OmegaMom

First off, did you know that the S&P 500 dropped 1235.05 points at one point this afternoon, hovering around 132?

Really!  Let me show you:

I saw that little lovely this afternoon while waiting for the DJIA to close, and just wanted to pass it on.  According to MSNBC’s little chart, it happened five times today!  Whoo! 

Of course, the reality, as shown by CNN, is much less exciting. 

Methinks someone has some code issues with 2/29, frankly.  Or code issues in general.  It was pretty amazing to see, though!  Even the most bearish of bears don’t think the markets will fall 99% in a day.

For those who are looking for a laugh, and a basic explanation of what’s causing the mortgage/financial mess, you need to take a look at The Subprime Primer (warning:  many F-bombs!).

For some more amusement, Our Fearless Leader saying "I don’t think we’re headed to recession."  As a few wags have put it, "He’s right!  We’re not headed to a recession–we’re in one now!"  I won’t inflict my many gloom-mongering links on you, but if you’re interested, just take a look at Calculated Risk or The Housing Bubble Blog in my blogroll to the left.

I need to add a finance or economy tag to my blog categories…

Those were the numbers that caused the IRS to send us a notice that we owed them $3,051 and some cents in back taxes and penalties.

That was the notice that gave OmegaDad and I heart attacks yesterday when we received it.

The reason?  "For one or more of your dependents the last name doesn’t match our records or the records provided by the Social Security Administration.  As a result, we didn’t allow one or more of your exemptions.  This change may affect your taxable income, tax, or any of the following credits: Credit for Child & Dependent Care Expenses; Education Credits; Child Tax Credit; Additional Child Tax Credit."

Seriously.  My eyes bugged out.  OmegaDad was hyperventilating that we were about to encounter an International Adoption Horror Story, courtesy of the Social Security Administration.  What?  Don’t they believe that OmegaDotter is our dotter?!

I frantically fired up the ol’ laptop and pulled up our tax return.  I looked at the information I had put in for OmegaDotter.  And there it was, in all its glory:  I had put in for OmegaDotter’s social security number the easy placeholder of 123-45-6789, because I didn’t have her card nearby and I was going to look for the number later when I did more work on the return.  And then I forgot about it.  TurboTax didn’t flag the when I ran the tax return error check routine, just before I printed the thing out and mailed it.

So first thing this a.m., I called the number listed.  I waded through the menu.  I reached a human being remarkably quickly.  The human being, Davis, had a smooth and mellow voice and a calm manner.  The IRS, unlike other financial entities, doesn’t take your word for who you are right away; you have to give lots of information to reassure them that you’re really who you say you are.

Davis informed me that they get lots of returns with the SSN 123-45-6789.  So far as he knows, that SSN doesn’t exist.

Anyway, unlike most people, I found my interaction with the IRS pleasant, quick (relatively), and painless.  Aside from my repeated banging my head against the table for my idiocy in doing this in the first place.

So, a friendly warning–if you’d like to avoid such a notice in your mail, do yourself a favor: don’t put a placeholder in the place of a real live SSN.

(Note:  As suggested by commenters, I forwarded my info about the email to Snopes.)

I like my blog.  It’s a nice, cozy place, where I get to rant and rave and philosophize about whatever I want, and inflict pictures of my darling dotter or other members of the family on The Public.  It skeeves me out that blog scrapers come by on a regular basis, grab a paragraph and a link, and then slap it up on a blog-ad-site (blad?) filled with AdSense ads, but it’s certainly better than folks who grab your entire blog, change some details, and publish it as their own (I’ve encountered this a few times, second- or third-hand).  It bothers me that there are people out there who will steal your pictures of your life, your child, and pretend the pictures are their own, illustrating their own life.

I can actually sort of understand it, though.  There are people out there who yearn after validation, who want to be seen as creative, as kind, as loving, as beautiful–whatever image it is that they are seeking, and stealing, they’ve got a serious self-image problem.  While I think plagiarizing like that sucks dead toads and should be the object of scorn and contumely, I also feel sorry for these folks.

But what the hell possesses people to start up an email with a lie?  You don’t know ahead of time that your email is going to go viral…

OmegaGranny recently sent me a forwarded email.  There were two lines of text, and 26 photos.  The text read: 

Entries for an art contest at the Hirshorn Modern Art Gallery in DC

The rule was that the artist could use only one sheet of paper.

The photos–the photos were awe-inspiring.  Fascinating.  Lovely.  Amazing.  Beautiful.  Quirky.  Sad.  Thought-provoking.

The photos were also very familiar to me.  I was dubious that these were the work of multiple people, because I could swear I had seen these very same pieces of artwork on one person’s website.  But I wasn’t sure.

So first I went off to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  I couldn’t find anything that related to an "art contest".  I did an advanced Google search of the entire website, and didn’t find anything.

I went to Snopes, just to see if they had anything listed.  Nope. 

So then I googled "paper art".  Because I was sure I had seen these pictures before.

And lo and behold, the very first link that shows up when you google "paper art" is the site of Peter Callesen, a Scandinavian artist who has been creating paper art for years.  Every single one of those 26 photos is directly from his website.  He’s been published in books, he has had oodles of shows in Europe (none at the Hirshhorn, by the way), he has permanent art up on display in various corporate places.

He’s a "name".  It’s his work.

Why?  Why would someone send out an email claiming his artwork is the result of an anonymous collection of art contest entrants?  Why on earth didn’t they just say, "OMG.  You have to see this guy’s artwork!  He’s a genius!"?  There’s no need to actually copy the photos (a violation of copyright) and send them on in an email–just provide a link to his website.

What is the motivation in doing something like this?  The person who originally sent the very first email (first in a long chain, trust me, because googling the text pulled up a large number of hits) knew that what s/he was doing was telling an outright lie about the artwork.  Why deny the artist of his recognition?  This man has worked long and hard establishing a reputation in the art world.  Why steal it and apply it to no-one in particular?

Gah.  It’s frustrating to me.  Anyway, as a result of that email, I have a post for the day, and I have a website to point y’all to.  Go look at Peter’s website.  Enjoy his artwork.  It’s amazing.

When I lived in the S.F. Bay area, I often thought that if the area had any sort of winter weather at all, it would never have gained the popularity and population that it has.  Mainly I was thinking of the effect ice would have on life there.

So here I am in Alaska, coming to the last third of my first winter here.  We’ve dealt with large amounts of snow that pile up and pack down on the roads.  We’ve dealt with darkness…deepest, darkest darkness.  We’ve dealt with weeks’ worth of below zero weather.

Now.  Now we have Nice Weather!  Sunshine!  Temperatures in the 30s and lower 40s, or more!  And the dangers that have lurked beneath that snowpack are swiftly being revealed.

To wit:  Ice.

Snow-packed roads and driveways are a pain (you have no idea where the road edge really is, and have to blindly follow the drivers before you, like a lemming, hoping that they’ve got a better idea than you).  But the snowpack is, really, eminently driveable.  Underneath the packed snow, however, is packed snow that has become ice.  And when the sun shines on that ice and warms it up, you get a nice slick layer of cold water on top of ice.  And when the temperature still drops beneath 32F at night, you get more ice.  Nice, smooth, slick, slippery ice.

Drivers on the main roads around town have worn down all the ice and the roads are clear.  On the side roads, not as much.  And driveways?  Ack.  The phrase "sheet of ice" applies.

Our driveway has a gentle incline, so while our wheels give a few spins here and there as we go up to the house, so far it’s been okay.

But some of our neighbors…their driveways are going up a hill.  It’s nothing compared to the hills of the Bay Area, but it’s still more of an incline than our driveway.  During my smoke breaks in the past few days, I’ve watched twice as visitors to my neighbors have striven (strived?) to drive up the driveways, only to reach a point where the car wheels completely stop gripping the road and their cars slowly and gently start sliding downwards in what ends up being a sideways motion.

My assumption was that people who have lived in Alaska a long while know how to drive on ice.  Right?  Wouldn’t you think that’s a fairly natural assumption to make?

Living in the mountains of the southwest, for us ice was a rare event.  Oh, we got lots of huge snows.  But generally the strength of the sunlight would melt through the snow before it ever really became ice.  So we’d get–maybe–two or three days when the roads up to the higher portions of Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods would become icy enough that we’d have to either do some fancy maneuvering up the icy spots or else try one of the less steep roads up. 

But honestly.  That was enough driving on ice to give us some basics.  Like, if you’re sliding downwards, sideways, on a driveway, perhaps the best thing to do would be to turn your car wheels so that you’re not going sideways?  After all, aiming your car in the direction the car is moving allows a certain amount more control.  And perhaps punching on the accelerator as you’re going downhill is a bad idea?  And perhaps you should tap on the brakes a few times as you’re going downhill so that you don’t do a fine out-of-control donut at the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the driveway and smash your car into the eight-foot-high bank of packed snow leftover by the snowplows.  All of which has happened.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.  We would never have considered the incline of the driveway when thinking of the house we were purchasing.  We thought about floodplains.  We thought about commute distance for OmegaDad.  We thought about being as far away as possible from the trains and the highways.  But ice?  Didn’t even think of it.

(Alert readers may note that there’s a comment down on Part I from "LASIK complications".  After some thought, I let that one in because–even though I feel that the folks behind the LASIK complications site have an agenda–anyone who is considering LASIK needs to understand that there are risks and those are your only pair of eyes.  But also take a look at PubMed listed studies about LASIK and come to your own conclusions.  Since I generally think that people who read me are Thoughtful, Intelligent, Respectful People [aren't you??], that probably goes without saying after all…)

There was no question as to who I’d use for the surgery–all my elderly relatives in Arizona who had had cataract or other eye surgeries had used one or another affiliate of the Barnet-Dulaney group, generally well-respected folk who were on the cutting-edge of eye surgery research.  Word had it that every one of the docs there had gotten PK or LASIK done to their eyes as well–sort of putting their money where their eyes were, as it were.  They were pricey–$2000 per eye–but every time I saw "bargain rate" LASIK ads, a shiver of fear would go through my body.  And Grandma was paying for it.  And she said "Get the best!"

First, you go get your eyeballs measured.  They have to be able to tell if your cornea is thick enough to be blasted by a laser.  Ahem.  Just wrap your brains around that phrase for a moment or two:  Is your cornea thick enough to be blasted by a laser?!?!  They also have to figure out if the pressure in your eyeballs is too high, whether you’ve got an astigmatism which would complicate the contouring, etc.

Then the day of the big event came along.  I was alternately thrilled and terrified.  At the time, BD did two days of LASIK surgery per week, Thursday and Friday, giving the patient time to recuperate over the weekend.  So I had a coworker drive me over on Thursday morning, and got into the cattle line.

Oh, yes, make no mistake:  it’s a truly Ford-like assembly line approach they’ve got going.  At the very start, you get one-on-one, where the doctor and nurse make sure you’re absolutely positively thoroughly sure you want to do this, they give you a goodly dose of valium, and then you get into the feedlot.

The feedlot being a huge waiting and recovery room filled with comfy recliners, dim light, music, and a herd of pre- and post-LASIK folks zoned out on valium, waiting for their turn or recuperating.

It’s somewhat surreal to be zoned on valium at the same time you are maximally uptight about being blasted by a laser!!! while listening to Muzak and swapping poor-eyesight-war stories with the guys in the recliner on either side of you.

Then it’s your turn.  You get loaded onto a gurney and pass under the industrial-size clock that looks like a brown circle with a white center with fuzzy brown blobs at roughly the quarters of the clock, and through the swinging double-doors into the operating theatre.  Where they have four LASIK operations going on at once.  I tell ya, these folks were making real money off this procedure–and this was back in 1998!

So there you are, lying on your back, about to subject your one and only pair of eyes to the awesome power of being blasted by a laser!!!, and the doc and nurse come to you and explain they’re going to just pop an eyelid stretcher into your eye.  My immediate thought was, "They’re what?!  I’m not going to be able to handle this!"  At which point, the nurse stretches your eyes open, the doc’s hand swoops down until your eyes go cross-eyed trying to focus on the black ring he’s holding, and poof! your eyes are forcefully held open and it doesn’t hurt or scare you after all.

That valium is good stuff, I tell ya!

And then the doc positions this huge piece of machinery over your head and slices an ultrathin slice of corneal flap so quickly you hardly remember it.  Then he asks you to focus on the pinpoint red light above you.

If you’ve got 20/600 vision, "focusing on the red light" is sort of an oxymoron.  The best you can do is try.  And the "pinpoint" red light is actually a great big fuzzy sparkling red blob.  But, hey, okay–the man wants you to focus on it, so you do your best.

Then the doc says, "Here we go.  Keep focusing on the red light."

At which point, he flips a switch.

And the road construction workers who were cleverly hidden in the operating theater go to work, full blast.

KRRRR-THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA-KRRRR-THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA

It sounds like a jackhammer.  It’s not like lasers in the movies, that make a nice, discreet "Brrrp!"  And as the jackhammer is hammering away in the background, the great big fuzzy sparkling red blob you are focusing gets clearer…and sharper…and clearer…and sharper…until it’s a tiny, brilliant red speck in the darkness above you.

The whole thing takes 30 seconds.

Then they switch eyes and do the same thing for the second eye.

Then they wheel you out.

Just like that.  Wham, bam, thank you Ma’am.

They wheeled poor ol’ valium-doped me back into the recovery room, in a different recliner, taped great big bug-like metal sieve things over each eye, and let me recuperate.  I glanced back at the operating room doors, and realized that the industrial clock, previously a brown and white circular blob, was now in clear and utter focus.  I was halfway across a room that measured at least 50′ long, and the clock was in focus.  I could read the minute marks!!!  I looked around, through my bug-like eye coverings, and saw everything in the room as if it were etched in glass.

(Cue angelic chorus singing "Ahhhhhh!")

I had to wear the buggy eye-coverings for two days.  I had to use special eyedrops for a month.  My eyes felt gravelly for a week.  And that was it.

Folks, I tell ya:  It’s a bloody miracle.

Now for the less miraculous news:  They undercorrected my left eye.  The whole deal included an option to go back for a recorrection within a year, and, looking back, I should have done it.  But it took so very much gumption to risk my eyeballs the one time that I couldn’t bring myself to do it a second time, and then time passed, and then, by the time I was ready to do it again, the year had already passed.  Bummer!  So I had 20/20 vision in one eye and 20/50 in the other.  And, alas, my eyeballs continued their ever-increasing nearsightedness, so at this point, I think I have 20/30 in one eye and 20/60 in the other.  I do need a very light prescription to drive as a result of my wimpiness.  But y’know what?  Even with that, I think LASIK is the miracle surgery.  I highly recommend it. 

Just don’t go to one of the fly-by-night operators that advertise "LASIK for $500!"

Tangent:  I’ve written before how certain songs just yank me right back into an emotional state/gestalt memory of where I was and what I was feeling at a particular time.  "I can see clearly now" places me in freshman year in high school, eating lunch in the extra classroom that was used as a lunchroom in Small Private School, eating canned tuna salad.  BLAM.  I am there, immersed in a flash from the past.

At which point, I take a moment to turn to OmegaGranny and tell her, in all seriousness, "Ma.  Ma, I hated that canned tuna salad you sent for lunch for me.  Sorry!"  It was made with sweet pickles!  Ack!  I hate sweet pickles.  Sweet pickles are a blight upon the surface of human gastronomy.

I am also immediately a gawky, plump teen with pimples, shy and lonely and reading a book, both because I love to read and because I don’t want to have to interact with any of the other students.

Ahem.

This post is supposed to be about LASIK.  I meant to write it eons ago, just on general principles.  Then I meant to write it because Blog Antagonist was thinking about LASIK and wanted experiences.  Then I meant to write it when Mutha was also on the brink of LASIK.  So, now that SpaceMom is getting down & dirty with the idea of LASIK, and having proclaimed to all and sundry that it’s on my list of blog-posts-to-do, here it is.

Procrastination, thy name is OmegaMom.  I did manage to comment on everyone’s "I’m-thinking-about-it" post.  Does that count, in terms of procrastination-fighting karma?

Anyway.  In fourth or fifth grade, my teacher sent a note home with me for my parents.  The note essentially said, Kate is very good at arithmetic and answers all the math problems correctly, but there’s a slight problem:  Even though she sits in the front row in the class, the math problems she copies down from the blackboard are not the correct math problems.  Maybe you should get her eyes checked?  Mom promptly took me off to an optometrist, I emerged with eyeglasses very similar to these, though with thicker brown frames, and every year or two thereafter I would trek off to the optometrist again to get a new prescription, each time with thicker lenses.  Somewhere along the line, the lenses were so heavy that I switched to plastic lenses, and even those were heavy enough so that I had an ongoing blister/sore behind my left ear and red blotches on either side of my nose from the weight.

I got to the point where my eyesight was something on the order of 20-600; I could see at 20 feet what most people saw at 600 feet.  Take my glasses off and the world around me was like a soft-focus acid trip.  Especially on an interstate highway at night–whoa, that was really kewl.  I hasten to add that I never did that when I was driving, it was when someone else was driving.  All those semi-trucks lit up with fifty kazillion driving lights?  They would turn into whizzing shadows covered with pretty spherical blobs of sparkling colors.  It was neat.  What was not so neat was being unable to see the time on the clock when I woke up, being only able to "see" people if they were a foot away from me, and going in constant fear that my glasses would fall off my nose as I crossed the street, be crushed by a passing taxicab, and I would be, in essence, blind as a bat until I could replace them.

Somewhere along the line, Great Grandma said she’d pay for radial keratotomy if I wanted it.

I thought about it seriously.  But.  Um.  Someone sticking a scalpel into my eyes?  My one and only pair of eyes?  Making slashes like darts so my eyeballs would smush?  And…leaving those slashes open?  Um?  Just what would happen if someone was tossing a softball around, and my non-sporty-self somehow managed to get my slashed-eyebally-head in the right place to get a softball square on my eyebone?  Wouldn’t the innards of my eyeballs go splurt?  My response could be categorized as a shudder.  But the thought of not having to wear the Instruments of Torture was quite tantalizing, so I parlayed the offer into getting soft contacts instead.

Then LASIK appeared and was approved for use in the U.S. around 1990.  Now Great Grandma had two options to pester me about.  And since my soft contacts had suddenly stopped working quite as well and I was back to eyeglasses, which she thought were unattractive, pester me she did.

Sometime in late 1997, I decided to really investigate LASIK.  It had been around long enough for studies to have been performed, and long-term follow-up to show any real problems.  Being a geeky gal who already was used to researching things on the intertubes, I got onto PubMed and pulled up all the info I could find on LASIK.  The more I read, the better I felt about it.  And there were no squicky scalpels or incisions or eyeball-goo-squishing-out-of-the-eyes-when-whapped-by-a-softball worries.

So I called up Great Grandma and said, "Eep!  Yes!  I want to do it!"

Tomorrow:  In which I end up looking like something from The Fly.

Lots of sky news lately.

First off, there was tonight’s total lunar eclipse.  Alas, we couldn’t see it, due to cloud cover.  I hope some of you did!  I was truly hoping to be able to see this one, because it was due to be total just as it rose here in Alaska.  The last time I saw a rising moon that was totally eclipsed was many years ago in Chicago, over Lake Michigan.  It was the most awe-inspiring sight:  a huge glowing red orb in the sky, quite Tolkein-esque, grim and foreboding.  It was huge, of course, because it was down on the horizon, and our perceptions of size are aided by local landmarks (trees, buildings, etc.); items not on the horizon don’t seem as big because there’s nothing to compare them to.

Then, there’s the U.S. planning to shoot down a defunct satellite (oops–it seems that they’ve done it tonight).  I’m not quite sure why our gummint has decided to do this, when we’ve had satellites merrily downing themselves for years now, though they played up the "1,000 gallons of hydrazine (EEEK!  Deadly chemical!)" aspect quite a bit.  OmegaDad’s theory is that the U.S. is doing it because China shot one of their own down a year or two ago, and we have to show them that we, too, can do fancy space shooting.  Sort of a cold, cold, cold war, being done in secret out in the open.

Then there’s the fireball seen over much of the northwestern U.S. Tuesday morning, estimated to be centered over Adams County, Washington, with various videos that captured it (wow!).  Reports on this meteor came from Idaho and Nevada, too, so it was quite a spectacular one.  You must watch those videos; in the second link, go halfway through and that’s when they show some more videos of the fireball.

Last of all, there’s news of a star that has a planetary system that’s practically a clone of ours, at least in galactic terms.

All very cool, to a geeky gal like me!

When the hits on OmegaMom were at 100 at 6 a.m., I knew something was up.

That something was Miss Cellania, running a post called "Manly Men", which (amongst other things) pointed to a post I did back in October about magazines for manly men.

I’m now up to 278 hits for the day, with 45 minutes to go; this is the highest I’ve ever gotten.  Woot!  I know that some of you have much higher hit counts, but it’s nice to have a record like this.

She also featured me as "best friend" in a fill-in-the-blanks, generate-your-own romance novel.

What to take from this?  Men are lured in by manly-man-ness.  Women are not lured in by romance novels.  I was going to say that this is because women have read too many of them, and know what’s going to happen, but you’d think that would apply to men and manly-man-ness, too.  Right?

I thought I’d just return the linky loooooove.  Thanks, Miss C.!

Any ideas?

Wow!  My homeschooling post has generated a lot of chatter, new viewers, and an absolutely lovely take-off a la Mark Antony’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, written by Dana, which is an absolute must-read and much classier (and classical) than my rantlet.

Some very valid objections to homeschooling were voiced, as were some equally valid supportive points.  I’m trying to pull the various commentary together into a coherent whole that I can respond to, but it may take a while to work my way through this.

First, we have the objections to homeschooling and a few good points about public schooling:

• Kate suggested that out-of-the-home-school gives one survival instincts that are priceless in the corporate world…which can be true, but to me can be seen as a sad commentary on both schooling and corporations.  I know far too many nerds who only "survived" middle and high school, blossoming only once they were out of the strictly age-regimented, slightly Lord-Of-The-Flies world that the school system provided them.
• Lisa had a neighbor with 10 children who "homeschooled".  I put the word in quotes because apparently this family’s idea of homeschooling was to just let the children fend for themselves.  Unfortunately, yes, this can happen and does happen.
• Johnny points out that his eldest niece lost out on science and math teaching because of the prejudices of the science/math teacher in his sister’s homeschooling co-op.  This makes me sad and mad and frustrated–because any niece of Johnny’s is likely to have been more than capable of understanding and liking the scientific viewpoint.
• Dosia was homeschooled until she took control of her own life and enrolled herself in the local public school system in her sophomore year.  I salute:  that took immense guts.  I don’t think I could have gone against my own parents in so forceful a way at that age; I was a beige adolescent who liked to fade into the background as much as possible, and didn’t discover a real backbone or real courage until I had been living on my own for quite a while.  Dosia’s take is that her parents had insecurities and biases of their own that they impressed upon their children, and not having any other outlet, the children absorbed that set and have been struggling ever since to restructure their lives.

Then we look at some viewpoints from homeschooling proponents:

• Adso of Melk rightly points out that the dynamics of teaching 30 kids versus teaching three are vastly different, something totally glossed over by the author of the article.
• Dawn, a teacher who homeschooled three of her children, mentions in passing NCLB.  I despise NCLB with a passion, because I believe the way it is implemented almost forces school districts to "teach to the test".  In the Best of All Possible Worlds, school systems would sneer at the very idea of "teaching to the test" and proclaim, loudly and proudly, that providing children with good educations will allow them to pass the tests with flying colors any time.  Unfortunately, when federal funds are tied to test scores, pride and self-confidence take a flying leap out the nearest school administrator’s window.
• Erika says that her neighbor, a teacher considering homeschooling her kids, is also concerned about the way that NCLB "ties the hands" of teachers.
• Crimson Wife notes that the original article’s author has degrees in Early Childhood Education and Elementary Education.  I admit my jaw dropped when I read that.  For some reason (perhaps the poor writing, lousy structure, and the fifty kazillion spelling and grammar errors) I had just assumed that the author was a high school student, writing in response to an assignment.  I confess:  I didn’t even look to see.  That’ll teach me.

The problem, of course, is that the process and end result of homeschooling is highly influenced by the abilities, motivations, and determination of the parents doing the schooling.  On the one hand, public schooling does try to adhere to certain standards across the board, though how well the application of those standards works is spotty…on the other hand, over-standardization of homeschooling in an attempt to avoid egregious problems would end up making it a Mini-Me of the public school system.  On the one hand, you have cases like those mentioned by Johnny, Lisa, and Dosia, where homeschooling has clearly failed, either outright or in part, to produce well-balanced and well-educated end results (adults)…on the other hand, you have cases like those cited by Dawn and me, where the parents were determined to provide the best education they could for their children, while ensuring that the socializing aspects of childhood and adolescence were equally attended to.

I haven’t investigated longitudinal results.  If anyone can point me to studies done by universities or educational associations or well-respected thinktanks, I’d be interested to see them.  The problem I have is that many opponents of homeschooling tend to see it as a religion-driven method of indoctrinating children into specific religious worldviews, and throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were, by waving their hands at the extremes.  The same happens on the other side, of course.  Me–I’m a numbers person.  I like studies.  I like hard numbers.  So sue me.  If someone is going to argue that homeschooling is either Bad or Good, I want to see solid evidence to back up that argument.   I’ve got anecdotes galore on both sides, but the plural of anecdote is not data.  Give me data.

OmegaGranny has, at times, hinted to me that I might consider it, motivated, I think, by worries about the mediocrity of the public school system.  I’ve thought of it.  But I personally don’t think I’d homeschool; my dotter is strong-willed and I am short-tempered, and that combination can be deadly. 

On a side note:  Folks noted that I used the F-word.  Ahem.  Yes, I did.  What can I say?  Yo!  Dudes!  I grew up on the near-nort’ side of Chicago, near Cabrini Green!  I worked in journalism!  My peeps, they use those words!  I could use "messed up their children", but that’s a dreadfully mild way to describe what some parents do to their kids.  There are times when a good F-bomb is about the only way I can express my indignation succinctly and clearly.

I thought, also, of titling this one, "The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round…", hoping to pass that hideous earworm on to my faithful readers.  But then I realized that would be cruel, and besides I had already given this post a title.  And then I realized that I could do both.  Bwahahaha!

Life has changed greatly in the past two and a half years.  Two and a half years ago, after a years’ worth of cruising my local real estate market and doing up a spreadsheet that showed the average asking price and average per-square-foot for houses in Hippy Dippy Enclave In The Woods, I googled "housing bubble" and found housing bubble blogs galore.  What a relief!  It wasn’t just me who was thinking that things were totally cockeyed in the world of real estate!

At the time, I thought many of the prognostications on the bubble blogs were a bit out of whack.  Commenters were gleefully anticipating the housing crash, and crowing that it would spread throughout the economy, ushering in a recession at the least and a depression at the worst.  I would raise a skeptical eyebrow as I read those particular prophecies.

In the meantime, it’s been like watching a movie when you’ve already read the book.  Everything–every damned thing–that those bubble bloggers and their commenters had laid out as the expected playing out of the bubble bursting has come to pass.  It’s pretty eerie.  What’s also eerie is that…well…the comments were full of common sense, and one kept wondering just why the mainstream media kept playing up the drumbeat of "it’s a whole new world out there!  Housing prices will never go down!"  The majority of economists cited by the MSM seemed equally purblind.

So I watched with amazement as the housing boom came to a screeching halt, and then as sales and prices started plummeting around the country.

One of the things that the bubble bloggers were talking about, way back when, was the coming tide of foreclosures.  They talked about "jingle mail"–where buyers who were negative on their mortgages and suddenly slammed with higher rates on their ARMs, would decide to just mail the keys to the house back to the lender, rather than fight against foreclosure.  And they said the immense number of foreclosures would bring the housing market down ever further, even quicker.

Well.  Let’s look at some things:

• 77% of the houses sold in Stockton, CA, in January were foreclosure sales (okay, in re-reading the story, it’s not clear whether that 77% is of all houses sold in Stockton, or of the houses sold by one particular broker).  In the Sacramento, CA, area there were 1,815 homes sold in January, but almost as many–1,782–foreclosures were recorded in that area in the same month.  Sit back and think about that–it’s just astonishing.
• Realtors are offering "foreclosure tour" buses, where the real estate salesperson grabs a list of foreclosing houses off the database, rents a bus, fills it with people who want to buy, and just spends a day shepherding these people from house to house, vacant, empty, owned by the bank.  The bank which is desperately trying to forestall further bleeding from the money accounts, and offering what seem to be bargain-basement prices.  Of course, some of these houses are going to be in dreadful neighborhoods, and some of the amazing deals will turn out to be money pits.  But there they are:  Pismo Beach, CA…Stockton, CA…San Jose…Las Vegas…Palm Beach, FL…Phoenix…Orlando…Michigan.
• Of course, someone has decided to cash in on the foreclosure business by offering a "how to put on a foreclosure bus tour!" seminar.  A few years ago, it was "how to make money fast, fast, fast by flipping real estate!"
• RealtyTrac claimed that there were 2,203,295 foreclosure filings across the country last year, on 1,285,873 properties, with more than 1% of all households across the country in foreclosure.  This was up 75% from the year before.  (Why are there more filings than properties?  I’d guess either some folks managed to close the door on the foreclosure wolf, or else some folks had more than one filing put on their property–people with multiple mortgages, perhaps.) 
• And homeless people have started moving into foreclosed houses as squatters.

The bubble blogs claimed that mortgage brokerage companies would start going out of business…and, sure enough, at the start of 2007 they started being able to track the bankruptcies.

But now it’s spreading.  The way that mortgages got purchased, chopped up, and resold as "investment vehicles", it turns out that a wide variety of financial investment companies find themselves holding the bag on loans going belly up.  The media has been playing up the "subprime mortgage" as the main culprit–mortgages handed out to poor credit risks.  But reports lately have shown that the same problems are showing up in the "more prime" mortgages as well…because what was risky was not just handing out money to people who could show they were breathing, but the fact that adjustable rate mortgages were the name of the game, people were mortgaging up to 100% of their new property, and people were taking out home equity lines of credit on their properties’ perceived value.  Now that housing prices are dropping, you’ve got ordinary everyday "good credit risks" who have discovered that their various mortgages and HELOCs have interest rates going up and they suddenly can’t pay what they were able to pay previously.

You’ve got real estate sales people who were making six figures two years ago who have had to quit the real estate business and get jobs.  You’ve got homebuilding companies that are either suddenly holding huge "sales" or else simply vanishing, even in Small Mountain University Town.  Even the companies that insure the financial investment companies against housing market losses are suddenly tottering.  Mortgage companies, trying to contact the mortgagees who flinch away from the phone ringing these days, are disguising their pleas to please pay up as wedding invitations (yes!).

And two years ago…two years ago, people were standing in line when new home communities opened their sales office doors, with prices ratcheting up $25,000 within a day as the hordes swept in.

What a difference two years makes.

I love cauliflower.  Tender, delicate, tightly woven off-white buds covered with butter or shredded cheddar cheese…yum.  However, we don’t eat it very often.  Mostly, we just don’t think of it.

OmegaDad got a hankering for tempura recently.  So he purchased mushrooms and broccoli and zucchini and cauliflower, hauled out the boneless skinless chicken breasts, did some research on Teh Google, and prepared a luscious tempura meal last night.  The batter, alas, was somewhat starchy, so only the zucchini (being full of H2O) came out with the perfect tempura crust; everything else was slightly chewy rather than crispy.  But add some sweet-and-hot sauce, some teriyaki or char sui sauce, and we were dipping fiends.

Then tonight we had steak and noodles and plain ol’ cauliflower with butter.

An hour later I came to the realization of just why we don’t eat cauliflower very often.

Actually, if I had been thinking, that realization would have struck me last night, when I was wandering around the house wondering just what was causing my unusual bloatiness, with disturbing thoughts of how the maternal side of the family has a tendency towards uterine cancer (one symptom of which is sudden onset of bloatiness).  Yes, I do have a slight leaning towards mental hypochondria–why do you ask??

But tonight, when my abdomen distended outward like a taut balloon within an hour after dinner, my brain finally acknowledged the two-by-four that was thwacking against my head.  I knew the eternal truth:  I love cauliflower, but cauliflower does not love me in return.

Believe me when I say "distended outward like a taut balloon", I am not exaggerating.  OmegaDotter, when presented with the evidence (see photo), gasped and said, "Omigod!  Mom!  You look like you’re pregnant!"  Then she poked at my tummy and watched with interest as her fingertip bounced off.  OmegaDad made a smart-alecky remark about how he wanted to know who the parents were if I were pregnant.  I merely marveled at how quickly those lovely, tender florets of the veggie had transformed themselves into a veritable explosion of gas in my gut.

As the dotter and I did our normal bedtime routine, first she asked her "one question" (why did the cauliflower make me look like I was pregnant? entailing a quick discussion of food, digestion and gas), and then she kept bouncing up from her pillow to look at me and ask me if I was going to fart or burp now.  When I did, she’d bounce up again to ask if all the gas was gone yet.

She thought it was hilariously funny.  It took her a while to go to sleep.  She kept snickering.

As I sit here hours later, still producing copious amounts of gas, I don’t think it’s funny at all.

Which is, of course, why I decided to share my intestinal distress with the myriad of intimate strangers who will arrive here guided by Teh Google when they search on "cauliflower gas" or "cauliflower farts" or "cauliflower burps" or some such combination.

I’m sure they (and you) will be happy to know that someone has done a scholarly mathematics paper all about the fractal factor of cauliflower and broccoli.  What the hell is a "fractal factor"?  I’m not quite sure (I think it has to do with how many times the patterns repeat themselves, and I leave my readers to dig through the various references to figure it out), but this delightful piece of information is a mighty testament to the wonders of the intertubes and the weirdness that can be scholarly mathematics…

So I got three votes for the economy and foreclosures, and three votes for homeschooling.  And one that said "I’ll read anything you write!" (BadMutha, you sure know how to make me blush!  And, honest, 75-100 is not too shabby as regular readers.  Nothing like The Big Guys, but still not too shabby.  I say so as someone with an average visit of just around 100.)

Since Mrs. Fibgy voted for the economy but said she’d be interested in the homeschooling critique critiquing, I used that as a tie-breaker.

Whilst wandering around ScienceBlogs last week, I came across a snippet of a "critique of homeschooling" on Greg Laden’s blog.  I followed the link to this article.  I read it.  Really!  I actually forced myself to read it, even though my former editor’s brain kept shrieking, "ACK!  ACK ACK!  ACK ACK ACK!" and my analytic brain kept grumbling "cherry-picking, dammit!" and my marketing brain kept snickering, "Ooooh, yeah, let’s get some more stereotypes in there, why don’t we?!"

Of you go.  Read.  Go on, go go go.  I’ll just wait right here.

Done?

First, let me reveal a snobby bias:  A poorly written article automatically prejudices me against the author’s viewpoint.  I hang my head in shame.  Lots of people who Think Good Thoughts can’t write their way out of a paper bag.  But clunky construction, poor verb-subject agreement, awkward (or nonexistent) segues, and downright errors in articles make my eyes cross and my brain stutter.

But, hey.  We all know that this particular post of mine will be inevitably riddled with errors, this being the Way of the Kozmik All.  "Whom the gods destroy they first make proud" and all that.  So let’s take that as a given, and I don’t want to hear any grumbling from the roaring mob about how not only am I a snob but an utter hypocrite to boot.

Let’s get to the substance.

The author ranks the reasons for homeschooling as:  Violence in the school system/safety and desire to provide better education.  She mentions in passing that many homeschoolers are religious, but doesn’t list that as a reason.  She waves her hand at "my research" but doesn’t say where she researched or what information she got.

So I had a go at looking for reasons for homeschooling.  The U.S. Department of Education performed surveys of homeschooling parents in 1999 and 2003.  The "most important" reasons for homeschooling given in the 2003 responses were:

That "concern" about the environment included drugs and peer pressure, not just "safety".  And having an "analysis" so poorly written that reason #2–religious or moral instruction–was conflated with other reasons and not discussed separately bugs me.

Then the author goes on to sniff at any concerns about the school environment, asks homeschooling parents what the crime rate is in their neighborhoods (?), and immediately takes off after…

…all those psychotic moms and dads who homeschool their kids and abuse or kill them.  Like Andrea Yates.  Or a lady named Deanna Landrey, who beat her kids with rocks to Save Them From Satan.

Because the Big Problem with homeschooling, dontchaknow, is that the kids are socially and physically isolated, and that’s a good way to hide child abuse.  Aside from the everyday horrors of not being socialized.

I stop here to say, yes, I know that there are, indeed, plenty of homeschooled kids who are socially isolated.  And social isolation is an excellent method of hiding abuse.

But then I look at all the homeschooling families I know of.  I worked in ITS with two.  I’ve made friends with a bunch via the web.  The parents of one of the dotter’s friends (another child adopted from Guangxi, whose birthday is one day later than hers) are homeschooling their child.  And the parents of one of her fellow ballet dancers are more homeschoolers.  Every single one of these parents has been using what’s known as a "home schooling co-op".  Some have been religiously oriented.  Some have been definitely non-religious.  All the kids that I’ve met are happy, healthy, dreadfully social children.  They go on homeschooling co-op field trips.  They play sports with other homeschooling kids and in the soccer leagues and the softball leagues and dancing and gymnastics.

The author goes on to say that those who are concerned about their kids’ educations should be more concerned about homeschooling than public schooling, because there are no requirements for teaching in a homeschool and the parents won’t be able to teach all the various subjects.  Amazingly enough, most of the homeschooling parents I know recognize quite well when they’ve reached the limit of their knowledge, and turn to the homeschooling co-ops for help.  Their children get taught science or math by parents in the co-op who are (gasp!) scientists or mathematicians.  They get taught English by parents in the co-op who are literature or English majors.  They learn online.  Or their parents study the subjects before their kids reach that point, so they can guide them.

Ah, but public (or private) school teachers are certified!  They’ve studied pedagogy!  They’ve done student teaching!  They have all the latest teaching theories under their belts!  They know how to handle 16 to 30 kids at once!  In some states, they need masters’ degrees!  A person without all that preparation simply can’t teach children!  Because they don’t Know How To Teach!

To which I say–pish tosh.  Again, the homeschoolers that I have encountered are wildly motivated to get their kids to learn.  Some have specifically taken their children out of school systems because…because…their kids weren’t learning.  All that teacher training, the masters’ degrees, the certification, the theories…and their kids weren’t learning.

To top it all off, she says that homeschoolers will share their biases (not "there bias’s") with their children.

Um.  Yeah…?  Do you know of any parents who do not share their biases with their children?  The only way I can think of for parents to not share their biases with their offspring is to…well…just keep their mouths shut.  All.  The.  Time.  In addition, the implication that teachers in school systems don’t share their biases with the children they teach is mind-boggling.  In every way, in every word, in every path of teaching, those teachers do share their biases.  The kids learn a whole slew of biases from the school system.  And from their parents.  And from their aunts, uncles, friends’ parents, and everyone they encounter.

Of course, being exposed to one, and only one, set of biases isn’t the best of all worlds in my mind.  Many parents do homeschool precisely because they don’t want their precious loinfruit to have their ears sullied by the word (or concept) of evolution, or sex education, or Harry Potter books.

I am not an apologist for homeschooling, trust me.  I do think that some people are quite capable of fucking up their children via homeschooling.  But to use an "analysis" such as this one to trash homeschooling is insanity.  This article is so full of stereotypes, misconceptions, scare mongering, lack of citation, and just bad writing, logic, and grammar, that it is, in my opinion, totally worthless.  If you’re going to disapprove of homeschooling and attempt to persuade someone that it’s a bad idea, this is not the article to use.

Whoa!  Here I am, with a whole slew of ideas for blog posts!

A plethora of riches.  So much so that I am tossing it out to My Loyal Readers (all 15 of them!).  Which of the following would you be interested in reading?

1. I Can See Clearly Now - My journey from coke-bottle-bottom glasses to being able to see the time on the clock in the middle of the night without glasses, via LASIK.  With a tangent into the reasons why that song immediately makes me think of tuna salad.  This one is mostly for SpaceMom, as BadMutha has already gone & done it.
2. Walking on Sunshine - Hey–Alaska has sunshine, too!  Who woulda thunk it?  How quickly things change.
3. The Blind Leading the Nearsighted - Our nation’s economists say that the bottom one-fifth of the U.S., by income, "have access to various sources of spending money that doesn’t fall under taxable income. These sources include portions of sales of property like homes and cars and securities that are not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts."  Yahhhh, right.  Notice they don’t mention such things as credit cards, or payday loans, or plain ol’ ordinary "debt".  I’ll give you the link to the article if you choose this one.
4. Everyone Knows Homeschooling Moms Are Ticking Time-Bombs of Psychosis! - In which I read a "critique of homeschooling" and decide that the critiquer needs serious–serious–critiquing herself.
5. Code Reviews?!  We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Code Reviews! - More tech talk, mostly about the lonely life of a university tech person who is not in the ITS department, plus an apologia for NYI.
6. Looking For Closure - 77% of the houses sold in Stockton, CA, in January were foreclosure sales.  In the Sacramento, CA, area there were 1,815 homes sold in January, but almost as many–1,782–foreclosures were recorded in that area in the same month.  Similar things are happening all across the country.  Realtors are offering "foreclosure tour" buses.  Life has changed greatly in the past two years.

Pick a topic.  Any topic.  Or suggest one.

(Technical stuff follows.  Feel free to ignore.)

Oooooo!

So there we are at work…our transportation center has an online reservation system that was written by a Nice Young Intern.  It was written back in 2002 and has worked okie doke since.  (Aside from the fact–which I discovered recently–that it has been running on the development server all this time, rather than the production server.  To those of my readers to whom that is an arcane distinction, let me just say:  production servers have paging systems.  If the production server goes down in the wee hours of the night, some poor ITS minion is paged and required to dash in to the office to Figure Out The Problem Right Now!  This does not happen with development servers.  If a development server goes down, the priority to get it going again is low on the totem pole.  Also, DBAs feel quite happy to Do Things to development servers, without worrying that they’re going to break something.)

Recently, we’ve been getting complaints from our TC that the users of the online reservation system have been getting errors.

I investigate.  Luckily (or not so much ‘luckily’ as ‘almost inevitably’, as it turns out), I immediately get an error page.

(Let’s set aside the fact that there’s no error checking, so we don’t have a “nice” error page telling our users that oops, there’s a problem, and please try again later??)

The error page says “unique constraint violated’.  What the heck?  Why would that happen?

Interestingly enough, the DBAs had just updated the development server shortly before the TC folks really pushed us about this error.  So I went down that path for a while.  But a DBA, when emailed, provided a clue–he said that we’re trying to insert new rows with a duplicate primary key.  (A ‘primary key’ is a number that uniquely identifies a row in the table.  For instance, if you’re doing a credit card transaction, the primary key might be, say, your transaction number.  No-one else is going to have that transaction number…or no-one else will have that transaction number on that date, so the primary key would be trans number plus date.)

I noodle around.

I investigate.

I discover, much to my absolute and utter horror…

The Nice Young Intern had set up the reservation numbers as the primary key.  This is okay.

The NYI had an automatic number generating doodad set up in the Oracle database to generate those reservation numbers.  This is okay.

The NYI had not used the default maximum limit for the reservation number–which would be some gawd-awful number like 999,999,999,999.

No.

The NYI created the reservation number system to have a maximum number of 9999.  This is not okay.

So…once the TC had gotten reservation number 9999, what happens?

The automatic numbering system starts all over again, at number 1.

Back when the system was being developed and tested, there were loads of jumps in the numbering system.  NYI would try a reservation, it wouldn’t work, he’d back out, that reservation number would be discarded…But as the system went online and real people started using it, the gaps in the numbering system would become fewer and fewer in number.

The first few hundred numbers worked okay.  Users would get an error once every great while, when the system tried to save a reservation that had a reservation number already used in the system.  But now…now…the gaps in the numbering system are few and far between.  Thus, as I said above, it was almost inevitable that the test reservation I made would not go through.

Why the fuck would someone create a system keyed on an automatic number that rolls over when it hits 9999?!  This is like our own little tiny version of the Y2K problem.

And I’m hopping mad about it.

Luckily, it’s an easy fix.

Grumble, grumble, grumble, bitch, moan, complain.

Wouldn’t that be a great title for a blog?

My brother and I spent the time at mom’s ferrying her around to appointments, grocery stores, phoning banks and brokers to learn the procedures for establishing death, purchasing various technical toys and gadgets, and taking her out into the woods to look at water flowing over dams.

At one lake, there was a sheet of ice covering one end, with a hole in the middle of the icy expanse.  The ducks and geese who like to hang out there, eager for handouts from visitors, congregated in the hole and made occasional forays outward when they saw suckers visitors who might throw food stood by the shore.  At which point, the ducks would start waddling towards the suckers visitors in a single file line across the ice.

One boy out on the frozen-in dock kept yelling out with wild enjoyment, "Mom!  Mom!  Look!  It’s a mob of angry ducks!"

They weren’t actually angry, nor were they a mob, but they made for great pictures.  Unfortunately, all the pictures I took were with mom’s camera, and are now happily ensconced on mom’s (new!) external hard drive, rather than here, so I can’t provide illustrations.

So.  I am home.

I have a cold, which my body determinedly held off while we were at mom’s house.  I have one of those horrid itchy noses that keeps saying "I’m gonna sneeze!  I’m gonna sneeze!" and then, moments later, "Gotcha!  Hah!  Pwned!", leaving me with sneezus interruptus.  The scratchy throat and cough are par for the course, but the I-really-wanna-sneeze feeling is the worst.

When I finally pulled up to the house last night, after an interminable day of traveling, the dotter came barreling out into the garage, clad only in her gymnastics leotard, dancing around, jumping up and down and screaming, "Mommy!  Mommy!"  When I walked into the garage, she flung herself at me, jumped into my arms, wrapped her legs and arms around me, and said, "I missed you.  A lot!"  Wow.  A person could get used to a greeting like that.

Apparently, while I was gone, she informed OmegaDad that while he was allowed to travel, she didn’t like it, but that Mommy Was Not Allowed To Travel.  At all.

With a kaleidoscope, you turn the end of the tube ever so slightly, and the pattern shifts completely.  Life, right now, is a kaleidoscope.

For example:  I was driving up to Former State Capitol, almost to mom’s house, after 12 hours of traveling.  At a stop light, I ran my hand through my hair, and thought to myself:  “Hah!  Well, at least I got my hair cut a few weeks ago, so that’ll be okay with…”

And there was that shift:  My normal everyday “I’ve got to look neat and orderly when I show up at Grandma’s house” thought was stopped in its tracks.  No, I didn’t have to worry about whether my hair was tidy.

Another shift:  Mom, talking to me about her feelings right now, said that she had always thought of herself as younger than her compeers, because her mother was still alive.  And now, she said, now she is Eldest.  Suddenly the patterns in life have changed:  we don’t have a 104-year-old to judge our ages by, and mom, at  81, is, indeed, Eldest.

Another:  Driving up mom’s street, thinking about things to be done, I said to myself, “Well, after we run x errand and y errand, we can swing by…”

No.  We can’t swing by Grandma’s.

It isn’t grief.  It isn’t even deep sorrow.  These past few months have not been happy ones for Grandma.  Her world had shrunk again, suddenly, at the whim of outsiders–too frail for the assisted living center, so she had to go to a nursing home.  She didn’t like it.  She kept asking when she could go home.  She was tired.  The atmosphere there–though the staff are caring folk–was grim and depressing (at least to a visitor).  Last Stop.  Holding Pattern.  Her mind was wandering back into the past and then dipping into the present for a small time period, just long enough to know people who cared were there, but that she just Didn’t Like It.

So it was time.

Which leaves one feeling rather odd at all the condolences.  While it’s a shift, a change, a spot where a tooth has fallen out, as it were, mostly I feel relief.  Glad that Grandma didn’t have to spend a lot of time in a place that wasn’t hers, glad that she didn’t have to spend a lot of time in a half-there state, just aware enough  to realize that her vaunted awareness was slipping away.  Glad that we didn’t have to watch while she went through invasive medical procedures or faded completely away.

So people say, with love and caring, “I’m so sorry for your loss”, and I am left feeling rather awkward, wanting to say that, yes, it’s a loss, but at the same time, it’s not.  I feel that I said my goodbyes back in December…that’s when I cried, that’s when I burrowed my head into OmegaDad’s shoulder in bed and railed against mortality.

The kaleidoscope was already shifting from one pattern  to the next, but it hadn’t completed the shift yet.

Anyway, thank you all for your caring and kind words.  We will miss Grandma, but she was already on her way months ago, and so the grief and pain are muted, felt more as a momentary disjunction between old habits and routines and those of the future.

Grandma died this evening, in her sleep.  She was 104.

Mom said, somewhat shakily, "But she was supposed to last forever!"  We didn’t really think that, and we were expecting this very soon.  I’m flying out to mom’s tomorrow.

My post about grandma back in December.

I first heard about it on Figlet’s blog.

Then I read about it on Bastardette.

And reading some comments here and there, I found this at Heart, Mind, and Seoul.

The gist, for those who don’t want to follow the links, is that someone put up a website purporting to be an adoption agency where lucky adopters who need organ donations can get two, two, two! for the price of one:  An adorable child (or baby or teen) specifically type-matched to be an organ donor.  Or you could even use the kids for sexual purposes (never said right out loud, but implied).

As Bastardette says, it’s satire.  I recognized this almost as soon as I started reading the intro.

And it’s thorough, complete:  it includes a child listing, it includes adoption prices, it includes "testimonials" from satisfied parents.

And it’s appeared on Snopes and been debunked pretty quickly as a hoax (what a surprise).

But, of course, some people take it seriously, so it was the brunt of horrified "OMG!  Have you seen this horrible, horrible website!" comments on a variety of adoption lists and sites.  I will admit that the horror came from those who thought it was real and those who didn’t but thought it was Not Funny At All.

Two viewpoints.  Both having their points.  Two viewpoints, what is more, that are held by bloggers and posters who I actually find interesting, intelligent, respectful.  So, what to do, what to do?  Do I stand by my original POV, that of chortling in dismay at the black humor and poking at various shibboleths, the send-up of both the entire adoption industry and those who treat children as commodities, those who would put different prices on children based on their color?  I thought it was hilarious.  Dark, oh yes.  Blasting, oh yes.  Searing?  Oh yes.  Creepy?  Oh yes.  But hilarious.  This is the view of people like Figlet and Bastardette.  But horrible?  Bad?  Evil?  Not humorous at all?  People like HMS and Chicagomama (I think) stood on that side.  So I find myself torn, a bit.

The one objection that I truly agree with–once I thought it over–is that it uses real children’s pictures.  It didn’t occur to me at first; I figured they were stock pictures, but even so, perhaps that’s a step over the line.  The website could be done with children’s pictures from the back, or in the distance, or blurred by soft focus, and the "profiles" handled by not having pictures at all, with the complete justification that various countries don’t allow pictures.

But some objections?  They make me roll my eyes.  "Giving people ideas" about adopting children for sexual purposes?  "Giving people ideas"?!?!  Please.  Let me just say "Masha Allen".  (For those who don’t know, Masha Allen was adopted as a child from Russia by a single man who managed to spend years abusing her, videotaping the abuse, selling the videotapes, and more.)  There are plenty of sick, twisted people who already use adoption as a covert method of obtaining children for sexual purposes.

Then there was "oh, noes, people will come up to us in (insert country of choice) and ask us if we’re adopting for organs!".  Dudes.  Read about the rumors of the destination of internationally adopted children that run rampant in some countries–Russia, Guatemala, even China.  While I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done that (it would be most difficult to arrange, I would think!), the rumors swirl around, fly up, get denied, die down, and then pop up again all over again.  There’s not much to do about it except educating, over and over and over again–which people who have adopted have to do anyway.

It’s been sneered at as the work of someone with an ax to grind–either against organ donation or against adoption.  No…ya think so?

It "portrays children as commodities"–well, guess what?  They are, in many cases, around the world and here in the good ol’ U.S.A.

And the thing is:  There are adoption agencies that push the hard sell almost as much as this fake website does.  I have seen ads for children to be adopted from Russia where the child is described as "sweet, obedient, willing to help around the house"–profiles that make it pretty obvious the child is being pushed as a family helper, or a maid, rather than a beloved child.  There are agencies that are pushing for adoption from Vietnam whose Vietnamese facilitators went right back to the old, corrupt methods of obtaining children as soon as Vietnam re-opened for adoption after the prior corruption hiatus imposed by the U.S. immigration service.  There are agencies that still tell potential adoptive parents who are looking at China that it will take 12 months to get a referral–not telling the truth about the three to four-year wait until after the PAPs are signed up and well into the process (some obfuscating the wait until after the PAPs have their dossier completed and logged in with China’s central adoption authority).

There are agencies and facilitators that regularly pressure potential birthmothers into adoption.  There are crisis pregnancy centers that funnel girls into maternity homes and "counsel" them into adoption.  There are agencies that whisk pregnant women over state lines into states where the adoption laws favor the adoptive parents much more, and birth fathers have hardly any rights at all.  There are still, in this day and age, pregnant girls who are hidden away from "the neighbors" by their families, sent off to other cities to have their babies in secret, alone and unsupported, just to hand them over to adopters who have lied up and down and left and right about keeping the adoption open–until they get their hands on that baby.

All this website does is to distill and concentrate a whole slew of ethical issues with adoption and paste them into one fictitious bundle, guaranteed to raise hackles, make people swoon with horror, and maybe…just maybe…make some people think about some of the issues that surround adoption.

So, I guess, in the end, while I understand the objections some people have, I side squarely with those who find it a brilliant satire.  I won’t link to it, but if you’re interested, do a search on "medical adoptions".

In the car on the way home:

"What the heck!" quoth the dotter about something.

"You shouldn’t say that," replies OmegaMom.

"But you say it!"

OmegaMom winces and says, like a wuss, "Well, some people don’t like it."

"You say ‘heck’, and ‘bloody’.  ‘Bloody’!  That’s gross!"

OmegaMom squints into the twilight, and muses that that particular phrase comes from OmegaGranny.

"And you say ‘dangit’, which isn’t good."

The litany continues:

"And you say ‘God bless America!’"

"Well, that’s actually a nice thing to say!" OmegaMom protests, then adds contritely, "But not the way I say it."

So I pulled into our driveway thinking that my cursing has been toned done quite a bit as a result of having the dotter around.  Which, of course, makes me want to say:

Fuck!  Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck!

This was a tag phrase on one list I was on.  (Since some people got the emails at work, too, it was generally abbreviated in the subject line, so when an email came in with Re: FFFityF, you knew a rant was coming about kids or spouses or insurance or something equally irritating in life.)

Later on, the dotter hauled out a new February calendar from her backpack, saying, "Miss Grossfalconhome made a new calendar because she screwed the old one up!"

Um.  Oh, well.  I’m trying to figure out if that one comes from us, or from Miss Grossfalconhome, the student teacher who is now flying solo while Miss Shoetree takes a few months of well-deserved rest, observing from afar.  At least the dotter has the formation down pat, so she says "screwed the old one up" instead of "screwed up the old one".  Though no doubt the English grammar purists would prefer the latter, the old fuddy duddies.

Or should I?

Last Wednesday, two cables that provide a large part of the internet pipeline for the Middle East and Asia were cut in the Mediterranean, resulting in huge internet outages for India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain.  The initial assumption was that it was some ships in stormy seas tossing out their anchors, with the anchors getting snagged in the cables and cutting them.  But people checked log books and shipping records, and found no ships in the area at the time.  (At least, on record.)

Then, on Friday, a third cable was cut off the coast of Dubai.

Then, on Sunday, yet another cable, linking the U.A.E. to Qatar, went down.  (Not sure if it was cut or just gave a last gasp under the re-routed load.)

Now.  I am quite aware that humans find patterns in natural coincidences all the time.  I am also (unfortunately) quite aware that cables get cut all the time–people doing construction forget to have utilities staked before they dig, and in areas such as Small Mountain University Town, where there is one main cable connecting the entire town to the rest of the world, such a lapse in judgment can cause a mountain of heartache for the folks who live and work there.  Anyway, all it takes, usually, is a bit of forgetfulness on the part of a human, or an Act of Gawd such as an earthquake or ice storm, to cause pieces of the world to drop off the ‘net temporarily.

And then there’s the fact that the media will become "interested" (obsessed?) with a particular issue, and suddenly news of that particular issue pops up with distressing frequency.

But really.  Four cables cut or breaking right around the Middle East, all within days?!  It seems to be stretching the concept of coincidence.

Of course, tinfoil hattiness is breaking out all over.  Two ideas previal:  It’s Israel, or it’s the U.S. preparing to attack Iran.

My personal (not-so-serious) take, a hat-toss into the tinfoil ring:  It’s an attempt by multiple governments to disrupt world markets so that the almost-inevitable market meltdown hits roadblocks and slows down, rather than crashing a la Black Tuesday–the start of the Depression.  Given the way the markets follow each other and provide positive and negative feedback loops, and given the nicely conspiratorial nature of the idea of Big Banks and gummints joining forces in a panic move to Stop The Madness!, this one really appeals to me.

Another spiffy idea:  Since India is hit hard by this outage, and the U.S. outsources so much technical stuff to India, it’s an attempt by Our Enemies to disrupt our technical base.

Seriously, though:  Something like this is enough to set the least sensitive of antennae to twitching.

In other world news, China is suffering from its coldest winter in a century.  Particularly hard hit are the southern areas, which are simply not accustomed to cold and snow.  Half The Sky is in contact with orphanages across China, and some of the orphanages are having very serious difficulties; you might want to check into HTS’s journal to see what the current status is and maybe contribute to their Little Mouse Emergency Fund.

Speaking of cold, it was -26F this morning.

We have had beautiful, clear, sparkling sunny days for the past week.  The clouds have moved away, the sun is out, and it makes me happy.

It also makes it very, very cold.

Very.

Right now, at 9 a.m., it’s 22 below zero.  For the past few days, the high for the day has been either zero Fahrenheit or 1 degree.

But it’s sunny!  And we’re up to almost eight hours of daylight per day!  And we went out to dinner last night leaving at 6 p.m., and there was still a trace of red and maroon right at the horizon!  And we’re gaining almost eight minutes of light per day!

But, dayum, it’s cold.

I said to someone on a board or list that I’ve gotten to the point that when it’s zero out, my mind says, "Hunh!  It’s kind of warm today!"  She laughed and said that meant I was becoming a true Alaskan.  I really think it’s my 27 years of growing up in Chicago and dealing with Chicago winters.  For those who wonder, yes, you can become accustomed to lots of things, so long as you get a steady taste of it, and I actually think that it’s easier to get used to extremely cold weather than it is to get used to extremely hot weather–especially extremely hot, humid weather.  After all, you can always layer more clothes on, but once you’ve stripped down to a bikini, you’ve pretty much reached the limit of "adjustment" that can be made.

The dotter, a few nights ago, wanted to know how come it gets cold in the wintertime.  The problem with these questions she asks is that she’s asking them when she’s snuggled up in bed, "ready" to go to sleep, so it’s fairly obvious that these questions are a last gasp attempt to stay awake.  A question like this, though, requires demonstration and discussion, so I promised her I’d find something on the internet to explain it (after a lame attempt using my fists).

(I mean–look, it’s hard to jerk your brain out of the "keep the child quiet, keep the voice low, it’s snoozing time" mode to answer, say, "How do you make plywood?"  You give the child a quick explanation, but it’s not enough, she wants more, more, more!  So I am beginning to collect a fine set of links…)

The cold is frustrating, I admit.  Looking out the window, we have a beautiful sunny day.  We have lots of snow.  I wist after sledding or skiing or just going out and playing in the snow.  But that cold is a bit too cold for such frolicking.  So we look out, enjoy the growing sunlight, and wait for a day that is (a) sunny, (b) between 0 and 32F, and (c) on the weekend.

We’ll get some sooner or later!

A few years ago, OmegaDad purchased a book called (I think) "Dinosaur Hunters", an in-depth retelling of the story of the feud between Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh, two paleontologists who set the standard for dinosaur fossil hunters in the 1800s.

For those who think that scientists are cold, aloof, logical, precise, and passionless, the story of these two would be an eye-opener.  We’re talking claim-jumping.  Races to publish data.  Vituperation and personal attacks galore.  Weapons drawn.  Dashes to be the first to dig in a promising new place.  Fights over who got to name what, whose reputation would be solidified down the centuries as The Premier Dinosaur Discoverer.  Nasty letters to the editor back and forth.  A feud played out in the public eye.

(Of course, as a person who grew up with scientists and scientifically-minded folk, I’m quite aware that the stereotype in the paragraph above just doesn’t cut it.)

One of my current regular blog-stops is ScienceBlogs.  You get it all there–climatology, biology, physics, computer science, zoology, oceanography, medicine, pharmacology–you name it, it’s there.  Along with lots of lively writers who are passionate about their fields.

This week, in the rotating blog headline spots, there was something about "armadillodiles".  I wasn’t interested, so skipped over it.

Then there was a rotating headline about Aetosaurs and Whistle-Blowing–The Saga Continues.  Well!  "Whistle blowing"?!  I had to dip in.

Dipping in led to this further article from a year ago. 

It turns out that there has been a controversy brewing in the U.S. paleontological world, starting small a few years ago, and growing.  The story, in a nutshell, is that the paleontologist who is in charge of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and is one of the editors of its journal, seems to have "jumped the gun" a number of times, citing other people’s work, work that was "in progress", taking the credit himself for the conclusions, and grabbing at chances to name specific fossil branches himself.  This includes claims that he cribbed info from unpublished masters’ theses, used information garnered from visits to other museums that were working on soon-to-be-published research, skipping over the peer-review process, and pretty much ran rampant over lots of younger paleontologists’ research.

This had been bubbling up in the professional email list for paleontologists.  It led to a variety of posts similar to the second one I linked (you need to read the comments, too!).  And then, the reason for the first post cited:  Nature Magazine, the stuffy crown prince of the natural sciences, has just published an article about the controversy.

A certain amount of stuff got posted afterwards, with titles such as Paleontologists Behaving Badly, Something’s Fishy About These Armadillodiles, Who’s Scooping Whom and Why This Matters, and Way to Represent Your Professional Community, Dude!

The entire affair seems redolent of the Cope/Marsh wars, an interesting perspective on scientific clashes, and also an interesting perspective in how Things Have Changed.  Once upon a time, the natural history world was filled with adventurers pushing each other out of the way, racing to be The First…enough so that "Around The World In 80 Days" is couched in those terms, a daring duel between scientific adventurers and scoundrels.

There you have it:  Dinosaur Wars, which I thought were a thing of the past, still exist.  The ethical scientists get creamed by a modern-day throwback.  Passions flare.  And it’s all about science!!!