Good News in the Fort

(1) It's raining again! Rained last week, rained the week before, we've got more rain coming this weekend, if you can believe the weather guys. For the first time in two summers, the grass is green in my yard and along the roads and in the meadows. And little flowers blooming wild everywhere. Redbuds! Clover flowers! Tiny little pink things in the grass! The kid stopped in the middle of our walk to the library yesterday to say to me, "What are those?" Um, flowers... It's so pretty, it brings tears to my eyes. (And you know me, I'm stony-hearted feminist. Nothing makes me cry.) No one is saying so out loud, lest we hex the weather demons, but we're hoping maybe the drought has ended.

(2) Three separate students came to me this week to tell me how easy they were finding this guy Chaucer to read these days. "This middle English isn't so hard." "Hey, how come Chaucer's so easy all of a sudden?" "Is Canterbury Tales just easier than Troilus and Criseyde or did we get better?" Ah, how I love it when students learn.

(3) Not only rain? Bright and cool spring weather. Almost as good as snowy winter weather, for my taste.

(4) I'm writing like a woman possessed again and -- here comes spring break!

(5) The car, which we thought was broken, turned out to be only a little broken. So, while we still need to buy a new one, not just now. Which is good, since we are stony-broke ourselves. (Yes, this qualifies as good news.)

(6) San Antonio, TX, I find, is only 9 hours from the Fort. Also good news, since I'm going to the CEA in April and it's in San Antonio. I'll only have to spend one day driving across Texas. Yay!

(7) As I mentioned in 4, Spring Break!

Oh yeah...

Now I remember why I don't shop at Wal-Mart...

Yesterday was the night my writing group meets, so I stopped at Wal-Mart on the way home from picking the kid up from school, because it is right on the way between our house and her school, and all I needed was a loaf of the white bread the kid eats (yes, she insists on white bread. without crusts: we're trying to break her of it, but so far, well), and I just didn't have time to go across town to the Harp's on Apostate Row.

Anyway. The Wall was its usual nightmare: lines stretching to infinity, even in the 20-items-or-Less line (the Grammar Nazi in me grits its teeth -- 20-items-or-FEWER, that should be), swarms of people with heaping carts lurching about, candy and bad food piled in mountains, idiot magazines shouting from every surface about who's been boffing whom and what diet will work and when Jesus will return...I got my bread and we got in the shortest 20-items-or-less checkout we could find, and waited and waited and waited. The kid is telling me her latest saga, about a dragon who got turned into a princesses and then found her dragon friends would no longer play with her. It's pretty good. I tell her she should write it down.

Finally we hove near the checker. He's about 19, smirky. The woman in front of me looks exhausted. She is buying the cheapest sort of white bread, a sack of oranges, a sack of apples, a half gallon of Wal-Mart milk. He asks how her day has been. She says fine. He says, not at all nicely, "You don't sound convinced of that."

She gives him a look. He's 19, did I mention that? She's at least 35.

He keeps on checking out her stuff. Gives her the total. She runs her credit card. He says, as we're waiting for her card to clear, to me and to her and to the guy behind me, who looks as tired and worn as she does -- this is the Fort, remember, where the average income is about ten thousand dollars -- he says, holding up one of those donor cut-outs, "Hey, anyone want to give some money away to lazy poor people?"

I look at him. The woman in front of me looks at him. The guy behind me, who's about 40, looks at him. None of us says a thing.

He seems to realize we don't think he's cute or funny. He says, handing the woman her credit card slip to sign, "Well, it's not like the money is going to teach them to fish, or buying them farms, or whatever. It's just giving them food."

"Right," I said. "Feeding the hungry. The bastards."

Mr. Snotty looked confused. And shocked. Probably at the bastards. People don't cuss in teh Fort.

The woman glanced at me, took her bag of groceries, and left.

Mr. Snot rang up my loaf of bread. I left.

I wish I had added, "Wonder what Jesus would think of that?" to what I said. Because I bet Mr. Snotty goes to church on Sundays.

I also wish I had said Yes when he asked if anyone wanted to give any money to lazy poor people. But I was so busy being outraged at his snottiness that it didn't occur to me.

Grr.

I also should have gotten his stupid fucking name and turned him in.

Man, I need to learn to think faster.

Honey....?

If you want to know what academics do for fun, this is it:

http://waste.typepad.com/waste/2006/03/i_have_a_thorou.html


(I'll tell you you what -- it makes me consider something I've never considered before. What if Plato was just fucking kidding? What if all the Dialogues are just, like, really dry Monty Python routines? Wouldn't that be a hoot?)



(Via my hero, Dr. Bitch:

http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/)

So I says to my students...

This was my freshman comp class this morning.

We're talking about interpretation, and how different folk can read the same work, or see the same movie, and nevertheless experience different results.

My students aren't getting it. It's the same movie. How could different people watch the same movie and see a different movie?

"It's like the five blind men and the elephant," I say.

They stare at me as though I am speaking Ancient Greek.

"You know," I say. "The five blind guys who go out to look at the elephant?"

No. They don't know. They have never heard this fable.

And my class last year had never heard Aesop's story of the dog in the manger. When I said someone in a story was a dog in a manger, they had no clue what I meant.

These kids today.

(So I switched tactics, btw. I went to Brokeback Mountain. All right, I said. Let's suppose all of us in this room go to see Brokeback Mountain -- which is still playing, right here in Fort Smith, something that boggles me every time I think of it -- the class erupted in wails of dismay, they were not going to see Brokeback Mountain, not even in theory, not even in supposition, laws a mercy, heavens no! -- let's suppose we did, I said, do you suppose we would be seeing the same movie, all of us in this room? No, said the rude punk in the back row, because not all of us are fags. Not quite the uncivil way I would put it, son, I told him, but precisely. Those of us who aren't too scared to see the movie would see one movie. Those of us who are frightened, well, they'd be seeing another, wouldn't they? And so on.)

Conversation While Folding Laundry

The kid, folding her socks: oh, no.

mr. delagar: what?

The kid: my socks have come out an uneven number.

Me: that's odd.




(Sorry. Can't help it. It's the only math joke I've ever made. And the kid loved it. She's good at math, not like her parents. She gave me this long suspicious look, and then rolled around on the bed giggling. "That's odd!" she kept saying. "That's odd!")

Here

This is the cost of the parental consent law the "pro-life" folk love so much:

http://www.ms4c.org/update/598bell.htm

(Via Pandagon: http://www.pandagon.net/)

Coulter Tells Lies

Here's a paragraph from Ms. Coulter's latest column, which I am not linking to, because the woman is such a liar I won't give her a link, but you can Google it if you want to read the rest of her evil hateful nasty vile:

The box office numbers for this year's favorite, "Brokeback Mountain," are more jealously guarded than the nuclear codes in the president's black box. Hollywood liberals want the government to release everything we know about al-Zarqawi, but refuse to release the number of people who have seen "Brokeback Mountain."

And here's my question for you: how stupid does this woman think we are?

Well, not us, I suppose. We're not her audience. Conservative idiots are her audience and maybe they are this stupid. All I myself get is EW, which has the box office numbers in that little chart in the back, and I know better than this -- but come on. Refuse to release the number of people who have seen Brokeback Mountain? Not only are they releasing that number daily, it's, like, common knowledge, how many people have seen Brokeback Mountain. For a bit there I was running a fracking tally of the number of people who had seen Brokeback Mountain! I'd check it first thing when I got to school in the morning! I'd come home every afternoon and tell mr delagar about it! I'd email folks the count! People got sick of hearing from me! Refusing to release the number?

And there are folk out there who believe Ms. Anne?

Well, yes. Apparently so.

I Blame Bush

Well, who else would I blame?

This is a post about what's up at the grocery story, and with the power company, and the gas company, and at the pumps.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticing how much harder it is to get from one end of the month to the next these days.

"What's the deal?" mr. delagar demanded of me last night. "Why don't we have any money any more?"

I didn't smack him, because, you know, I'm a sweet woman, I am.

I just pointed out to him a few rough things that had happened over the past few months -- Spike's eye injury, and the car trouble, and me getting slapped in the hospital for a suspected tumor, and the kid's nine weeks of therapy, which the insurance did not cover -- and told him he might add on to all that what the entire country had been going through this year.

Which is that all of us have, in fact, seen our electric bills and our gas bills and our gasoline bills double, at least. Grocery bills and clothing bills have also increased -- well, clothing bills did not increase for me, because we haven't bought clothes. No money left for clothes in the delagar household. Not after paying medical bills.

But grocery bills? We walk into the grocery store these days, buy almost nothing -- nearly no meat, no junk, nothing fancy -- and walk out with a bill for over a hundred bucks. For just basic food. (Well, okay: I do buy organic milk and free range eggs and free range chicken -- those are my three luxuries -- but except for the milk, which *is* pricey, none of those are much more than the regular goods.) For three people. One of them only seven. What's happened here? Why is food so expensive?

Because fuel is so expensive. It costs more to ship the groceries, so they cost more. And it costs more to cool and store them -- more to run the grocery itself. Prices everywhere have increased. The only thing that hasn't increased is my salary, or mr. delagar's.

In fact, my salary looks like it might get cut -- already the university is talking about raising the caps for summer classes, and cutting those that don't meet the caps. No summer pay for you!

Charming.

Here's more from mouse:

http://amousehole.blogspot.com/2006/01/this-little-thing-thats-been-buggin-me.html

Making Bagels

mr. delagar's family owned a bakery in trenton for five generations -- this is an adaptation of the recipe they used in their bakery. It's not the same receipe, because their bakery kept kosher, which I don't, yikes, don't tell mr. delagar about the butter on the baking sheet, will you? and I've made some other changes. But the product is, all the same, satisfactory. Even mr. delagar has to admit that.


You’re going to need

(1) Good flour. By this I mean a high protein flour of some sort. I recommend King Arthur white flour. Feel free to ignore me at your own peril. But I’ll just tell you what I have learned in all my years of cooking and baking: The One True Thing: Good Product comes from caring about what you do, and starting with good ingredients.

So go get the right flour, damn you. And DON’T use any of that snotty whole wheat flour, thinking you’re going to make these bagels good for you, or I will haunt your dreams. Yes I will.

(2) You also need barley malt syrup. You can get this at health food stores. I don’t know where else you can get it. If you live in the real world, and not Arkansas, it’s probably available in gas stations.

(3) Aside from good flour and barley malt syrup, you need only water, salt, yeast, and oil. Isn’t this cool? Oh, also toppings, if you’re the sort who wants to fancy up the bagel.

Okay. Here we go.

Take two cups of really cold water. Ice water works best. Put it in your industrial grade mixer. I use a Kitchen Aid stand-up mixer. If you don’t have one, use what you have. You can even mix bagels by hand and I used to before I married mr. delagar and he brought the Kitchen-Aid into the marriage. Gives you strong wrists, mixing bagels by hand.

Mix one cup of flour, the yeast – about a spoon full – and a spoon full of salt, and a spoon full of oil, and a spoon full of barley malt syrup, in with the water.

Mix the whole lot for one minute. Add another cup of flour. Mix another minute. Add another cup. Mix another minute.

When you get to clean up – when the flour comes away from the sides of the bowl and starts adhering to the mixer paddle, in other words -- start adding flour in smaller increments, about a fourth of a cup, but keep mixing for a minute each time. Switch to the dough hook if you’re using a Kitchen-Aid around this point. If you’re mixing by hand switch to stronger music on your i-pod and keep kneading.

Knead/mix for about ten to fifteen minutes altogether. When the dough is very nearly not sticky but still just a tiny bit sticky, stop. It’ll be a stiff dough but not really dry. Put it in an oiled bowl. Cover, let it rise for an hour.

Punch down, cut it into eight or nine bits. Shape by rolling into snakes and then hooking the ends together. You need to wet the ends and roll them together and smush them to get them to stick. Even then you’ll have to be really firm with them. Don’t take no for an answer.

Put the shaped bagels on a greased baking sheet. I grease my baking sheet with butter because I like how that makes the bagels taste, but use what you like.

Have a five quart pot filled with water started on the stove. Have the oven heating to 400 degrees. Put a spoon full of malt syrup in the water.

Let the bagels rise for about 15 minutes, while the water heats and boils. Once the water’s boiling good, drop the bagels into it. Boil one side 30 seconds, flip and boil the other side another 30 seconds. You can boil 3 or 4 bagels at a time, depending on how big your pot is.

Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel. If you’re the sort who likes bagels with stuff on them, sprinkle stuff on them while they’re still damp. (Stuff: sesame seeds, Kosher salt, poppy seeds, minced dried onions, whatever strikes your fancy.)

Put the bagels on the greasy cookie sheet and stick that sucker in the 400 degree oven.

Bake for 15 minutes. Flip the bagels over.

Bake another 15 minutes. Take them out. Cool.

They freeze well, or you can eat them all now.

Grading Midterms

And it's way depressing.

I always hate exams. Why haven't these students learned what I was teaching? Why am I not a better teacher? What is the point of anything?

All that.

Fearing Cylons

I'm driving the kid to school this morning, when she says, meditatively, from the back seat, "You know, those Cylons are scary."

"Well," I say. "They can be."

She's eating a waffle, because, as usual, we are late. She chews it awhile, and then says, "I know why most Cylons are beautiful women."

I bite my tongue, hard, and I mean I actually on it, to keep from spilling out a raging lecture on why most Cylons are beautiful women, the misogyny of American culture, rant, rant, and instead say, really calmly, I swear, "Yes? Why is that?"

"Well," she says, "it's to show you that things are not what they appear. You think something is pretty and nice and then BOOM! It blows up your ship."

"Huh," I said. "I like that one."

"Why do Cylons have everything like humans, though?" she asked. "Bones like humans and blood like humans and sweat like humans? I don't--"

"Here's the real question," I interrupt, unable to contain myself. "How are Cylons not like humans?"

She chews on her waffle, thoughtfully.

"Humans say Cylons aren't human," I agree, "but they look human to me. They have human bodies and human emotions and they bleed and they hurt and they die. How aren't they human?"

"Well," she said. "Cylons blow up your ship."

I laugh.

"Also," she said, pleased with herself, "they can do that thing where they jump to that copy of themselves. That's not human."

"Excellent points," I agree. "I suppose that's not human."

We drive for a bit.

"On the other hand," I say, "don't humans blow up Cylon ships?"

"Well, yes," the kid concedes.

"And you remember when the humans were burying their dead pilots? What did they say? They said they would meet again in a better world? That sure sounds like they believe their souls jump somewhere after their bodies die. How's that different from what the Cylons do, in any essential sense?"

She pondered this.

"It's true," I said, "on the other hand, that the Cylons attacked the humans without warning and blew up their planets with nuclear weapons. But the story also tells us that the humans enslaved and oppressed the Cylons -- created them in order to enslave and oppress them. And what do humans call Cylons?"

"Toasters."

"What kind of a word is that?"

She thought it over. "A mocking one?"

"A racist one," I said.

"Hey!"

"Well," I said. "So I'm not sure what to think about the humans here. The Cylons are a bit scary. But the humans scare me too."

Which I'm starting to think is the point of the show.

It Burns!

Russ over at Barely Legal writes about the experience of having a liberal parent turn conservative on you. His experience doesn't exactly match mine, but it's close enough to sting.

My mother was in all sorts of female empowerment groups in the early 70s. She was an Indian Health Nurse (the only health care on an entire reservation) when she was 22 where she would explain to Indian women in Cree that they didn't have to be just squaws and that they should start practicing birth control and take control of their lives. While this makes for an interesting woman, it also makes for a bizarre mother. When I was 12, I remember calling a woman a "chick" and getting a stern lecture from my mother about the equality of the sexes.

Then my mother stopped working for the government and opened up her own business. Slowly, government bureaucracy and shiftless employees drove her to the brink of madness. That's right, she began listening to conservative talk radio. She claimed to be older and wiser but crazy things would come out of her mouth like, "How would you like to have been adopted by a couple of homosexuals. That should be illegal." Now, instead of getting lectures about women's equality I have to listen to, "You better do right by that girl. A woman has to depend on a man," and "A man's life is empty without the direction a woman provides from the home." The woman who once rode in an elevator with the prime minister of Canada and lectured him about women's rights would now prefer to listening to her idol, Dr. Laura Schlesinger.

http://barelylegalblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/feminism.html

There's more.

Ha.

Crossing the parking lot this morning I saw one of those magnets, like the yellow Support-the-Troops magnets, but this one was jet black, and said SUPPORT PIRACY!

All right, then.

Zelda Does It Again

I love it when Zelda writes about her Nanny --

Go see:

http://darcy12.blogspot.com/2006/03/warm-weather-brings-tornados-bummer.html

Social Darwinism, Anyone?

Very good post on why not over on GreyThumb.Blog:


One of my favorite papers in evolutionary biology, which I have mentioned here before, is this:

Muir, W.M., and D.L. Liggett, 1995a. Group selection for adaptation to multiple-hen cages: selection program and responses. Poultry Sci. 74: s1:101.*

It outlines the group selection effects observed when trying to breed chickens for increased egg production in multiple-hen cage environments. In short, selecting individual chickens for increased productivity in a group environment didn't select for increased productivity. Instead, it selected for mean chickens. The result was an overall reduction in productivity. Only by selecting at the group level was productivity increased.This is a great experiment because it illustrates why evolutionary theory cannot be reduced to the phrase "survival of the fittest."

That phrase isn't technically wrong, but it neglects so much that it might as well be. "Survival of the fittest" is either meaningless or misleading. It's like saying that mountain climbing is just "walking upward" while neglecting to discuss proper supplies, fitness training, establishment of base camps, selecting the proper climbing group, atmospheric oxygen considerations, and... the fact that you don't always walk upward. Sometimes you have to walk sideways, or downward, to get to the top.

So how does this chicken paper relate to Enron? Well, it turns out that Enron sorta reproduced this experiment through their corporate human resources policies. (Are you shuddering yet?)

Read on:

http://www.greythumb.org/blog/index.php?/archives/80-Eugenics-doesnt-work.-Ask-why,-asshole..html


(Oh, and BTW? This is why Zelda's (http://darcy12.blogspot.com/) Least Favorite Professor is wrong to scoff at the school of Poultry Science, up there on the hill. Just for the record.)