meirwen_1988

it ain't about LOVE.

The state has no business talking about love. They're bad at it, and need to stay the hell away from it, and so does everybody else.

It's about the state interfering in the ability to MAKE CONTRACTS between two adults so that the property, debts, and entitlements which accrue to the individual follow a stipulated path (currently defined by state and federal laws regarding obligations of and to spouses). My social security would go to support a man I married, whether I loved him or not, whether I had sex with him or not, whether I lived in the same house with him or not. But if I die unmarried, it goes to no one, even if I had lived with, supported, and loved someone, male or female. So, the state doesn't CARE about love, and people need to stop using that as the argument, compelling reason, etc.

It's about inequity in the ability to make contracts. And it's wrong. And it needs to get fixed.

But it isn't about love. The state doesn't give a f*ck about love.

Why are people who are for the reasonable regulation of firearms widely characterized as "anti-gun" but those who believe in the reasonable regulation of intercourse (i.e., against child porn, for statutory rape laws, in favor of restricting to appropriate/non-public venues, etc.) not considered "anti-sex"? Or people who believe in licensing, insuring, and inspecting automobiles not considered "anti-car." There are people who are anti-gun, but I'm not persuaded the people described above meet the qualifications.

When did proposing and signing unpopular laws become "impeachable" offenses. Recall petitions I understand--but impeachment? In the words of Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that means what you think it means."

I really think someone needs to put a sock in the mouth of the gamin-faced George Stephanopoulos. He may have been the model for Sam Seaborn on The West Wing, but Lowe's character Nick Andros in The Stand consistently had more cogent and worthwhile things to say in the eight hours of the mini-series than Stephanopoulos has had to say in his entire 13 year tenure as a media personality.

And, while I'm not generally a Roger Federer fan, his Mercedes Benz commercial is "da bomb."

Okay--time for a dose of Bourdaine and Lawson. Cheerio!

Some folks read my LiveJournal who are not on my Friends list, and this will, unfortunately, affect you.

Lately I've been getting a lot of spam in comments, so I'm going to reset the comment default to disable comments by people not on my friends list. I apologize to those of you who either do not have LJ accounts or who, in order to keep my reading list manageable, I haven't friended here. This is really in response to the actions of commercial spambots, not any comments made by people about the actual content of posts.

*sigh*

I'm sorry, either you believe a woman has a right to terminate a pregnancy, or you don't.
If you don't, discussion is over. How she got pregnant is irrelevant.

If you believe she does, then you may still have limits. Perhaps she can exercise choice until a certain stage in fetal development. That seems reasonable. But if you say a woman has a right to choose, then the reasons that inform her choice are irrelevant.

You can't be "a little" right to life, any more than you can be "a little pregnant." You are, or you aren't.

Anything else is hypocrisy.

-rant over-

Either our elected representatives should enact the "will of the people" or they should be expected to exercise their own judgement on our behalf. If you castigate them on Monday for the first, then bemoan on Tuesday when they've done the second, I call "hypocrite." Instead, though you claim a principled stand about the nature and purposes of government, I have noticed your opprobrium all depends on whether the "will of the people" or "their own judgment" coincides with your own. That only leaves labels my mother told me to never apply to people because those are bad words.

Apparently there are two kinds of stupid that can enjoy a measure of success. The first follows all the rules of a writing task, doing it correctly, but having the judgement and insight of a tomato bug. If it's a writing class I suppose it doesn't matter. The rest of the time, it does. Yes, political speech writers--I'm looking at you. The second shows insight and an ability to think clearly, but puts as much effort into the writing of the communication as a tomato bug. That measure of success only applies in the artificial confines of academia. The rest of the time people will just sort of shake their heads and move on. Sort of like when you showed up for the interview in a holey rock concert T-shirt, sweatpants, and flip-flops.

Junior faculty coming to me for advice is...disturbing.

Really--I wonder how big that hail was before it melted.

For years I've griped about the documentation required for A&S competitions. With the exception of major competitions like Northern Lights, Ice Dragon, and Kingdom Champions, I think we often set the bar far too high (thus discouraging entrants), and when it isn't set there, it is too low/absent (leaving the judges and populace with little or no information).

The Shire of Coppertree's event this weekend has an A&S competition, which I was asked to coordinate. So I came up with a form I think addresses most of my concerns.




The form gets torn in half, and the side with the entrant's name gets kept for tallying the votes and announcing the winner/s, and the other half goes with the entry.

I'm not convinced there will be any entries, but if there are we'll see how it works out. This is me, putting my money where my mouth is.

Recently, in another forum, a woman I used to babysit for was ranting about the fact that "they're no longer teaching cursive in schools." Hmmm.

Ah. Handwriting. When I was growing up, the handwriting in my house was a joy to behold. Daddy went through a spell of being very sick when he was at the age when students were learning cursive. He was stuck in bed for several months, and to make the time pass (this was the 1920's, and even radio wasn't omnipresent), he practiced his penmanship. He developed this wonderful hand, that was pointy, and angular, and...gorgeous. One of my most treasured possessions is four lines of verse he wrote for me, in his own hand.

Momma, on the other hand, was a product of Palmer Method. Moreover, as she was naturally left-hand dominant (back in the 30's, when teachers routinely smashed the hands of students using their left hands for pretty much anything), learning Palmer method with her non-dominant hand was a trial--one, like so many, she assailed, crushed, and danced on in triumph. Her hand was gorgeous--round, flowing. Even when the schleroderma and arthritis made writing a trial, her hand was beautiful and legible.

It is no wonder, then, that as a child and teenager I wanted my penmanship to be beautiful but distinctive. I took a bit from Daddy, a lot from Momma, and put my own spin on it. Writing hurts these days, but when I take the time, even now, people look at my handwriting and say "Your handwriting is beautiful," and for a moment it feels like Momma has her hand on one shoulder and Daddy the other, squeezing with pride.

With all of that, it may come as a surprise that when Lisa ranted about the lack of cursive instruction in the classroom my response can best be summed up by the phrase "So what?"

Perhaps my problem comes from knowing too much about the history of writing. Our cursive manuscript today is derived primarily from Carolingian Miniscule. Carolingian Miniscule was a hand developed for governing purposes to speed up the time it took to make multiple copies of documents from the Emperor Charlemagne to distribute to vassals and government officials (he who also thought that teaching people to read was a good thing). The calligraphy used before CM was labor intensive and took a significant amount of time, but the connected nature of the letters in CM, which meant fewer lifts of the pen from the vellum or parchment, increased the copier's speed.

Most cursive hands since (excepting extremely ornamented hands like Spencerian and others of that sort) have been devised mostly for legibility and speed of transcription. When the bulk of writing is done by hand, it is essential to make that writing readable and quickly produced.

However, it has been a long time since government and business relied primarily on handwritten documents. And for at least the last twenty years even those documents with sections to be filled in by hand have had,in teeny tiny letters, "Block letters only," or, in more polite circles, "Block letters please." A few years ago the U.S. Postal Service even sent out a communique informing the public that envelopes and packages addressed with cursive script were not guaranteed delivery. Hell--they don't even want you to use upper and lower case!

In academia, at every level, more and more "writing" is done in an electronic environment, with a keyboard, even for in-class and standardized tests. And when scribing is done, block letters work perfectly well (and when done with an electronic stylus and pad, block works even better).

Cursive script, as it existed for those of us who were schooled before the 1980's, is not the same as it is now. It does not serve the same utility, and it was for that utility--legible, quickly written documents--that it occupied time in the classroom. Given the amount of material an elementary teacher has to get through, given the time it takes to teach students cursive, if they have no need for it (and, let's face it, they really don't), then teaching it in school becomes uselessly quaint. Cursive script is now most appropriate for calligraphic purposes, and that is how it should be taught. In art class.

However, if they start getting rid of the teaching of writing altogether, I'll have a problem, because that will be throwing the baby away with the bathwater.

I look forward with no more joy than the next person to attics empty of letters written in beautiful cursive hands, where you can tell Grandma's letters from Aunt Josie's without even reading the names, but those days are gone. And holding onto the relic that is the cursive hand will not change that.

I'd really like a "build the nominee" kit. I want to take parts of Obama, Gingrich, Paul, and Romney and build a strong, humane candidate who understands both how government and the private sector function.

While I'm at it, I'll build a senator or ten, using Scott Brown (the most recent senator from Massachusetts), Ted Kennedy, Orrin Hatch (no, really), and Lyndon Johnson (no, really) for basic building blocks.

The Representatives to Congress are supposed to basically dance as the electorate commands (unlike the Chief Executive, and the Senators, whose offices were designed to have the ability to exercise insight and the long view), so I'll not do anything there. In the case of the House, people get the representation they deserve, either because they voted for an idiot or because they couldn't be bothered to vote at all.

Yeah, I'll get right on that. Assuming I finish my Tardis in time.

This week has been a strange one. There has been vehicle drama (sing with me now "Dead car in the middle of the road/Dead car in the middle of the road..."), followed by less than successful rescue/salvage attempts, mechanic magic, and the final pronouncement "it could die on you in two days or go five years...it's a crapshoot." Then there was the nice collection man at the door today for one of the household bills NOT my responsibility (I do food, oil, car insurance on all three vehicles, cell phones, and the satellite TV). Since I like to bathe, and electricity is necessary to run the pump...

And then there's the packing for the yearly exercise in living in misery in order to "have fun," using some definition of "fun." There is one thing I really like to do there, now that watching the battles and tournaments is basically an exercise in enduring insult in order to experience misery, with very brief moments of actually seeing fighting. What I really enjoy is singing in the Pennsic Choir. But I haven't been able to do that lately because I haven't been able to be there for the concert dates, let alone rehearse enough. Classes can be fun, but lately the heat and humidity have really wiped me out to the point that the last thing I want to do is be trapped in a hot, humid tent, whose walls have clearly been mildewed (hello asthma!), with 20-40 other hot, sweaty people, at least half of whom seem to spend their time trying to one-up the instructor. Look, I'm the first to admit that sometimes the teacher doesn't really know what he or she is talking about. In that case, be polite, ask questions, and don't be a smart ass. And, frankly, if the "one-uppers" would shut up long enough, they'd find that most of the teachers, even if they get some things wrong, really have things of value to share. But, no, there's this real tendency for some people to use the classes as a way to try to prove that they should have more letters after their names than they do, and this is their venue to prove it. Look--we all know that the average IQ in the SCA is way above "norm" (someone even did the research). But it is also true that the social IQ quotient is probably below. One of our claims to fame is that we can "socialize" people so that they are no longer shunned as rude and boorish. Please, stop proving both stereotypes.

So tomorrow I leave for Pennsic. Gear is packed, food prepped (oops--need to make my lunch for the 8 hours on the road). Time to go to bed.

All of which is my long way of saying I'll be gone for a bit. I'm taking an Elizabeth Chadwick novel with me (though I may cheat and continue reading A Dance With Dragons on my iPhone). I'll be back with tales of handfastings, and 50th birthday parties, and well-deserved peerages, and probably a bit too much alcohol, and the inevitable fat-laden food.

As Garrison Keeler would say, "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."

There is great ire in the universe, yet again because of Michael Vick.

This probably deserves a long, thoughtful, developed post, but my "annoyed" button has been pushed, and so here it is.

Either people grow and change, or they do not.

Either we believe people can grow and change, or we do not.

If we don't believe people can grow and change, then we need to punish people, every second of every day, for every bad thing they ever did from the time they were old enough to know that what they were doing was something others thought they shouldn't do. We should give up on the total notion of "second chances," "rehabilitation," or intellectual and moral development.

If we do believe that people can grow and change, then we need to present as role models both those who have always "been good" and those who pay for their mistakes and then move forward to lead lives of value and grace. The one is an ideal to strive for, the other is a promise that a mistake can be overcome. Everyone, particularly children, need to know that a mistake, no matter how horrifying, doesn't have to mean you can't become someone of value and benefit to others, and it is right of corporations to valorize both--the saintly and the redeemed.