Posted by Jim at October 28th, 2006
Here’s clip from David Letterman’s show in which David Letterman and Bill O’Reilly talk about Iraq. There’s a point in it in which O’Reilly asks the sort of question that he often asks on his own tv show–a question that makes the interviewee look like a fool when he/she answers differently than Bill O’Reilly would have.
It’s harder to put someone into a box when it’s not your show.
Posted by Jim at October 27th, 2006
At one point, one of our cats decided that tipping over his water bowl was highly entertaining. He would put his paw on the side, tip it a little to test it, and then just push the side all the way to the floor.
We got a new bowl for him within a few days. The last one was made out of plastic. The current one is made of clay and weighs almost as much as he does.
This same cat also had a strong interest in pressing the eject button and popping the cd tray out of the cd player. Once he followed it up by removing the cd with his teeth. This is why Dvorak’s New World Symphony’s third movement is unlistenable.
The cd player is now inside our entertainment center.
I don’t know what we would have done if the cat started to do this…
Posted by Jim at October 20th, 2006
In discussing a recent blog entry with my wife, I was reminded of a similar event in my own childhood.
When I was in first grade, I ended up being sick with the flu for about a week. When I was feeling good enough to do homework, they started sending home the worksheets I would ordinarily have done at school.
I wasn’t entirely finished with all of them when I went back to school. Thus I was finishing them off after coming home. At some point, I got bored and picked up the scissors I was using and experimentally cut my hair in the front. Despite the fact that it was a rather dull scissors, it did cut hair.
Soon after I did this, my mom came into the kitchen and noticed me at the table. More to the point, she noticed my hair and asked me about it. Faced with the dim but growing sense that cutting one’s hair was something that could get a person in trouble, I lied.
I created a story in which the most powerful force I could imagine (a bunch of second graders) was running around the playground with scissors giving children haircuts.
Amazingly, she bought it. My mom is actually an intelligent person so I put this down to the fact that I was generally a truthful child. What I did not anticipate was that she would then call my teacher and and inform her that second graders were running around the playground with scissors and giving children haircuts.
So, the next day I was taken out of class. My teacher asked which other children had had their hair cut so she could talk to them.
This caused me to do some story revision. So, I explained that I was the only one whose hair had actually been cut.
Then she wanted me to identify the second graders who had done it.
Erm…
I realized at that point that while I did not want to tell my mom that I’d cut my hair, I also didn’t want to get some random kid in trouble.
I confessed.
My teacher then lectured me about lying. I remember it as a rather traumatic event and realized as I was telling my wife about it that I’d never told the story to anyone before. This despite the fact that I remember thinking about it a lot during my elementary school years.
I’ll leave it to you the reader to construct your own moral.
Posted by Jim at October 14th, 2006
Some of you may remember this post I made about Iraq a while back. I can’t say my views have changed much since then, but that won’t stop me from briefly revisiting them.
Here’s the worst case scenario I worried about pre-invasion due to the little I was hearing about post-invasion planning:
1. We invade and win.
2. Due to not having enough troops on the ground, we are not able to prevent an insurgency from developing.
3. Because we do not prevent an insurgency from developing, many people die and the U.S. public loses confidence in the war.
4. Because the war is unpopular, we pull out early. This leads to civil war or at least civil disorganization.
5. Eventually some sort of dictator comes into being, stabilizing the country, but causing the U.S. to wonder whether it should go in a second time.
Though I don’t find it particularly comforting, I’ve been a little bit relieved to find that we are only at number 3 (even though the current situation edges toward 4) in my worst case scenario.
“Well,” I’ve said to myself, “at least we haven’t had serious talk about putting in a dictator to stabilize the country.”
You can then imagine my reaction to this NPR story about coup rumors in Iraq. The good news is that a coup isn’t likely. The bad news is that some Iraqis appear to be thinking that it wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing.
In the past I’ve written that the solution to insurgency is putting more people on the ground. I still think this. The trouble is that the chances of that are roughly zero. If we wanted to raise the necessary troops from our own country, we’d need to draft people. Raising troops from other countries seems unlikely.
Bearing that in mind, it seems that the question then becomes how to leave responsibly. As in, how do we leave while giving Iraq the best chance to avoid civil war and dictatorship? Personally, I’d be in favor of a slow withdrawal while simultaneously training up Iraqi troops. The trouble is that that seems to be our current policy and my impression is that it’s not working very well.
Every so often I’ve heard people who defend the war say something along the lines of, “Leaving Iraq alone would have left Saddam Hussein in charge. Removing him is an improvement no matter what else happens.”
While I agree that removing Saddam Hussein from power is potentially a good thing, I’m inclined to think that a process of removal that turns Iraq into a chaotic mess (or creates a new dictator) is just as bad or worse.
Posted by Jim at October 8th, 2006
The “make up” day for school pictures is this week. Our kids didn’t get to the regular school pictures day because pictures were taken on a day that they don’t go to school. Fortunately it turns out that “make up” day is on a day when they do go to school. It’s just that if the pictures turn out to be bad, there is no way to change them.
Trouble is, we know now that they will be bad pictures. Why?
Some of you may remember a story arc in “Calvin and Hobbes” in which Calvin brings hair gel and shapes his hair into a shark fin (or something like that).
Well, that’s not really an option for our kids now. They put a chair next to the stove and climbed up to the cupboard above the stove.
The second shelf above the stove is where we keep the scissors–safely out of kids’ reach.
You can guess what follows that. The pile of hair under the piano. “My Pretty Pony’s” new (and much shorter) tail. The larger hair pile next to the toy box mixed with multi-colored string (the origins of which we will someday discover).
In summary:
The scissors are now in a new place.
The haircuts are not our fault. *
* Well, sort of. I was downstairs in the basement when it happened. While I didn’t hear them do anything, there was a point at which it got really, really quiet. Those of you with kids will know that that’s the point at which I should have run upstairs.
Posted by Jim at October 6th, 2006
Those of you with kids may have noticed that Campbell’s has a line of soups featuring popular children’s characters (which cost a few cents more, I’ve noticed).
So anyway, if beef soup has beef in it and chicken soup has chicken in it, what is “Dora the Explorer” soup made from?