In case you needed one

Another reason to despise the Wall:

A Wal-Mart in Tampa thinks a black guy with a big check has to be a thief:

Pitts, local human resources manager for GAF Materials Corp., called the Wal-Mart Supercenter at 11110 Causeway Blvd. in the morning to order 520 holiday gift cards for employees. The white, female worker who normally did the task was on vacation. The company had spent about $50,000 a year on gift cards at the local Wal-Mart for several years.

Store employees assured him it wouldn't be a problem. The roofing system manufacturer gave Pitts a check for $13,600, and he left to pick up the gift cards.

Pitts, who wore khaki pants and a button-down dress shirt, arrived at the Wal-Mart customer service desk about 1:15 p.m. and found the cards ready.

But first, he was told, managers needed to verify the check.

Pitts gave them his GAF business card, driver's license and numbers to Citibank, GAF's bank. The company's accounting supervisor told Wal-Mart over the phone that the check was good. GAF, based in Wayne, N.J., is the nation's biggest roofing systems maker, with $1.6 billion in 2004 revenue.

At least two black clerks watching the situation told Pitts he was being subjected to such scrutiny because he is black. They told him other companies made similar purchases that day without such interrogations.

Wait! There's more!

Hillsborough County sheriff's deputies arrived, responding to a call from store managers about a possible forged check.

Pitts said one of the officers grabbed his arm, causing him to pull away.

Hey! Doesn't he know that's resisting arrest?

And this isn't the first time, either:

Last summer, Wal-Mart managers at an Eagan, Minn., store accused Gayle Bryant of using a bad check to buy $92.69 worth of bottled water and household goods, news reports said. Managers called police, who waited for her to leave the store and then stopped her for questioning.

Bryant said she was targeted because she is black.

http://www.tampatrib.com/MGBK6Q0HRGE.html

To be fair, of course, this likely is not Wal-Mart policy. This is the racism of Wal-Mart employees -- which is to say, the racism of typical Americans. Nor can the caliber of the average Wal-Mart employee be much, considering what Wal-Mart pays -- anyone who can, moves on as soon as possible, I imagine. Anyone who stays is no doubt angry and looking for someone to take it out on.

Which doesn't excuse anything.

Wal-Mart ought to be educating its employees against racial profiling. For that matter, it ought to be paying its employees enough that they aren't taking their hate out on their customers.

The Kid Makes Me Nuts

Now y'all know me. I loves me some dialect. I love teaching the History of the English Language class, here at the Fort, mainly because in the second half of the class I get to teach dialects. So I have nothing, nothing, mind you, against dialects.

On the other hand: the kid has taken to saying "ain't," every chance she gets, in this utter hick accent, and it is driving me m-a-a-ad.

Which I made the parental error of letting her know, early on.

"I ain't going to," she said, about something. (Ain't pronounced like a'yunt, only all one syllable, it's appalling how low-rent it sound, well, I'm appalled, and you know me, I don't have class issues -- well, I thought I didn't--)

"You ayunt?" I said. "What are you, from Arkansas?"

This was a bad mistake. Since then she's been fitting ayunt into every sentence she can. Giggling madly when she does it. Today, I'm suffering from my fortnightly migraine -- "My head is killing me," I say.

"It ain't," the kid declares.

I glower at her.

"Well," she points out, beaming with delight, "you ain't dead."

Developing!

Apparently, not only have we evil Secular Humanists declared a War on Christmas, but now we are launching a War on Thanksgiving (Why do I never get the Memos?). Go here for details:

http://christianconservative.blogspot.com/2005/11/happy-thanksgiving.html

While we're on the subject, I'd like to give Christian Conservatives a bit of homework: look up that word secularist, would you, please?

Here's what secularist means: "one who believes that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs or public education."

Not an atheist, not one who isn't religious, not evil Satan-worshipping demon: just someone who happens to believe that religion should be kept in one sphere, and civil matters in another. Someone like, oh, Thomas Jefferson. Ben Franklin.

War on Christmas

Our university has just put up its holiday decorations -- immense they are, and very shiny, lots of lights and very festive.

So I'm leaving my office with the kid, who had a day off and spent it with me. She's trying to read the giant decorative light outside my building from the reverse. "S-E-A-- What does that say?" she demands.

"That one says Season's Greetings," I said.

She frowned. "Why does it say that?"

"Well," I explain, "if it said Merry Christmas, it would just be talking to the Christians, right? But if it says Season's Greetings, then it's talking to Christians, and Jews, and Muslims, and anyone who celebrates a holiday around this time."

I swear to you, her face absolutely lit with delight. "It's talking to me!" she said. "It's talking to us!"

Then yesterday? I pick her up from school and we're driving to Aikido and she's singing one of the two existing Hannukah songs (O Hannukah O Hannukah) and I say, "Did you sing that in music class today?"

"No," she says. "If we sang songs in music, they would be Christmas carols."

Like, duh, you idiot.

And? In Wal-Mart? We're looking at all the bake-your-own Christmas crap? She asks me why there aren't any Hannukah cookies or Hannukah candies (we can't even get Hannukah candles in the Fort). I tried to explain that if we lived in other parts of the country, there would be, but I don't think she believed me.

So do I have a lot of sympathy for Mr. O'Reilly and his faux-War? I fucking well do not. He can fucking well bite me, in fact.

Him and all his lying weasel friends.

Wal-Mart Fucks America

TBogg has a good post up on the details:

http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2005/11/dropping-your-standard-of-living-as.html

This has been irking me for about a decade now. All over Arkansas, everywhere here in the Fort, folks claim they "have" to shop at the Wall, because things are so much cheaper there. Yes, certainly. Cheaper because Wal-Mart is being subsidized by your tax dollars, you berk. Because you're paying Wal-Mart's health insurance bill. Because you're paying for food stamps for Wal-Mart's employees and the ER bill when the children of Wal-Mart employees get sick -- that's why your fucking underwear is so fucking cheap, you fucking bint.

Not that I'm the least bit hysterical about this or anything.

And then, because it's where all my students end up working, and they all end up "full-time" employees, working 33 hours a week for six dollars an hour and no benefits, because what other options are there in the Fort, and most of them cannot afford to move, not with three kids and a husband who hasn't paid child support in five years, well, it's a never-ending story, isn't it?

New Orleans

DED Space links to a Katrina story --

http://dedspace.blogspot.com/2005/11/katrina-story.html

that makes me sad and angry, though not surprised.

New Orleans has sort of fallen off most people's screens these days. I hear about it, because of my family. Metairie, where most of my family lives, is partly up and running again, my mother tells me; but New Orleans itself is not.

My youngest brother lives in the city. His house still has no power, though he says power crews are "supposed" to be coming through soon. He and his wife are nearly the only ones living in their neighborhood at the moment. One house down the block is also occupied, and another house several streets over -- and this is typical, apparently. Only about 15% of the population of New Orleans has returned.

Shops aren't opened. Stores that do open, close by five, for the most part. Houses are decayed and fallen. My mother says the landscape is gray. Places burn down frequently. At night, the city is utterly dark, and utterly silent.

My brothers went to the French Quarter on Halloween evening. They said it was bizarre. (Halloween, you might know, was, or used to be, a huge deal in the Quarter.) They said it was like a J. Crew Halloween.

Oh, what's been done to my city.

Pride and Prejudice

We took the kid to see two movies over the TNX holiday, Zathura and Pride and Prejudice. She loved them both; so did I. (mr. delagar confessed to being a bit bored in Zathura, but then I suspect he did not find the astronaut as charmingly sexy as I did. A charmingly sexy astronaut will go a long way toward distracting me.)

Anyway, this P&P is the best yet, I think. It's got the best Mr. Collins ever, and while I don't think it handles Mr. Wickham very well, all the other characters are brilliantly done, including Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth. And it's done just excellent with the class issues -- it touches deftly on the real peril of the Bennett situation and lets the audience, at least, see that yes, Elizabeth does, in fact, have her head in the clouds just a touch, if she thinks she can afford to marry for love.

It also captures all the background detail wonderfully -- the scenery and the lighting and the clothing and the farmyards and the servants and the dogs -- those are all perfect. The ballroom scenes! The kid was bouncing in her chair with delight over the ballroom scenes.

Also, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy's sexual attraction -- repressed and violent, played with amazing beauty. The actors did an amazing job with this. As did the director.

(For an opposing view, see this guy,

http://catholicanalysis.blogspot.com/2005/11/movie-review-pride-and-prejudice.html

who apparently thinks people should not desire one another sexually previous to marriage -- I guess that's what he thinks -- and that previous to 1960 no one ever looked at anyone else's butt. Yes, of course. That's why Victorians put out more porn than any other generation on the planet, son.)

Anyway, I highly recommend the new P&P. I loved that six hour BBC version, but this one is even better.

(mr. delagar, at Pride and Prejudice, looking around the packed theater about six minutes before the previews start: "I think I'm the only guy in here."

I look around too. "Nah. Look. There's one, with his mother.")

The Rude One Speaks

The Rude Pundit on Coulter:

"You can dismiss Coulter's mad brain as a belfry filled with those flying rats, but she is the seething evil id of the
right, daring others to cross her line."

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/

Yep. And this is why -- much as many might like to dismiss her as harmless and a joke -- she, like her animus figure, Rush, is scary.

It's not so much that she says what they all want to say -- though she does -- as that, by saying the truly evil things she says, she moves the boundaries: and thus allows the Right to say, each day, things that are just a little bit more evil. It's the function of every trickster figure in every culture. She and Rush are the Right's own Loki puppets. It's not what they say that matters -- it's the changes they leave in their wake.

Thanksgiving

We stopped visiting family for Thanksgiving about five years ago, here at the delagar household. It makes us much happier about the holiday, frankly.

So today, instead of waking up after having driven miles & miles to be somewhere we don't especially want to be, we woke in the chilly dusk of an Arkansas fall morning, and have been, since, idly preparing a feast for just the three of us -- a turkey (which we got free from our local Harps -- it's Employee Owned, the Harps, and sells free-range chicken, and organic vegetables, and milk from a local dairy that comes in glass bottles and has Nothing Added! and tastes wonderful, we love our Harps, they gave us the free turkey because we bought more than a hundred dollars worth of groceries last Friday) and rolls (I'll attach my recipe) and pumpkin pie (mr. delagar made that, so I don't know the recipe) and some of those sweet potatoes with marshmellows but not raisins because the kid does not believe in cooked raisins and grilled asparagus (you can have the recipe for that too if you like) -- and in between making all of this, I've been working on revising the third novel in my trilogy and mr. delagar has been composing and the kid, well, she's still working her way through Black Adder. "What's a leper?" she asks. "What's a dingle?" "What's typhoid?"

We've bought her a children's dictionary. It's infuriating what those things don't contain.

On the other hand: "What's a tosser?" she asks.

Now that one I'm relieved to find the children's dictionary won't define, I admit.

Here's the recipe for my rolls:

One cup ice-cold milk. Marshall's dairy makes the best milk, but if you don't live here, do what you can.
Two eggs. Free-range organic are the best.
One Tbs yeast
One tsp salt
One tsp sweetening -- any sort, honey, brown sugar, maple, whatever suits you
Two tbs butter, soft or melted

Mix. Add in some bread flour. King Arthur Bread flour is the best sort. But if you can't get that, just use any sort of bread flour. It MUST be bread flour, though. Keep adding bread flour and mixing (if you have an industrial mixer, mix one minute after every half cup of flour you add; if you're kneading by hand, you have my sympathy, and just knead as long as you can stand it) until you have a good stiff smooth dough, almost but not quite not sticky.

Set that sucker to rise about an hour. Punch down after an hour. Rise again, another hour. Punch down again. One more hour. Punch down, shape into rolls, put in a well-buttered pan -- I use a round pan, but that's only because my pan is round. I also make round rolls, but it's only because I always have. Rolls about the size of my fist. You should have started the oven heating to 400 somewhere in here.

Let them rise about 20 minutes. Bake about 20-25 minutes. Eat with real actual butter. Honey is also nice.


The Asparagus.

Get skinny aparagus. Little puppies. Wash'em. Snap off the tops, throw the bottoms away. Put them in a big shallow pan. Put about a tablespoon of good olive oil on them. Toss'em around. Sprinkle with Kosher salt. Put under the broiler for about six minutes. Eat like French fries. The kid loves these.

Why Do We Have Kids

Except to torment them?

So the kid is still studying her Black Adder text assidiously, and it contains a whole section on Medieval Medicine, with various ways leeches were used for this cure and that cure. She's munching Tater Skins while she reads.

I eat one. I eat another. She is reading me bits about leech cures. I eat another, and say, "You know, these are dried leeches."

She looks at the Tater Skin she is about to eat, and looks at me. "It isn't."

"Is too."

She considers it. "Leeches aren't this color," she declares.

"Well, sure. Not until you cook them."

She considers some more. "Leeches aren't flat."

"Right, the factory flattens them during the process."

She regards me with deep suspicion. "It says Tater Skins on the bag," she points out.

"Of course it does. Who would eat a chip called Dried Leeches?"

She didn't fall for it, though. She's gotten too clever. My brother Ben, on the other hand. He would have fallen for that one until he was ten or eleven, at least.

The Kid Strikes Again

Two days ago the kid found a copy of the Black Adder scripts in our local public library -- all the scripts, in one volume -- and has since been reading them with a Talmudic intensity that is almost unbearably charming.

Or it would be if she didn't keep demanding that we supply historical annotations, definitions of obscure words, and disquisitions on just why certain puns are or are not funny. Which behavior, frankly? Gets old after the second or third hour.

Anyway.

Last night, she's kneeling by the ottoman, her favorite study position, reading intently, and abruptly she says, "Daddy."

"What, sweetness?" mr. delagar says.

"Does prick have two meanings?"

Here, Here, Here, Here

HERE you go.

Here is why being an atheist is the right and moral way to go:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

My two favorite paragraphs:

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, "How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do." So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

(Hat tip to the Other Liberal Professor.)

Fat America

Every semester in my ENGL 1213 class, which requires a research paper, I have two or three students who write on dieting or on weight loss or on various weight loss methods -- one this semester is writing on bariatric surgery as the sure-fire way to reduce the rate of morbid obesity in this country. Usually the students who write are wan girls of around nineteen, who weigh in at about 122 and walk with their heads down, and who earnestly tell me, when I try to point them toward the articles that show that being a bit overweight really isn't bad for one's health, that "people" really just want to lose weight because "they" will "feel better about themselves." All the while never once looking me in the eye.

Here's an article looking over the whole obesity mess one more time.

http://www.csicop.org/si/2005-09/obesity.html

It doesn't really say much that's new, but it says it clearly. I like this paragraph especially:

In spite of the fact that there are virtually no controlled clinical trials examining the effects of obesity in people, we can make some inferences from animal research. Investigations performed by Ernsberger and his colleagues have shown that, over time, weight cycling (temporary weight loss followed by a regain of that weight, otherwise known as yo-yoing) in obese laboratory animals increases blood pressure, enlarges the heart, damages the kidney, increases abdominal fat deposits, and promotes further weight gain (Ernsberger and Koletsky 1993; Ernsberger et al. 1996; Ernsberger and Koletsky 1999). This indicates that the yo-yo effect of crash dieting may be the cause of many of the problems we attribute to simply being fat.

That's the one you can't get people to hear -- people like my mother, who has been on diet after diet for the past fifty years, and who insists to me that if she "ever" stopped dieting she would weigh a thousand pounds, and yet keeps losing and regaining the same twenty pounds. And meanwhile along the way, like so many of my students, has done speed and diet pills and diuretics and Atkins and this lunatic diet and that insane regime and is currently, I believe, doing a mix of Weight Watchers and those no-fat/no-carb foods everyone thinks will work so well -- yikes.

I've got feminist issues about this (what else?) mainly because I had food issues as an adolescent: I remember trying to make myself thin enough to be acceptable to the world. I remember what it was like, trying to like on 1200 calories a day. I remember a life when all I could think about was food. This was high school, mind you. When I ought to have been thinking about algebra and physics and Latin: I was thinking about how much beef broth I could have for dinner and whether I could have four crackers or five with it. All afternoon I would think about that. And how many miles I would have to run, if I ate ten crackers instead.

Because I focused, from grades nine through eleven, on trying to make my body fit some magazine image, I did not focus on what I ought to have been focusing on (not, I admit, that it would have made much difference: I was, after all, attending what was likely the worst high school in Jefferson Parish, Riverdale High: but nonetheless.

My young women students, many of them, are in the same place. They are focusing, not on studying biology or algebra or work for my class, but on how much they weigh, how much they have eaten, how much they can eat, how much they ate yesterday, do their bellies stick out, did they run far enough last night -- if they're obsessing over their weight, as America tells them to do, they are not obsessing over my class.

Which is just wrong.

Some Housman for Today

Yonder see the morning break:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what's to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I've done my best
And all's to do again.

A question

I’m teaching Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in my Lit of Diverse Culture’s Class (we’ve gotten to the Feminist Lit part of the class) and we were discussing the bit where Woolf says women previous to the 20th century really couldn’t write well because they were too hampered by their cultures, unable to travel or have educations, and by the critics around them telling them constantly that women couldn’t say this and mustn’t think that, that they weren’t smart enough, and so that women were, as a result, too limited, too angry, too poor – I was delving into this idea with the students, seeing what they thought of this, with side excursions into Woolf’s classism (which gets really evil in that text, I’d forgotten how vicious she was about the working classes, all in the most polite manner possible, of course: that is, she is totally blind to her own prejudices), and one of my students asked about the anger issue, did I think that was true, that you couldn’t write well if you were writing out of anger, or other strong emotions?

“Ah,” I said. “Well,” I said.

They waited, expectant.

“See,” I said.

“Here’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t think that. But that’s because I write pretty much entirely out of anger myself. So you might want to reckon whether I’m able to give you a clear answer to that question.”

Now they’re staring at me, like hungry wolves. “What do you write?” they demand.

“Can we read it?” they demand.

“No, you can’t read it!” I said. “Hell, no, you can’t read it!”

And I got the class back onto Woolf, swiftly.

But here’s my question: what do I do about questions like that?

I’ve had students want my blog address before. Sometimes I give it to them, sometimes not. Depends on the student and how reliable I think that student is – students who want to read my short stories and novels, I have always demurred. (One or two are published, but I can count on students not being able to find them, as obscure as the publications are.)

My impulse is not to let students read anything I write, you know, EVER.

On the other hand, I make them let me read what they write: they have no choice about it. So it hardly seems fair, does it?