Basic Ball I’m Not Vogueing

August 26, 2022

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, friends, games & puzzles, music, politics, radio & podcasts, Recreation, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Basic Ball I’m Not Vogueing

Department Of Serves You Right
( And By You, I Mean Moiself )

Because This Is So True ®  for moiself, and several others beset by earworms,  I shared this post after seeing it on FB.

 

 

That night, or rather, early the next morning, my petty brain woke me up at 3:30 am and forced me to listen to this:

 

 

Yeah.

The following night’s song was an improvement, at least, harmony-wise:
The Eagles cover of Seven Bridges Road.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of A White Lady Watching A Black Lady Sketch Show

Last week, after listening to a Fresh Air interview with show creator Robin    [1]   Thede, I began watching episodes from the first season of A Black Lady Sketch Show.   [2]    I’ve a lot to catch up on; the show has been running for three seasons.  But so far it looks like it’ll be well worth it to park my ass yet again in front of the TV rearrange my hectic schedule so as to find precious time to devote to appreciating the show’s thoughtful-narrative mixed-with-magical-reality commentary on contemporary society.

Translation:  I laughed, out loud, a lot.

Here is a mishmash of bits that caught my attention:

* The premier episode: The Bad Bitch Support Group, wherein guest Angela Basset supports women who feel guilty when they wake up in the morning and don’t want to put on makeup or want to wear house slippers instead of three inch heels…but Bassett’s “support” turns out to be cooperation, with two pharmaceutical researchers who are observing this test group of women through a two-way mirror:

First researcher:
“What is happening to subject four?  She seems to have built up an immunity to the Foxycodone.”

Second researcher:
“Double her dosage!” (shakes bottle of pills).
“If women start rejecting impossible beauty standards,
we’ll go out of business.”

Foxycodone.  I’m dyin’ here.

 

 

* The delightfully/deadly serious ramblings of the nonsense-spewing Dr. Haddassah Olayinka (“How many Caucasian seconds must pass before it’s time for me to tell the truth?”)  Ali-Youngman, “pre-Ph.D.” The recurring character is described by Thede (in the Fresh Air interview) thusly: 

“Dr. Haddassah Olayinka Ali-Youngman, pre-Ph.D., is a charlatan of sorts, a saleswoman of sorts, a conspiracy theorist of sorts….somebody who spouts a lot of conspiracy theories about the world…. She’s fun because she gets to say all the things that I think sometimes we see online or in other places. I’ve known women like this who constantly think everything is a conspiracy.”

Check out this ramble of a diatribe toast Ali-Youngman gives at her sister’s wedding:

 

 

* A takeoff skit on ball culture,   [3]   the The Basic Ball (“A ball for the rest of the LGBTQ Community”).  The emcee does his best work-it-girl narration, over the pulsing dance music glitter ball strobe lighting, as a trio of dissipated looking women clad in, well, non-glittery, non-ball clothing (read: sweats and down jackets; pajama pants), stumble their way onto the catwalk.:

“The category is, clinical depression. All my children serving chemical imbalance, that’s right, make your way to the floor if you can…..  You are tired; you are unmedicated; make your way to the floor…  Walk for the judges; now vogue.  Oh, I see you, eating carbs! Oh, I see you, too depressed to leave the house.  I’m looking for sadness… I’m looking for Eeyore in Dior….”

 

 

Other Basic Ball categories include

*Barbecue Grill Daddy

(“They’re serving leather and linen; they’re serving let’s-argue-about-routes-to-work:  ‘I take the 405 to PCH.’  ‘Oh, I just take Cahuenga all the way down.’  You’ll gag… They are cookout ready, Betty – oh, he didn’t start the grill until everybody showed up? You won’t be eating until night time…. Oh, he is passing out matching shirts at the family reunion; he is mispronouncing all of your friends’ names…”)

* Running Errands

(“Oh, did you remember your reusable canvas bags?  Oh, work it girl – she has all her receipts; yes, she knows the return policy and she will not take store credit, baby….Oh, she’s running a quick errand and didn’t think anyone would see her, but you ran into your boss, and now she knows you do not have eyebrows….”)

*   *   *

Department Of Yet Another Reason To Go On Living

That would be this:  Northcoast Pinball, the pinball-centric video arcade in Nehalem, has a new Godzilla pinball machine.

 

 

While I’m no wizard,    [4]  I do enjoy playing pinball, and can get quite picky re what, for moiself, constitutes a good game.  I never really got into video games; something about the three-D, mechanical immediacy of pinball punches my flippers.  My enjoyment of pinball also stems from following a certain philosophy I have re recreational activities:

If you can’t do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly.

 

 

 

I wish I could take credit for coining that masterful maxim, which, IMO, is a key component of psychological health.

Despite the above quote I do not consider myself a poor pinball player.  I just enjoy it too much – as in, I find it relaxing – to take it (or moiself, playing it)  too seriously. When I’m in the pinball lounge I often see players who are quite intense, and who obviously have a strategy.  I know of one strategy I could employ to get “better” (as in, getting a higher score/winning more free games):  simply spend a lot of time getting to know one game.

 

 

 

 

Each game has its own/different scenarios, “routes,” and shooter allies and ramps, bumpers, and traps, etc.  And although all pinball machines flippers, the flippers of different games have a different feel (and reaction speed), which I notice immediately when I go from one machine to another…which is my non-strategy strategy.  I allow moiself  one or two games on a machine, then move on to the next, trying to play at least one game on the twenty-plus games in the lounge.   [5]  Which means I’m in the pinball lounge for a minimum of 30 minutes…thus….

Hint for all pinball and/or video arcade aficionados:  earplugs are your friends.

 

 

The noise in the arcade when there’s just me and one or two other players is tolerable…but still, tolerable can be too much, and I know that we humans consistently underestimate noise levels and what constitutes over and/or dangerous levels of exposure.

Thus, I have started wearing earplugs when I’m playing pinball.  And I am concerned for the owner of the pinball lounge.  He is one of the Nicest People I’ve Ever Met ®,  [6]  but his geniality and right-on social and cultural attitudes are not going to protect him from the fact that the continual noise exposure in his workplace is going to give him hearing loss.

“A study conducted by University of Maine graduate students recorded noise levels in four video arcades. The study found noise levels so extreme that visitors in the arcades risked temporary hearing loss in just 30 seconds of exposure. Extended or frequent exposure at such levels may result in permanent hearing loss or tinnitus.

In one of the arcades noise levels peaked at 114 dB, with average sound levels of 93 dB. In another the noise levels varied from 69 dB to 119 dB…..

A continuous noise level of 85 dB will result in hearing damage. At 115 dB, the noise levels are eight times higher and hearing damage may occur in 30 seconds….

Not only the video arcade customers put their hearing at risk in this environment. Arcade employees are even more at risk, unless they use hearing protection. They are exposed to the high noise levels repeatedly and for longer periods of time.”

( “Video arcades causing hearing loss and tinnitus,”  hearit.org )

 

How I wish a friendlier version of this could be in arcades.

 

Places of employment with high noise levels   [7]  now offer – or are required by OSHA to mandate – ear protection for employees and visitors.   [8]  I can see how an entertainment venue might not want to acknowledge that their business has a certain risk to your health….but that doesn’t change the facts.  So perhaps I can suggest another business venture for him, and other arcade owners:  sell earplugs.

I regularly stock on the ones pictured above, buying in bulk for what amounts to 17¢, but with other brands and buying even more, [9]    you could get the price for 9¢/pair, possibly even lower.  Along with the snacks and beverages most arcades have for purchase, I wish they’d also have earplugs available at the front desk, where people purchase their tokens, for a minimal cost.  You could charge just 25¢ per pair – or give them away free, to kids under age 12 or whatever, and to adults for a minimum purchase of $10 or $20 worth of tokens…there are many possibilities of working this in to arcade “culture.”

Moiself  is going to gird my proverbial loins and present this idea, as diplomatically as possible, next time I’m in the arcade.  Hopefully I will find out that the owner already wears earplugs.   [10]     Wish me luck.

 

 

*   *   *

Punz For The Day
Pinball Edition

Have you played the new Lord of the Rings pinball machine?
It doesn’t take coins, only tolkiens.

What’s the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a pinball machine?
Pinball doesn’t suck.

Why couldn’t Led Zeppelin play pinball?
They had No Quarter.

 

Hulk hate bad pun…

 

…but Hulk love my own pinball game.

 

*   *   *

May you find a pinball arcade and see how much fun it can be;
May you OF COURSE wear hearing protection while doing the above;
May you resign yourself to the occasional 3 am
♫ Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang; ♫
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Nice name, but she spells it wrong.

[2] All three seasons currently streaming on HBO.

[3] A subculture which originated when Black and Latino drag queens organized their own ballroom pageants to protest what they saw as the racism of established drag queen pageants.  Participants choose from several multitude of categories in which they can “walk” and vogue for prizes.

[4] Style points for those getting The Who song reference.

[5] There are a couple of the old-timey machines (the ones requiring only one token to play), which I skip, because I find them boring.

[6] And whose politics I am quite fond of. There are scattered references, including books and other reading materials he keeps by the lounge’s sitting areas, and signs in the windows, that he – and his wife, who runs the pottery gallery next door – are right-on considerate, intelligent, religion-free, humanists and feminists.

[7] E.g. factories, or where employees are outside but using loud equipment such as mowers or leaf blowers.

[8] MH, son K and I wore them recently, while visiting Belle at her place of work.

[9] Like these, 500 pair for $44.60.

[10] Ones that are so cool and discreet that I haven’t noticed them.

The Clinic Protocol I’m Not Following

August 12, 2022

Robyn Parnell community, current events, extended family, freethought/humanism, health & wellness, making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, Me so happy, nature, Oregon, radio & podcasts, Recreation, science, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Clinic Protocol I’m Not Following

I had my second Covid booster vaccination yesterday, at the same clinic where I had my first booster.  My first two Covid vax (over a year ago, at the height of the campaign to get everyone vaxed) were given at a local school gym, in a group setting run by that same clinic.  After you’d had your shot, you sat along with others (all masked and seated at least 6 feet apart) who’d been vaccinated, with a post-it sticker on your shirt noting your time of vax. You waited until the Person Watching You ® let you know that your 15m was up and you could leave.  As y’all probably know, it is standard vax practice to wait at a vaccination site for 15m after receiving a vax to make sure you do not have a severe allergic reaction to the shot (which is very rare).   [1]

My first COVID booster shot was administered to me at the clinic itself, in an exam room, by a nurse practitioner. After the NP gave me my shot he said I should stay in the exam room and he’d be back in 15 minutes to release me.  I got in some e-book reading time…but after I left the clinic I thought, even though I’d never had an immediate/allergic reaction to any kind of vaccination, there could always be a first time, and what if moiself   passed out (or worse, began to have an anaphylactic reaction) and I were alone in the exam room?  I decided that this time, if the clinic did the same logistics, I would speak up about that.  They did, and so did I.

A quite genial nurse nurse gave me booster #2. She told me that although she “didn’t carry a pair of handcuffs” to enforce the protocol she highly recommended I stay put for 15 minutes, in case of a reaction.  I told her that during my previous booster, the NP told me I had to stay in the exam room. And the hijinks this exchange ensued:

Moiself:
How’s about if I return to the waiting area, where there are other people and the receptionists?
The point of waiting 15 minutes after having the vaccination is to make sure that I don’t have an immediate or allergic reaction to it, right?

Nurse:
Yes. Like I said about the handcuffs, I can’t force you to stay, but we highly recommend it.  You can stay in the room if you like.

Moiself:
Yes, I could…but then, how would you know if I’ve had a reaction, if I’m left alone in the exam room?  Are the rooms wired – will the sound of my body hitting the floor let the staff know I’ve had a bad reaction?

Nurse:
It’s a small clinic.  We’d *probably* hear the thump.

Moiself opted for the waiting area.

 

Just don’t thump too loudly; it’s my turn to calibrate the rectal thermometers and I need to concentrate.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Yet Another Lie My Teachers Told Me

This particular lie, like most lies I was taught, was not conveyed on purpose. My teachers were lied to as well…perhaps, misinformed would be the more accurate term.  Think back to your elementary, junior high, high school, and even a few college classes. Very few of our teachers were doing original or first source document research; they taught what they themselves had been taught.

 

Yeah, well, that’s what they told me me, so suck it up.

 

The specific lie to which moiself  refers is the idea that a so-called agricultural revolution brought about a better society – that the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers and ranchers brought nothing but positives, and was responsible for what we now call Civilization ® .

“The agricultural revolution is the name given to a number of cultural transformations that initially allowed humans to change from a hunting and gathering subsistence to one of agriculture and animal domestications.”
( The Agricultural Revolutions, sciencedirect.com  )

In a recent People I (Mostly) Admire podcast, “Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing,” guest Harari   [2] and podcast host Steve Levitt discuss some of the ideas and observations Harari addresses in his latest book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.   [3] One of the ideas that struck me the most was that the agricultural revolution was ultimately better for germs than it was for people.  Moiself  has read other versions of this hypothesis, but Harari presented the most entertainingly succinct one I’ve come across (my emphases).  The entire interview is thoughtful and thought-provoking; moiself  hopes this excerpt piques your interest.

LEVITT (quoting from Harari’s book, Sapiens):
“ ‘The agricultural revolution was history’s biggest fraud.’
My hunch is that listeners, when they hear that sentence, they’d probably find it jarring because we’re taught to celebrate the agricultural revolution, not to think of it as being a fraud.”

HARARI:
“But if you look at it from the viewpoint of middle-class people in the West today, then agriculture is wonderful. We have all these apples and bread and pasta and steaks and eggs and whatever. And if you look at it from the viewpoint of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh or a Chinese emperor, wonderful. I have this huge palace and all these servants and whatever. But if you look at it from the viewpoint of the ordinary peasant in ancient Egypt or ancient China, their life was actually much worse than the life of the average hunter-gatherer before the agricultural revolution.

First of all, they had to work much harder. Our body and our mind evolved for millions of years to do things like climbing trees to pick fruits and going in the forest to sniff around for mushrooms and hunting rabbits and whatever. And suddenly you find yourself working in the field all day, just digging irrigation ditch, hour after hour, day after day, or taking out weeds or whatever, it’s much more difficult to the body. We see it in the skeletons, all the problems and ailments that these ancient farmers suffered from.  It’s also far more boring.

And then the farmers didn’t get a better diet in return. Pharaoh or the Chinese emperor, they got the reward. The ordinary peasant, they actually ate a far worse diet than hunter-gatherers. It was a much more limited diet. Hunter-gatherers, they ate dozens, hundreds of different species of fruits and vegetables and nuts and animals and fish and whatever. Most ancient farmers, if you live in Egypt, you eat wheat and wheat. If you live in China, you eat rice and rice.”

 

 

LEVITT:
“If you’re lucky. If the crop doesn’t fail, yeah.”

HARARI:
“If you’re lucky. If you have enough. And then, because this is monoculture, most fields are just rice. If suddenly there is a drought, there is a flood, there is a new plant disease, you have famine.

Farmers were actually more in danger of famine than hunter-gatherers because they relied on a much more narrow economic base. If you’re a hunter-gatherer, and there is a disease that kills all the rabbits, it’s not such a big deal. You can fish more. You can gather more nuts. But if you’re a herder, and your goat herd has been decimated by some plague, that’s the end of you and your family.

… in addition to that, you have many more diseases. In the days of Covid, it’s good to remember the fact that most infectious diseases started with the agricultural revolution because they came from domesticated animals, and they spread in large, permanent settlements. As a hunter-gatherer, you wander around the land with 50 people or so. You don’t have cows and chickens that live with you. So your chances of getting a virus from some wild chicken is much smaller. And even if you get it, you can infect only a few other people, and you move around all the time. So hygienic conditions are ideal.

Now, if you live in an ancient village or town, you’re in very close proximity to a lot of animals, so you get more diseases. And if you get a virus, you infect the whole town and the neighboring towns and villages through the trade networks, and you all live together in this permanent settlement with your sewage, with your garbage. People in the agricultural revolution, they tried to create paradise for humans. They actually created paradise for germs.”

Swine flu stew tonight! Invite the neighbors!

 

*   *   *

Department Of Celebrity Mythos

Moiself  recently watched the first two episodes of The Last Movie Stars, an HBO six part documentary which, as per its website description, aims to chronicle

“…Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s iconic careers and decades-long partnership. Director Ethan Hawke brings life and color to this definitive history of their dedication to their art, philanthropy, and each other.”

Newman’s and Woodward’s 50-year marriage is generally regarded as one of the most successful and truly happy show biz unions, and Newman was known for his devotion to his wife and family.  Over the years many reporters asked Newman about the temptations of show business for a handsome actor such as himself (read: Why do you remain faithful/stay with your wife when you’re surrounded by all the babes, in Hollywood and in fandom, who’d love to throw themselves at you?).  On one such occasion, when Newman was queried about his reputation for fidelity to Woodward, Newman famously quipped, “Why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?”

I’d heard this quote many times before the HBO documentary brought it up, but this time, watching The Last Movie Stars, I couldn’t help but think about how Newman‘s “devotion to his wife and family” – meaning Woodward and their three children – happened after he dumped his first wife Jackie Witte (and their three children), to marry Woodward, with whom Newman had been having an adulterous affair.

Apparently Newman also couldn’t help but think of that irony.  He reportedly agonized for years re the guilt he felt over ‘his shortcomings as a parent’ to the children from his failed first marriage, and he blamed that guilt in part for the drug overdose death of his son, Scott.    [4] 

I’ve only watched the first two of six episodes of the HBO series, and thus don’t know how much the series deals with Newman’s first marriage.  Hey, I’m glad Newman and Woodward had a happy alliance, despite their relationship’s less-than-honorable origins.  But whenever I hear that legendary quote from Newman – the quote so admired and applauded by many people as an exemplar of witty romanticism – I wonder what Jackie Witte felt when she first heard it?

“Why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?”

I can imagine it felt like a sledgehammer in the gut.  So, Witte was the (original)  hamburger Newman left in order to be with the steak?

BTW, re the hamburger-steak comparison:  as a plant-based eater, I find no hierarchy in that metaphor.  They’re both just dead meat to me.

 

 

 

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of Thar She Blows

Two weekends ago MH and I, along with son K, visited daughter Belle in Tacoma.  Belle had arranged for the four of us to go on a whale-watching trip in the Puget Sound.  It was delightful afternoon, and not just because we spent the afternoon on a boat in the Sound during a heat wave.  Even the veteran crew of the boat got excited when we spotted and the transient orca pod T37, which approached our boat and (unintentionally) put on quite the show for us.   [5]    We got to observe hunting and feeding behavior of the majestic orcas, as the pod chased and caught a very unfortunate harbor seal who’d ventured too far from shore.  I heard another boat passenger make some comment about how fortunate we were to get to see “killer whales making a kill,” and I wanted to smack him upside his head with the pectoral fins I don’t have.

 

 

Moiself  objects to the use of the term killer whale when it is applied to orcas.  First of all, orcas are not actually whales; rather, they are the largest member of the dolphin family.  They, like Flipper and other dolphins, are carnivores.  Other animal’s names are not tied to such a pejorative suffix – lions and tigers and bears and weasels and eagles are not referred to as “Killer” lions/tigers/bears/weasels/eagles, despite the fact that, as carnivores, they must kill and eat other animals to survive.

“Paul Spong, a researcher who runs OrcaLab from Hanson Island in B.C., says he finds the name killer whale ‘rather unfair to a creature that deserves and lives a peaceful lifestyle.
Killer whales has that flavour that they’re somehow vicious animals that are a danger to humans,” he said. ‘I just happen to think that using a more neutral term is better.’.
Despite what the 1977 sea-monster film Orca: The Killer Whale might show, there have been no documented cases of orcas killing humans in the wild….
and they are highly social creatures that show almost human-like emotions, such as when southern resident J35 carried its dead calf for 17 days before finally letting go.

( “Why are orcas called killer whales?  They’re the apex predators of the sea, but many feel their long-used common name demonizes them.”  cba.ca )

Yeah, yeah, it’s word cop time.  Of course and ultimately, work for the orcas’ preservation and protection before arguing what nomenclature to use….  Still, words carry and impart meaning, and perhaps more people might be convinced to care about orcas and their vital role in their habitat – and their right to continue to exist – if the fear/revulsion-inducing *killer whale* moniker fell out of favor.

 

 

Once again, I digress.

We saw other wildlife as well on our whale– orca-watching trip, including harbor and elephant seals, herons and tufted puffins and bald eagles, on the shores of Protection Island Wildlife Refuge.  As our boat passed that island, I saw for the first time something I could only vaguely recall having heard about: a leucistic bald eagle.    [6]   “Lucy,” as I thought of her, had a very light, mottled pigmentation which made her blend in with the driftwood log upon which she’d perched, next to the standard issue bald eagle I was watching through binoculars.  Moiself  didn’t even notice Lucy until a part of the log suddenly took wing.  The boat photographer and staff and several avid birders aboard realized what they were seeing, and lost their proverbial shit.    [7]

 

 

 

 

One of the boat staff, the official photographer, was armed with a bazooka like camera-lens set up.  He took fantastic pictures of the whales, which he presented to the passengers in a slide show while our boat returned to port.  His shots had included dozens of rapid-fire close-ups of the orcas hunting the doomed seal – oh, the eyes of the hapless pinniped, when it realized it was toast!  That was painful to see, even as I acknowledged, hey, the seal is out in the water, hunting because it’s hungry, and so are the orcas.

The photographer  offered to transfer his photos of the trip to a thumb drive, for $50 for anyone who was interested.  Seeing as how the professional’s pix were so much better than our family’s cell phone snaps, MH asked me if he should go for it.  I gave him the okay, although, when MH was chatting with the photographer as the thumb drive was downloading the trip’s pictures, I approached the photographer, thanked him for his skill and commentary during the trip    [8]   and said that while I was in awe of his photographs, when reviewing them later I would probably skip watching the “seal snuff film” sequence.

I cannot display the photographer’s copyrighted photos here.  [9]   Belle had several shots which good – they are like teasers as to the beauty of seeing the orcas in their natural environment.   Here is one of my favorites of hers– featuring the T37 pod’s leader, the matriarch researchers have named “Volker.”

 

 

The day after our boat cruise, I went for an early morning walk.  Moiself  could hardly believe the timing of the Radiolab podcast I listened to as I trod the path which winds along the periphery of that salty-air scented Puget Sound estuary/harbor area in Tacoma known as Commencement Bay.

Despite its annoyingly sensationalist title, Radiolab’s “The humpback and the killer” was an excellent listen.  It reports on the fascinating observations made by marine mammal biologists around the world – scientists who, in recent years, have documented astounding, classic-explanation-defying interactions between humpback whales and orcas. If after listening to descriptions of these interactions you (still) harbor doubts that species other than homo sapiens can feel and demonstrate emotions and motivations such as altruism, or even revenge…then I don’t know what to do with you.

 

 

*   *   *

Punz For The Day
Cetacean Edition

What do a pod of dolphins use to wash themselves?|
A multi-porpoise cleaner.

What is the favorite constellation of star-gazing whales?
The Big Flipper.

What is the best way to listen to the sounds a group of orcas makes?
Tune in to their podcast.

Why do male humpbacks have little-to-no hair?
They suffer from whale-pattern balding.

 

“It’s okay, honey, she told me she’d stop after four.”

 

*   *   *

May you warily weigh the costs and benefits of history’s so-called revolutions;
May you banish the term “killer whale” from your vocabulary;
May you respect your longtime partner enough to never compare them to cuts of beef;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] And for 30m, if you’ve ever had a reaction to a vaccination.

[2] Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian, philosopher, author, lecturer, and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

[3] How’s that for a modest title?

[4] “ ‘I’m guilty as hell – and I’ll carry it with me for ever.’ Paul Newman’s marriage secrets”: Shawn Levy, dailymail.com ; Newman felt personally responsible for (his troubled son’s) tragic drink and drugs death… The son Paul Newman lost to drugs – and the guilt he could never escape,” Shawn Levy, part 2 )

[5] Unintentional, as in, the orcas were just doing what they were doing, and we happened by.

[6] Leucism, a condition that partially prevents pigments from being deposited in a bird’s feathers, hair or skin, is rare, and is the result of a recessive gene which reduces the color-producing pigment melanin. It is related to but different from albinism

[7] I can see why these “blonde” bald eagle can confuse even veteran bird watchers, as they (usually) still have the bald eagle’s defined white head and tail, but the rest of the feathers are a much lighter hue than normal and are mottled, creating a “What the heck am I seeing? reaction – is it a bald eagle or some other strange species?

[8] He gave a running commentary of the history of the T37 pod we saw.  One look through his lens and he could identify the different members of the pod by, among other features, the distinctive markings of their dorsal fins.

[9] He offered them for our own personal/home viewing, not to post on any social media platforms.

The Luge I’m Not Watching

February 25, 2022

Robyn Parnell annoyances, current events, exercise & fitness, foodie, freethought/humanism, general ruminations, health & wellness, Isms (religion), making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, politics, Recreation, sports, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Luge I’m Not Watching

Department Of Olympic Reflections

 

 

I’m going through my every-two years (pandemic-influenced schedule changes notwithstanding), post-Olympic blues, where after dinner I sit down in one of our way-too-comfy chairs and expect instant access to televised, Holy ACL tear, how do they *do* that? feats of athleticism.  Despite my enjoyment of the spectacle, my attention feels somewhat squirm-worthy….  Moiself doesn’t even try to justify my interest in The Games ®  with my abhorrence of the host country’s abysmal human rights record.

The USA engaged in a “diplomatic boycott” of these Beijing-hosted games.  Remember the lackluster response to that announcement?

Few if any sports fans tune in to watch the participating countries’ political envoys compete in the Ambassadorial Mixed Team Relay Luge, what’s the point?  When it comes to action strategies, a diplomatic boycott reminds me of prayer – it’s a way of trying to provide the illusion that you’re doing something when in fact you’ve done nothing of consequence.

“We’re doing a diplomatic boycott of the Olympics.”

“We’re praying for the victims of human rights violations.”

Can or should sports (or any human endeavor) be politics-free?  And if the answer is yes, what kind of human rights violations and atrocities are allowed to eclipse those leave-politics-out-of-these-games declarations?

Other minds far keener than moiself’s  frequently debate this issue, and come to contradictory conclusions (“The Olympics *are* political and the IOC is delusional” ;  “Olympics ‘Are Not About Politics,’ Athletes Should Be Politically Neutral At Games”) and everything in between.  I do remember reading a couple of op-ed pieces about the importance of viewers – and journalists – at the Olympics, as in, acting as witnesses to hold the China government accountable for the image they intended to portray vs. the reality of what they do.  If no one’s watching, Chinese officials can say whatever they like about…anything.

When the USA boycotted the Russian-hosted 1980 Summer Olympic to protest Russia’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, 64 other countries joined the boycott.  Sound like a lot?  Think again – 80 countries did not, and sent representative athletes to the games.  What was accomplished?  Oh, that’s right; how quickly I forget.  Shamed as bullies before the free world, Russia renounced its oppressive ways and turned into a beacon of liberty and civil rights for the downtrodden masses across the globe.

 

 

Back to the actual games.  The big-liest story involved the 15-year-old Russian figure skater, Kamila Valieva.  Valieva tested positive for a banned performance-enhancing substance but was still was allowed to compete (and then fell apart during a key performance).   [1] 

Moiself  would wager that many teenaged Olympic athletes are “older” than their non-athletic team member peers in many ways, after years of single-minded devotion and adherence to a grueling practice schedule that would break most adults.  There is a second part to my wager: at the same time, these teen athletes’ pursuit to excel at their sport makes them more naïve than other teens. Young Olympics-bound athletes often little experience of the maturation that comes from encountering “real life,” having been shielded from the day-by-day mundane decisions and activities – by both their coaches and parents – so that they can concentrate on mastering the backside quad cork 180˚ or whatever.

So, who’s responsible for Valieva’s doping?  Was it the athlete, or her coach(es)?  Given how coaches control influence their athlete’s lives, and the age of the skater in question, it’s not that difficult for me to imagine Valieva’s unquestioning compliance to a command recommendation.

“Here comrade, take pill/shot, and don’t worry, it’s …uh…
vitamin B-12!  Da, that is what it is.”

Still, there is the argument that if she’s old enough to be on the Olympics team she’s old enough to take responsibility for following the Olympics’ rules. If a substance is banned, you don’t take it, and you don’t let anyone give it to you. 

No matter who’s at fault, I hated to see/think of a 15 year old getting ripped a new one by her coaches…which is what happened. Whosever decision it was to dope – hers, or her “support” team’s – maybe it doesn’t matter in long run.  And maybe someone should check on Valieva, after she’s returned to Russia and the hoopla dies down, to make sure she hasn’t been carted off to the All-Gulag Tour of Ice Dancing With The Russian Stars. 

My interest in watching any of the figure skating dropped after the Valieva doping-but-excused revelation.  It left a bad taste in my mouth, particularly when I compared the skater’s outcome with what happened to a Summer Olympics track star.  Why wasn’t there a huge outcry about the difference in treatment – USA sprinter Sha’ Carri Richardson was kicked off the Summer Olympics team for failing *her* drug test.  A few people commented, including, succinctly, Richardson herself:

“The only difference I see is I’m a black young lady.”
( “Double Standard, Racism? Sha’Carri Richardson Booted From Olympics For Cannabis, Russian Skater No Problem For Doping.”  Benzinga 2-14-22)

 

 

Moiself  does recall that someone else commented about the brouhaha, at the time when Richardson got the boot….

As the Tokyo (Summer)  Olympics Games enter the final week, I’m realizing I will soon be going through the withdrawal I experience every two years, after watching two-plus weeks of (summer or winter) Olympics events.  I’m not normally a frequent televised-sporting-events fan, but moiself  does enjoy The Games ®….

In the second week, with track and field events predominating, moiself  is thinking about a conversation I had with daughter Belle, several weeks back, about how the USA’s track star Sha’ Carri Richardson received a suspension for testing positive for marijuana, and thus would not be participating in the Olympics.

Belle was peeved that Richardson would not be able to compete, due to what Belle sees as an unfair and archaic drug testing system.  I mentioned that Richardson’s competitors might also be disappointed in Richardson’s absence from the games.  As I understand it, when you’re at the top level of your sport, you want to compete against the best.  Also, whatever your accomplishments, you don’t want an asterisk next to them (as in, “* ___ won the gold medal, after the favorite ____ was disqualified for….”).

We agreed that athletes should be tested for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs; definitely-absolutely-go-for-it.  But Belle and I had fun wondering back and forth about why athletes are tested for alcohol and marijuana…. it seems to moiself  that weed and booze, with their relaxant and depressive properties, would diminish, not enhance, athletic performance.  And really now: in what sports could marijuana be considered a performance *enhancing* drug? Competitive eating? Belle suggested.

You’d think athletes would *want* their rivals to get the munchies before competition: “Here comes Richardson, strolling across the finish line in last place, giving the other racers a, ‘What’s up with all the hurry?’ look as she heads for the pizza roll vendor….”


“I’d like to thank my coach, and my training partner, Maui Wowie.”

So, lobby to change the Olympics’ drug testing rules, if you think it would be worthwhile to do so.  Until then, it would be unfair to other athletes to make exceptions for some and not others, in terms of how existing drug rules are applied.    [2]

Also, the athletes know full well what they will be tested for.  My advice    [3]   to them  is, don’t act surprised and/or disappointed if you used a banned substance and then get caught.  Take responsibility.  Don’t play dumb when you’re not.
(Excerpts from 8-6-21 blog post, The Drug Test I’m Not Failing, full text here)

 

 

Once again, I digress.  Time to finish with the Winter Olympics.

As always, moiself  thrilled to watch  the ariel snowboarding and skiing and ski jumping events, marveled at the WTF?!? stamina and skill required by the XC skiers and Biathlon-ers,     [4]   and yawned through (read: ignored) the curling/bobsled/luge/skeleton events.   [5]   Although it was great to see pioneering USA snowboarding champ Shaun White in Olympic action again/for the last time, it was also awe-inspiring to see the younger snowboarders – many if not most of whom were inspired by White – perform their gravity-defying new stunts…and then it was poignant to realize, as White seemed to do so graciously, that his time at that level of competition had passed.  Most of all, it was great fun, for moiself  at least, to see a smaller country, Norway (population 5 million, led the medal count with thirty-seven.  Yes; 37), dominate the competition.   [6]

But, my enjoyment was dampened by the skating scandal.  And also, the host.  Fucking People’s Republic of Human Rights Bullies China.

 

 

My gradually-souring mood was saved by son K, who steered me toward an old video clip of Shaun White as a bright-eyed 19 year old, being interviewed by CNN after his first Olympics.  Refreshingly unjaded and enthusiastic, gushing as if amazed by his own success, White described how, during his plane flight back to the USA, the flight attendants   [7]   fawned over his Olympic medal.  White’s charmingly disarming, duuuuude, totally rad persona, seemingly endemic to surfers and snowboarders, surfaced when the CNN interviewer interrupted White with an attempted “gotcha” moment.  It reminded me why I’m gonna miss the red-haired dude and his ‘tude:

 

 

 

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

 

Department Of Things I Sometimes Forget

 

 

 

Such as, sometimes I forget how much I like a simple veggie chili, which can be made rather quickly with Staples I Almost Always Have Handy ® . As for the simple part, you can complexify     [8]  it up, as much as you want, with different beans and pepper combos, and get jiggy with the toppings.

Lotta Beans Chili (makes ~ 6 servings)

– ½ T EVOO
– 8 large garlic cloves, chopped   [9]

– 2 cans no salt added chopped tomatoes
-1 can each (~15 oz) of the following (no salt added) cooked beans, rinsed & drained:
  Black, kidney, garbanzo, lima
– 1 c white frozen corn, thawed
– 3 T chili powder
– 1 T ground cumin seed (toasted first – optional, but delish)
– ½ t each kosher salt & freshly ground black peppercorns; cayenne pepper to taste

– 1 t (or more) red wine vinegar
– 3T rinsed pickled jalapeno slices (more or less to taste)   [10]

– lime slices

Heat oil in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add garlic and sauté until fragrant, about 1m. Add beans through cumin seeds, mix well, and bring to simmer over med-high heat. Cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer until flavors are blended, ~ 30m.

Season w/salt, pepper and cayenne, and jalapenos. Add vinegar to taste. Serve with lime slices to squeeze over.

Additional toppings:
Avocado chunks or slices or guacamole; chopped fresh cilantro; chopped scallions; plant-based or regular sour cream or plain yogurt; shredded veg or other cheeses; crushed tortilla chips; red or green chili salsa; a mother’s bitter tears….

 

Your final product should look nothing like this.

 

*   *   *

Punz For The Day
Chili Edition

I got a miniature fresh habañero pepper at the farmer’s market. When I returned home
I put a tiny blanket on it, because it was a little chili.

We are thinking about making Five Alarm Bean and Cabbage Chili for Christmas Eve.
We’re starting a new tradition called, ‘Silent But Deadly Night.’

How do you make a good vegan chili?
Stick her in the freezer.

What do dead Norseman like in their chili?
Vallhallapeños.

 


You can see yourself out.

 

*   *   *

May you never be subjected to an Olympic-sized double standard;
May you never engage in a diplomatic boycott (of anything);
May you join your loved ones in a rousing chorus of,
“I’m talkin’ ’bout Mountain Dews, baby!”    [11]

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] As in, she fell, several times, during her last performance, where, favored to take first place in the Women’s Singles competition, she did not medal.

[2] Richardson claimed she used weed to cope with receiving the news of the unexpected death of her biological mother.  If that’s the case, I’m wondering why she didn’t alert officials before she was tested, along the lines of, “BTW, I used this substance for this reason,” to try to explain or at least warn them that she wasn’t trying to sneak anything past them.

[3] Which they clamor for, night and day…it gets soooooo annoying.

[4] Only Norwegians could come up with such a body-punishing, seemingly disparate skills-requiring event as biathlon.

[5] The nuances of the sledding events evades me (“He tilted his body one degree to the right to steer the sled higher on the turn”…uh huh).  No doubt fun to do yourself, but a snoozefest to watch someone else do it.

[6] Second place Germany, population 83 million , 27 medals…summer Olympics powerhouse USA (population 330 million) got 25 winter Olympic medals.

[7] Although he refers to them using the antediluvian term, “stewardesses.”  DUDE ?!?!?

[8] My word.  You’re welcome.

[9] I don’t need to specify peeled, right?  Who chops fully clothed garlic cloves?

[10] Obviously more, if you like the taste.

[11] You have to watch the Shaun White video to get this one.

The S-Words I’m Not Mispronouncing

January 14, 2022

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Department Of Starting The New Year With A Memory Of Teacher Appreciation

Someone once lost an argument with me….

 

 

No; really.

Someone once lost an argument with me….

 

Who does she think she is, ME ?!?

(hint: this is called, foreshadowing)

I’ll try again.

Someone once lost an argument with me re the correct the answer to the question, “What is the USA’s ‘National Pastime’?'”  Someone said the answer was baseball; moiself  pointed out that our national pastime is criticizing other people’s parenting skills.  [1]  Someone began his rebuttal, then quickly conceded.

Another easy target for critique is K-12 schoolteachers. I recently ran across some grousing about teachers, which caused me to reflect upon how it is so easy – too easy – to look back and criticize schools and teachers, to parse what they neglected to do, or what they did do, but did wrongly or inadequately.    [2]   I wanted to take a different tack, to start the new year.  And so, here is A Good Thing ® which happened to me, when I was in grade 3, courtesy of select staff members of Wilson Elementary School.

 

“I have to have that Parnell girl in my class?  Give me a minute while I check my Valium supply….”

 

Background info (as in, a memory spark):  Dateline: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (college, late 1970s).  I was out to dinner with my Boyfriend. In a tender moment ® and apropos of something I cannot now recall, BF reached across the table, used his index finger to brush a strand hair off of my forehead, and said he’d noticed that, sometimes when I was tired and/or had something cold to drink  (I was drinking a glass of ice water at the time   [3]  ), I spoke with a soft lisp. BF said he found that little tic of mine to be “adorable.”

I thought he was nucking futs, and told him so.

 

 

What was he talking about – nobody had ever said anything like that to me?!  For some reason, moiself  was…not pleased. But I asked a couple of close friends, who confirmed BF’s observation.  The next night I telephoned my parents, and my mother filled me in.

“Oh, I haven’t thought of that in years – don’t you remember?” she began.

Up until age eight or nine I apparently spoke with a slight lisp. I say “apparently” because I have no recollection of having done so.  But after the afore-mentioned memory spark inspired me to phone home, my mother confirmed that, yes, I’d spoken with a “minor” lisp as a child.  Mom said that they (my parents) had consulted with my early teachers (grades K-2), who advised *against* giving me any speech treatment or therapy. Their reasoning was that I was an early and confident reader, a “social leader” among the other students,   [4]  and a straight A student. In other words, my lisp did not seem to be an impediment in my life. It was barely obvious to adults, and I wasn’t teased about it by other children.  Why risk singling me out and making me feel like there was something wrong with me?

However, my third-grade teacher advocated for speech therapy, which my parents agreed to. Thus, for a couple of months I got excused from class, twice a week in the afternoon, to go to a special group therapy meeting, with other kids in the school who also lisped.

Wait a minute, Mom, seriously? Wouldn’t I remember this?

It took me a moment, and then I had the face-palming realization:

Holy Misarticulated sibilants –THAT was speech therapy?!?!?

 

 

I had completely forgotten about that group.

Indeed, for a period of a little less than two months, third-grader moiself  got to leave class a couple of times a week, during afternoon reading sessions, to join a group of four or five other kids (all of them younger than I and in the first or second grades), and we got to play board games.

As the memory came back, I recalled thinking at the time that the games were somewhat childish – but, hey, it got me out of class and doing something different.  Also, my teacher and the nice young woman (the speech therapist, although I didn’t know that that’s what she was) who ran the games acted like it was an honor to be chosen for the group.

The games consisted of the participant students rolling dice and hopping their game tokens around a game board.  When you landed on certain squares you had to draw a card from the pile of cards next to that square, and pronounce the words or describe the pictures and/or actions being depicted on the cards – all of which…hmmm…started with an S, or sometimes a Z or Th  (“Three sealions are serving seaweed soup and sandwiches to Sally.“)   The speech therapist looking on would make some comments about pronunciation, but after the first few sessions she mostly hung back, as the students began to correct one another.  And then we’d get candy, or some kind of prize.

 

 

Here is where the Teachers  [5]  Doing Their Job Right ® comes in.

I’ve heard other adults tell of how they (or their children) were embarrassed for needing special help in school – whether for speech or physical or academic impediments – in part because of how they were singled out and/or removed from class to receive the tutoring they needed.  Not only did I have no shame whatsoever in going to (what I did not realize was) speech therapy, I thought it was yet another privilege I was given, like being able to go to The Back Of The Class without asking for my teacher’s permission.

The Back Of The Class, consisting of a table and two bookshelves, was the class’s mini-library.  Those students who finished their work early during individual project times (and who had been deemed by the teacher to be mature enough to self-monitor their behavior) could get up from their desks, quietly go to the back of the room, and take whatever book they wanted from the library back to their desk.

 

 

I consistently finished my in-class assignments earlier than the other students. My teacher noted this early on in the school year; she also noted how I got easily bored (and prone to mischief involving distracting my peers) when I had nothing to do.  She wisely instituted the “class library policy,” and so I got to read Kon Tiki (for what seemed like 20 times) and other adventure stories, instead of just sitting in my seat fidgeting while my classmates finished their math worksheets, handwriting practice, etc.

My teacher had already enlisted me in helping other students with their multiplication tables and spelling lists; it was an easy leap for moiself  to think that the speech therapy board games were yet another way in which I was being recruited to help Other Kids ®.  The teacher’s and therapist’s deft handling of the situation – aided in part by my own cluelessness – had me thinking that I was getting rewarded for academic success by being able to leave class –  *not* having to stay after class, or miss part of recess or lunch break – and go play games (even if it was with other kids who talked funny).

 

*   *   *

Departments Of One Of The Word’s Cruelest Ironies

BTW: Whose brilliant idea was it, for the word lisp to have an s in it?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Keeping The Relationship Fresh,
Chapter 198 In A Never-Ending Series

Dateline: January 2; MH and I go for a “Second Day”   hike  [6]  at the newly opened Chehalem Ridge Nature Reserve. The reserve is home to upland forests, oak woodlands wetlands and other habits, and its ten miles of intersecting trails offers several lovely views of the Tualatin Valley, Mt. Hood, and other Willamette Valley/Portland Metro area sights.  The area’s recent snowfalls were an added hiking bonus (read: a challenge, re icy trails), and were a good backdrop for other kinds of nature observations, such as this picture MH took, and posted on FB:

 

MH’s caption: “Can anyone identify this scat with a size 13 shoe for scale?”

 

MH received comments, ranging from helpful to guffaw-worthy, in response to his question.  The science/biology-minded folks got into comments re color and texture, while others just enjoyed the possibility for thinly-disguised poop jokes.

Moiself’s contributions included:

– It’s slightly greenish, with the striations that may be… Plant matter?… Fur? But it’s not pellets so it’s not a deer or other ungulate
– Our biology-trained daughter (who has also worked with big cats) thinks it’s bobcat scat, and that the striations are fur, not plant matter.

 Other scoops on the (presumed) poop:

– The tapered end and size makes me think Coyote.
The green is odd, was it near a wetland?
-To me it looks like a cat’s fur ball hack…
which would explain the fur and greenish liquid oozing.

Then, this past Monday morning, I saw that MH had made an addition to his post:

“I tried googling for bobcat hair balls. There’s a video of a bobcat bringing one up, but I didn’t come across any good pictures. There was this lengthy page that includes stories of domestic vs bobcat….”

To which moiself  had to reply:

“I tried googling for bobcat hair balls.”
Now, there’s an afternoon well spent.

I have heard that *gentle* teasing can keep a relationship young.   [7]  That may be debatable, but surely one of the more fulfilling aspects of a decades-long relationship is discovering something that you are surprised to know about your partner. Never would I have predicted, as a new bride over thirty-some years ago, that a sentence containing the phrase “…googling for bobcat hairballs” would ever be used by my beloved.

 

 

*   *   *

Punz For The Day
Scat Edition

Did you hear about the monkey who was arrested for throwing its feces at zoo patrons?
She was charged with Turd debris assault.

Why did the Packy the elephant bring toilet paper to the zebra’s birthday bash?
Because Packy was a party pooper.

Remember, dog owners, when you walk the dog you have to pick up its poop.
It’s your doo diligence.

Why is Chuck Norris’s dog trained to pick up its own poop?
Because Chuck Norris doesn’t take shit from any one.

Chuck Norris doesn’t flush the toilet.
He scares the shit out of it.

Yeah, I know, scat is typically used to denote animal feces, but I’ve heard that making at least one Chuck Norris Joke ®  – aka, reciting a Chuck Norris “fact” – at the beginning of the year is a guarantee of good fortune in the weeks to come.   [8]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of The Bonus Round Of You-Know-Who Jokes

(Happy New Year to son K, who once brought me to helpless tears of stomach-cramping, snotty-nosed laughter when he loaned me his Chuck Norris Factbook to read while we were seated in a booth in a restaurant, waiting for our lunch to arrive).

* Chuck Norris doesn’t read books.
He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

* The flu gets a Chuck Norris shot every year.

* When Chuck Norris plays dodgeball, the balls dodge him.

* Chuck Norris doesn’t worry about high gas prices. His vehicles run on fear.

* The Dead Sea was alive before Chuck Norris swam there.

* When Chuck Norris was born, he drove his mom home from the hospital.

* There is no theory of evolution, just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.

 

* Death once had a near-Chuck-Norris experience.

* There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.

* MC Hammer learned the hard way that Chuck Norris can touch this.

* Chuck Norris has been to Mars. That’s why there are no signs of life there.

* Chuck Norris can strangle you with a cordless phone.

* If Chuck Norris traveled to an alternate dimension in which there was another
Chuck Norris and they both fought, they would both win.

* Chuck Norris’ farts smell like freshly baked cinnamon rolls.

*   *   *

Okay; I gotta get control here.  Seriously; somebody stop me; this could go on forever.

* Chuck Norris counted to infinity — twice.

 

 

*   *   *

May you have a legitimate reason for “googling hairballs;”
May you cherish memories of a really good teacher;
May you read a series of Chuck Norris jokes that makes you laugh so hard
you fear a proverbial pants-wetting session may ensue;

 

Chuck Norris peed here.

 

…and may the (continent) hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] All together now: specifically, mothers.

[2] I am not in anyway implying that teachers should be immune from critique…and I have *plenty* of I-can’t-believe-they-did-this examples from my own life as a student, who had to deal with massive teacher fails.

[3] His theory was that the ice numbed my tongue, making it easy for my mouth and tongue to slip back into my former lisp, which I was subconsciously controlling…or something like that.

[4] Is that teacher-speak for, “bossy?”

[5] I include the speech therapist in that category.

[6]  “First Day Hikes are part of a nationwide initiative led by America’s State Parks to encourage people to get outdoors.  On New Year’s Day, hundreds of free, guided hikes will be organized in all 50 states….” (from “First Day Hikes,” American Hiking Society )

[7] That, and appreciation – or at least toleration – of fart jokes.  And, this should go without saying (so I’ll type it,) farts.

[8] That is something I just made up.  But it makes as much sense as any of the “Doing _____ will guarantee good luck in the new year!” prescriptions I’ve ever heard.

The Heroes I’m Not Worshipping

December 3, 2021

Robyn Parnell community, extended family, family life, friends, hiking, Holidays, Holy Shit!, making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, Me so happy, nature, Oregon, science, travel, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes!, Zoo , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Heroes I’m Not Worshipping

Department Of Holy Mother Of Romulus And Remus –
I Saw An Effin’ Wolf

Dateline: Wednesday, circa 12:45 pm, Oregon highway 26, headed west (toward the coast), at about milepost 15 or 16. The movement from the north (right) side of the road caught my eye; in the micro-mico-millisecond it took me to register the movement I took my foot off the accelerator and thought,

Oh, great, a deer is about to spring across the road.

There was no springing. That micro-micro movement morphed into an elegant running creature, crossing the two-lane highway, a mere 20-30 feet ahead of me.  The animal was the size of a deer but definitely not a deer; my mind immediately tried to register, “coyote,” except that I’ve seen plenty of coyotes running across roads (or fields) or loping on/crossing hiking trails ahead of me. This canid was the size of a deer and had long, thin legs and different body posture from a coyote (its long tail was horizontal to its spine, not tucked, as a coyote’s would be).  I’ve never seen a canid run like that, the way it held its large, majestic head, so very upright, like one of those carousel animals….

 

The wolf’s head was like this, vis-à-vis its posture…but nothing remotely zebra-ish otherwise

 

Yes, moiself  knows I am babbling right now, but holy fuck, this is the first wolf I’ve seen this close  [1]   and I am (still, two days later) gobsmacked.  Oh, but for a camera mounted on my car’s front bumper!

There are wolves in Oregon.  Many (but not all) of them are tagged (for tracking/ study purposes), and most live in the eastern part of the state, although wolves can and do roam…and a few of Oregon’s have roamed as far as So Cal .  The one which crossed the road in front of me appeared to be heading toward Tillamook county…looking for a cheese fix, perhaps?

*   *   *

Department Of Life Is So Unfair

Yet another of life’s inequities to ponder:

If you donate a kidney, everybody loves you and you’re a total hero.

But try donating five kidneys and suddenly everyone is yelling
and the police get involved….

 

*   *   *

Department Of Sunday In The Park With George

Tuesday In The Park With Robyn

 

 

Apologies to the late Stephen Sondheim.  I’m sure the opening to moiself’s  blog would have been better if Sondheim had composed it, given the complex polyphony which was his style.    [2]   May we all take a moment to pause to remember and appreciate he-who-was-arguably among the greatest of American lyricists and composers.

 

Bravo, Stephen.

 

 

And now, three vignettes of my Tuesday In The Park.

Dateline: Tuesday, circa 7: 15 am.  Which way shall I go this morning? I decide to do the to-and-from to a light rail station which, given my circuitous route, will be a 3-3.5 mile jaunt.  I take one of the trails leading through a neighborhood park, when what to my wondering eyes did appear

 

 

I pause to document the odd (to me) sight, then post the picture on my Facebook page, soliciting explanations:

“OK; what’s the story here? A fire extinguisher, about 25 yards from the nearest house, under a tree, in a bunch of wet leaves?”

There were some creative hypotheses.  I liked my daughter Belle’s offering best:

“They were deep frying a turkey and forgot to bring that back in.”

Vignette the Second

Department Of Appreciating A Form Of Reasoning Which
Is The Process Of Drawing A Conclusion
Based On Premises Generally Assumed To Be True;
As In, Using A Logical Premise To Reach A Logical Conclusion.

Same morning walk, 20 minutes later: now the sun is trying to rise above the cloudy horizon. I’m taking a winding road through a neighborhood adjacent to the park, a road I traverse at least once a week on my way to the walkway which leads to the afore-mentioned light rail station.  As moiself  rounds a corner I exchange good morning greetings with a couple I have come to know by sight.  They and their three canine companions are out for (what I assume is) the morning ritual of dog owners everywhere: that which moiself  thinks of as the “P Five” – the Puppy People’s Predawn Poop Perambulation. ®

It appears my presumptions are spot-on.  A the couple passes by on the other side of the street I notice that the (presumed) husband has two plastic bags of (presumed) doggie-doody swinging from a strap around his wrist.

Ain’t deductive reasoning grand?  Truly, ’tis a cognitive process we often take for granted… until we meet a #45 conspiracy theorist who wouldn’t know the concept of deductive reasoning from his ass if it were wrapped in a MAGA hat and sticking out of a hole in the ground.   [3]

 

 

Vinaigrette the Third

Department Of Later That Same Morning…

I have reached the station and am headed home.  I am walking on a pathway near the athletic fields west of the station. Yet another dog-walking couple with whom I have an I Hi-there-we-pass-each-other-at-least-once-a-week relationship    [4]   are walking toward me.  As we approach each other we all look skyward at the same time, toward the sounds of at least five different, low-flying, scraggly V formations of Canada geese, calling out to their comrades as they head southeast to…wherever.

The man points his finger upward and says,

“That’s a very nice sound, isn’t it?”

Moiself  points to my rain-or-shine hat, then at their respective visors, and replies:

“Yes, it is.
And it’s very nice – and very smart – of us to have hats on
when we’re walking underneath flying birds.”

The three of us chuckle as we pass one another, our mirth punctuated by the sound of…uh, plops… from overhead landing on the grass on either side of the walkway.

 

“I hate it when they wear protection.”  “Yeah; we’ll get ’em next time.”

 

Department Of Belated Content Warnings

Moiself  just realized I missed the opportunity to apply a content warning to the previous segments: two of my three park vignettes involved a mention of shit “animal droppings.”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Kill Your Heroes

Dateline: a week or so ago, MH and I were discussing a recent podcast we’d both (separately) listened to, in which one of the stories presented involved an immigrant Chinese worker exploited by a railroad baron.  We somehow segued to the subject of power, as in, having power over the lives of others, and how easy it is to draw lines and reach binary conclusions, particularly when we judge the wielding of power in the past.  Railroad tycoon = bad.  Chinese railroad worker = good.

It’s an interesting subject to ponder: how would the immigrant railroad worker have behaved if he’d been the one with the power?  Perhaps he was downtrodden at work; what about when he returned home where, as a man in a patriarchal society, he had power over others simply by virtue of his gender?  Would he have shared his power with his wife and daughters? Would he have encouraged their own dreams and aspirations, or subjected them to foot binding and/or denied them access to education as per the other cultural torture norms of his time and place?

 

 

No matter what our intentions, moiself  thinks it’s healthy to keep a certain supposition in mind:   [5]  that most if not all of us may be just a couple of rungs on the authority ladder away from being the despots our descendants might denigrate.

Moiself  remembers the less-than-positive reaction I have garnered over the years, when I’ve been asked the question, “Who are your heroes?” and I’ve replied, truthfully, “I have no heroes.”

There are historical figures whom I admire for specific things they did: causes they fought for, injustices they tried to right, etc.  That said, I do not believe in having “heroes” because it seems that we – and by “we” I mean, every human being but moiself  ( ahem, I mean of course, every human being *including* moiself  ) – do not know how to apply perspective – that is, how to consider so-called heroic people for the flawed human beings they are.

 

 

Some great scientist will – someday very soon, I hope – discover the key to fixing global warming.  But, years later when it is revealed that she was, say, consistently rude to waiters and others in the service industry and disparaged anyone whom she considered to be “beneath” her, our descendants will argue over whether or not such a practitioner of classism should have a high school named after her…and should the Nobel committee rescind the prize they bestowed upon her?

Early 20th century activist Margaret Sanger was inspired (in part by her own family history) to work to liberate women from early death and abject poverty due to their lack of bodily autonomy which consigned them to lives of serial breeding.  Sanger withstood withering criticism, ostracization, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats to her life, from individuals and powerful organizations (read: the Catholic church) alike, not only for advocating birth control, but also for simply teaching women about their own bodies and reproductive cycles – which was illegal!

Sanger strongly believed that the ability to control family size was crucial to ending the cycle of women’s poverty. But it was illegal to distribute birth control information. Working as a visiting nurse, she frequented the homes of poor immigrants, often with large families and wives whose health was impaired by too many pregnancies, miscarriages, or in desperation botched abortions. Often, too, immigrant wives would ask her to tell them “the secret,” presuming that educated white women like Sanger knew how to limit family size. Sanger made it her mission to 1) provide women with birth control information and 2) repeal the federal Comstock Law, which prohibited the distribution of obscene materials through the mails, and regarded birth control information as such.
( “Margaret Sanger,” womenshistory.org )

 

 

Margaret Sanger also made some comments which, taken out of time and context, are used as a cudgel – particularly during political campaigns by conservative, anti-abortion Republicans – to discredit Sanger and to brand her (and, by association, Planned Parenthood and any organization supporting birth control and women’s reproductive autonomy) –  as  “racist.” 

Sanger’s stated mission was to empower women to make their own reproductive choices. She did focus her efforts on minority communities, because that was where, due to poverty and limited access to health care, women were especially vulnerable to the effects of unplanned pregnancy. As she framed it, birth control was the fundamental women’s rights issue. “Enforced motherhood,” she wrote in 1914, “is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.”

That’s not to say that Sanger didn’t also make some deeply disturbing statements in support of eugenics, the now-discredited movement to improve the overall health and fitness of humankind through selective breeding…. She was, of course, not alone in this viewpoint: In the 1920s and 1930s, eugenics enjoyed widespread support from mainstream doctors, scientists and the general public.
( “What Margaret Sanger Really Said About Eugenics and Race,” Time, 10-14-16 )

What Margaret Sanger may or may not have thought about eugenics does not change her ground-breaking accomplishments in helping to unshackle generations of women from  lives of compulsory brood mare-ism.

 

 

Likewise, Nelson Mandela deserves high praise for his tenacious fight against the immorality of apartheid.  But if you elevate the man to a myth, you’ll be disappointed to find that your great moral hero sacrificed his family life to his causes (and expected them to do the same), did almost nothing to alleviate or even acknowledge the growing AIDS crisis in his country (he later admitted to being “shy” re talking about a sexually transmitted disease), and upheld and instituted economic policies which have kept poor South Africans living in much the same conditions as when they were under apartheid, while the country has had to live with “…growing insecurity, violence, and crime.”

The more you know about historical figures, the more material you will have for being disappointed in or by them.  They were creatures of their time, as we are, of ours.  Even the most prescient of us will be judged harshly by future generations.

So, admire the ideals and actions  [6]   of justice warriors – certainly!   But just as certainly, never worship the creatures behind the causes.  Don’t idolize *people;*  do venerate the high *principles* for which those flawed people have fought.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of A Blast From Christmas Past

Dateline: Southern California, in the late 1960s – early 1970s.  For some reason, for a few years in the Westchester area of Los Angeles the “in” holiday décor was having a giant (as in, eight to ten foot tall) red wooden candle in your front yard.  [7]   I’m 100% sure how the fad began; I seem to recall my Uncle Joe telling me that some guy had made one for his yard, his neighbors admired it and he made some more for them, and then other home carpenters/crafty-types figured it out, and it took off from there.

When visiting our LA relatives (my aunt and uncle, Gwen and Joe Baker, and their five children) during the Christmas season my family would drive around their neighborhood at night, just to see the big ass candles.  All of the yard candles had the same setup:  a lone red candle, with a spotlight illuminating the candle from base to the top.  At the base of the candle were wooden letters, painted white, spelling out the name of the family in whose yard the candle stood.  In two or three cases I can recall, the word at the base of the candle was, “Noel” or “Yule,” but for 99% of the candles it was the family name.

Uncle Joe was quite the carpenter hobbyist (one of my favorite creations of his was a motorized wooden Santa and elves display that he put out on the rooftop, every Christmas).  Joe constructed a Christmas yard candle for his family’s front yard, with their surname “Baker” prominently spotlighted.  A few days after my grandmother admired her daughter Gwen’s and SIL Joe’s yard candle, Joe drove down to Santa Ana and installed, in my grandmother’s front yard, the candle he had made for her.  Thus, Edna Gertrude Hole   [8]   became the only person in Santa Ana (as far as we knew) who had an eight-foot-tall red candle in her front yard with a spotlight illuminating her last name.

 

I haven’t been able to find any pictures of the Westchester yard candles.  Think of something like this, only made of wood, with a white top, eight feet tall, in someone’s front yard, with a sign at the base.

 

My grandmother left her yard candle up for that one holiday season.  The day after Christmas she telephoned Joe and asked him to come and fetch it.  The thrill wore off for her, the third or fourth night Edna Hole answered her doorbell – which had been rung by a person who’d been walking or driving by – and found herself listening to a total stranger sharing their concerns regarding her holiday décor:     [9]

“Excuse me, I don’t want to embarrass you, but I think you’ve misspelled, ‘Holy.’ “

*   *   *

Punz For The Day
Heroes-Not-To-Be-Worshipped Edition

Q. Why did Wonder Woman stop checking her email?
A. Her inbox was loaded with Spamazons.   [10]

If Iron Man and Silver Surfer teamed up, would they would be alloys?

Q.  What does Peter Parker say when people ask him what he does for a living?
A.  Web designer.

Have you heard of The Incredible Hulk’s new fashion line?
It’s all the rage.

 

*   *   *

May you see a wolf before you die (but not see it and then…die);
May you applaud the deeds and have forbearance for the deed-doers;
May your holiday yard décor provide confusion and/or entertainment
to passing strangers;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] The wild ones I saw in Alaska were much farther away, and the ones in zoos don’t “count.”

[2] Yeah, but could you hum along to it?

[3] Yes and obviously, I can mangle mix those metaphors with the best of them.

[4] But this couple has only one dog between them…which seems kinda stingy.

[5] This space does not need a footnote.

[6] Should, of course, those ideals and actions be truly admirable, as opposed to ill-considered, rash, or merely attention-seeking.

[7] And then, just three or four years after the fad started, no one put up the candles anymore.  What happened?

[8] Yes, that was her real (married) name.  She was born Edna Gertrude Moran; Hole was her husband’s family surname – apparently, it was prestigious name in the tiny Norwegian town they came from, but in America?  No surprise it never occurred to my mother to keep her birth surname.

[9] I always wondered, why didn’t she just remove her family name, and keep the candle?

[10] That’s enough with the footnotes.

The Temple I’m Not Joining

November 12, 2021

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, freethought/humanism, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, nature, Oregon, politics, reproductive rights, school, science, theatre, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Temple I’m Not Joining

Department Of First Things First

Fifty-one years ago today, the blast that was heard around the world.   [1]

Happy Exploding Whale Day, y’all.

 

 

*   *   *

In May 2014, The Satanic Temple scheduled a Black Mass to be held on the Harvard University campus, sponsored by the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club; the event was forced to relocate off campus due to significant opposition by Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and school administrators.
(Wikipedia, The Satanic Temple entry)

Department Of Arguably The Best Quote From A Documentary Filled With Zingers

“I think the participants felt discouraged after their permit  (to demonstrate) in Boston was denied.  And then it just occurred to me: this is the Catholic Church in Boston, which covered up decades of child rape, moved priests around, covered it up, let them continue their raping and child abuse… and then had the gall to say what *we’re* doing was sinful? I mean, fuck them.”
(a member of “The Satanic Temple” (TST), as quoted in, Hail, Satan?)

 

 

 

“The mission of The Satanic Temple, a religious organization, is to encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits.
The Satanic Temple has publicly confronted hate groups, fought for the abolition of corporal punishment in public schools, applied for equal representation when religious installations are placed on public property, provided religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women’s reproductive autonomy, exposed harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners in mental health care, organized clubs alongside other religious after-school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations, and engaged in other advocacy in accordance with our tenets.”
( mission statement, from The Satanic Temple website )

*   *   *

The Wiccan priest tried (unsuccessfully) to stifle rolling her eyes.  The man interviewing her had asked her to explain Wiccan beliefs but inserted a stereotypical inaccuracy before he gave her time to answer:

“So, you are devil worshippers?”

The Wiccan’s tone indicated that her patience was tried; obviously, this was not the first time she had been asked that question. She replied emphatically, and a bit wearily:

No, *we* don’t worship Satan.
*We* don’t believe in Satan, or devils or demons.
*Christians* are the ones who believe in the devil. Satan is a Christian god.”

 

 

 

The interview moiself  refers to happened many years ago, in a documentary I saw about the connections between Wicca and Paganism and Norse Mythology.  I thought of that interview last week when, thanks to daughter Belle’s recommendation, I watched Hail Satan?, the 2019 documentary which followed the rise of the grassroots activist organization, The Satanic Temple (TST).  Belle thought I would find the documentary entertaining and provocative – she was correct – and we had a fun back-and-forth texting about the subject matter.

Hail Satan?, as one reviewer put it, “puts the fun in satanic fundamentalism.”    [2]  In many places the film is downright hilarious…and also thought-provoking.

“For something that doesn’t move or talk, monuments have been the subject of much debate and deep feeling in recent years. And not just Confederate monuments, but also religious ones. And one of those debates played out in Arkansas, where State Senator Jason Rapert petitioned to erect a statue of the Ten Commandments outside the Capitol building in Little Rock. In response, a group called The Satanic Temple asked to have a monument of their choosing displayed on government property. It was of Baphomet, a goat-headed angel-winged icon. And let’s just say the offer wasn’t that well-received.

That fight and The Satanic Temple more broadly is the subject of a new documentary called “Hail Satan?” – that’s with a question mark. And it follows the founding of this group, which is bringing a puckish new voice to a very thoughtful and actually serious debate over religious freedom.”

( NPR, ” Filmmaker And Satanic Temple Leader Talk New Documentary,
 ‘Hail Satan?’  4-27-19)

 

 

Moiself  was chuckling throughout the film, especially at the moment whence the opening quote in this post is taken:  in Boston 2014, when The Satanic Temple had received permission to perform a Black Mass, and they were being picketed by Catholic priests and nuns and received so many threats they decided to call it off.    [3] A Satanic or Black Mass  [4]  is a grotesque mockery of the Catholic Mass, and is meant to be offensive to RC believers…but then, the Catholic Mass and other Christian churches’ communion rites – with their reenactments of ritualized cannibalism – can be offensive (or at least, bizarre and mystifying) to people of other beliefs.

So, there they were, in the middle ages twenty-first century, priests and nun in their robes, holding rosary beads, crucifixes,chalices, and other artifacts of “catholobelia”… [5]

 

 

and then you have the “Satanists,” in their robes and masks….

 

 

It was so funny, to see both sides in their respective, silly outfits.  Only the Satanists seemed to have any self-awareness about the whole thing – that this (religion) is all play acting/dress up.

Does moiself  think that any of those people involved with TST are, in fact Satanists – that they actually and sincerely “believe in” or “worship” Satan?

Hell no.

The impression I got was that TST organizers and the vast majority of members are part political/Constitutional/free speech activists, and part street theater/Merry Pranksters…with some Cosplay nerds devotees thrown in there as well.

Belle and I bantered with the question: Does TST do more harm than good, by using imagery and tactics that some people find sooooooooooooooooo offensive? Yes, and no.  And admittedly, there is a certain power to be had from disgusting, shocking, frightening, and angering your adversaries.  If you have personal, political, and/or ideological beefs with Christianity, what better way to get under a staunch Christian’s skin than to profess allegiance to that which they view as their polar opposite, whether or not you actually “believe in” your own silly deity (just as you don’t believe in their silly deity).

 

“Who you callin’ silly?”

 

And, analogous to how some rap stars often call themselves the N-word, many people believe that there is power in taking a pejorative which has been used against you and using it (on) yourself. As one of the TST members interviewed noted, for many Conservative and Evangelical Christians, any beliefs other than theirs are evil.  Thus, if you believe something other than their interpretation of their religion, you are under the influence of the devil – they are going to consider you evil or satanic anyway, so why not be proactive about it and claim the title yourself, under your terms, not theirs?

For moiself, one of the more uproarious moments documented in Hail Satan? occurred when TST took a page from the Mormon playbook of performing proxy baptisms (a ritual wherein a proxy for a deceased, non-Mormon person is baptized into the Mormon church   [6] ).  In order to incense and mock the notoriously homophobic Westborough Baptist Church founder, these antics ensued:

” A group of satanists say they’ve given the controversial Westboro Baptist Church a taste of its own medicine, performing a same-sex ritual at the grave of the mother of the church’s founder.
Members of the Satanist Temple performed on Sunday what its spokesman describes as a “pink mass,” an admittedly made-up ritual celebrating gay love, at the grave in Meridian, Miss.
Spokesman Lucien Greaves doffed a headdress made of horns as two male couples and a female couple recited scripture, lit candles, and made out over the grave.
Members then posthumously declared Catherine Johnston, the mother of Westboro’s founder Fred Phelps, a lesbian.”

(“Satanists Perform ‘Gay Ritual’ at Westboro Gravesite,” ABC news, 7-13)

Belle and I went back and forth re the tactics of TST, which we both found…the word “silly’ kept being used.   However seriously you do or don’t take TST, it seems to be a reaction to the abuse of power and religious discrimination promulgated by Christian culture and theology, rather than standing for something on its own.

However….

Many of TST‘s antics are actually well-informed public protests, and not just “giving the middle finger to the evangelical right.”  One high ranking TST organizer pointed out that “…we are really giving the state of Oklahoma a civics lesson,” referring to TST‘s fight to have their group’s goat-headed statue (“Baphomet“) displayed on public ground, after Oklahoma allowed Christian religious artifacts on the State Capitol lawn.   [7]

 

 

One lawyer quoted in the film said, “…from a constitutional law perspective I am really interested in the Satanic temple, because it is basically making these public bodies confront the real implications of their decisions to allow religion into the public square.”

 

 

The documentary gets into some very interesting, and serious and disturbing territory when it revisits the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s , a time when many innocent people’s lives were ruined via a series of bizarre, totally false and fabricated accusations of ritualized child rape. The founders of and teachers at the McMartin Preschool and so many others endured false charges of child abuse;    [8]   meanwhile, as records would later reveal, priests and other religious figures were actually abusing children, with impunity.

One TST member recalled how he, as a boy during the 1980s who loved to play Dungeons and Dragons,  was ostracized by his friends’ religious parents, who thought the D & D game had satanic connections:

“The ‘satanic panic,’ we now know, in an entirely verified and publicly known way, was projection.
*They* (Christian religious leaders) were doing it (abusing children).
I was playing D and D.”

 

 

*   *   *

Punz For The Day
The Devil Made Me Do It Edition

I’m writing a book about a guy who peddles shoe parts to Satan.
It’s your basic, “Sold My Sole To The Devil” novel.

Where does the devil do his dishes?
Helsinki.

Why couldn’t the Devil find any cheese?
There’s no whey in hell.

How do I know that Satan works at the DMV?
Because a priest said the devil takes many forms.

If the devil were to go bald…
I bet there would be hell toupee.

I want to get a job as a stunt devil who lights his butt on fire.
It’s just something I asspyre to.

 

 

 

*   *   *

May you keep in mind that the things you take seriously
may be silly – or disturbing – to others;
May you never attribute human failings – or successes – to supernatural beings;
May you honor Exploding Whale Day ® in your own special way;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Well, if your world consists of proud Oregonians.  And it should.

[2] “Hail Satan? puts the fun in Satanic fundamentalism.”  The Verge, 4-17-19

[3] Actually, they moved it to another location.

[4] Which TST was going to perform in private, as in, not open to the public.

[5] My term (I think) for such accoutrements.

[6] Yes, this batshit crazyass rite in the LDS church is a thing.

[7] The Satanists won that battle in court, as per a 2015 Oklahoma State Supreme Court decision.

[8]  And were ultimately acquitted of all charges…after a trial that lasted SEVEN YEARS and cost taxpayers 15 million dollars.

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