Just Wait for the Saturday Morning Cartoon (and matching Breakfast Cereal)

For some reason my children have this idea that yeast is a superhero. I believe this stems from several years ago, when they asked how bread is made. I've made sourdough, so I tried to explain that these invisible particles, called yeast, float through the air and land on the dough, eating the sugar. Their toddler-boy minds probably most enjoyed the description I gave them on how the little yeasties make the dough actually rise, but I'll leave that up to your imagination.

Anyhow, it's become quite a rock-paper-scissors-dynamite type game, where whomever claims to be the yeast ends up winning by default. For example:

Thing 1: "And then I'll be the giant who saves everybody."
Thing 2: "Then I'll be the Papa who saves everybody."
Thing 1: "Well, then I'll be the super-fast robot who wins."
Thing 2: "I am the super-fast robot whose batteries don't run out."
Thing 1: "Then I'll be the yeast."

At this point an awed silence comes over the both of them as they consider the wonder of this amazing creature.

I Have a Dream

That one day I will get up at 5:00 am. I will have a big, heavy camera and lug it out into the middle of an orchard. And I will take photos like Eugene Atget.

I will then lug my big, heavy silver plates into a darkroom at home and come out smelling like developer. And hang gorgeous black-and-white and sepia photos around my home.

I Wish We Had More Politicians

I am currently reading the autobiography of my new presidential hero, Calvin Coolidge. He had a hard life, but probably had more integrity than nearly all of our current politicians combined. He was named after his father, John Calvin Coolidge, and he named his two sons John and Calvin. Talk about some serious Puritan roots.

This is what he said about the presidency:

"It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. "

Now if we could only get more politicians like that, I wouldn't mind having a few more around.

Raising 21st Century Children

So the conversation in the car yesterday with my 6-year-old...

L: Mama, I wish my brain was a computer, then I would know everything.

Me: (after laughing) Are you really sure that computers know everything?

L: Yes! If you don't know something, you just put it in the computer, and the computer answers it for you!

Me: Uh-oh.

Very Old Fashioned Feminism

Reading Chesterton seems to be an inspiration to blog. Yesterday, reading a few more essays, I came across some of his statements on Victorianism and feminism which were extremely enlightening. Earlier this year I read a wonderful book, The Feminization of American Culture, by Ann Douglas, where she showed that 20th century feminism came straight out of Victorian sentimentalism. Chesterton clearly agrees with her, so now I know that she's right:

"This humourless hammering on one note is like the worst Victorian fads; Temperance or Feminism. It is especially like that very old-fashioned Feminism that hated to be feminine....It means that women dress like men; not that men dress like women. Now that is sheer stark, stale, dead Victorianism. That is the only original Woman's Rights Woman, who deliberately made herself hideous with bloomers and goggles." [emphasis mine].

Chesterton, himself, was the child of Victorians, and was born towards the very end of Queen Victoria's reign, so he saw what he was talking about. If you're saying to yourself, now that doesn't sound much like Victorianism to me--even by his adult years the definition of Victorianism had warped. Check this out:

"While the world has been talking about removing Victorian taboos, I have been resolved from the first to remove that one Victorian taboo; which really was a senseless and strangling taboo; the taboo on the topic of real religion, and its real and inevitable place in practical life. Most of the things the Moderns call Victorian taboos are about as Victorian as the Ten Commandments or the maxims of Confucius. But this really was Victorian, in the sense of having arisen recently in a vulgar, commercial and cowardly social system. It is not the notion that it is right or wrong to be a Moslem; it is the notion that it cannot really matter even to a Moslem that he is a Moslem. What is totally intolerable is the idea that everybody must pretend, for the sake of peace and decorum, that moral inspiration only comes from secular things...and cannot possibly come from spiritual things..." [emphasis his].

It looks as though as far as our age despises and scorns Victorianism, we are despising and scorning ourselves.

Chesterton for President

I had a rare find this weekend--Borders in town is going out of business, and I found a compilation of G.K. Chesterton's essays that I hadn't read yet! This one is called The Well and the Shallows and it is one of the last things he wrote, just before World War II. I know the guy was a journalist, not a politician, but I still would have voted for him--if I ever could have. Here's some of the gems:

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent those mistakes from being corrected."

"The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school."

"Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion."

Good News in the Middle East

So if Egypt and Tunisia sound like the last place you want to be, check out this that happened this past week. Of course, it is barely mentioned on major news networks. Southern Sudan is nearly entirely Christian, while the north is predominantly Muslim.