I know I'm a day late and a dollar short on this post, but I thought of it while I was unpacking boxes and just never got around to blogging it.

You know how Miss Nevada was stripped of her crown for being a skank? I was thinking that it's a lot more likely that girls of her/my generation would have something like this in their past to hide. How are we ever going to find First Ladies out of the Girls Gone Wild generation? Lots of college girls do dumb or slutty things these days, and with the prevalence of cell cameras, they'll never be safe from their antics.

Just a thought. Today's Girls Gone Wild chick is my kid's future third grade teacher...

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Doesn't this hullabaloo over "Where's Obama?" remind you a bit of the time they gave the James Earl Ray plaque at a Martin Luther King celebration? Some typos should just never happen.

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I'm still making my way through A Pocket History of the United States; I haven't gotten much reading in during moving time. I'm up to JFK though, and the book only goes through Reagan, so I should get there soon. I've been learning a lot and gaining perspective on our country's lifespan.

One of my favorite bits, from weeks ago, is on the Constitutional Convention:

They were aided in their discussions by the rule of secrecy which the Convention strictly kept. Publicity would have magnified the dissentions; it would have tempted members to make speeches for the galleries or press; and it would have laid them open to pressure from their constituents. The sober citizens of Philadelphia deserved praise for their refusal to pry into the Convention's work. Once at the dinner table Franklin mentioned to friends the old fable of the two-headed snake which starved to death because the heads could not agree on which side of a tree to pass; he said he could give an illustration from a recent occurrence in the Convention; but his friends reminded him of the rule of secrecy and stopped him.

Can you even for a moment imagine this happening today? There's no way that 39 men could work in secrecy to draft a constitution, but thank heavens it happened that way back then.

I also have noticed the book getting slightly less rah-rah about the US, as I mentioned in the preface and as several Amazon readers noted. However, it's not nearly as bad as another book I recently skimmed through. The Girl, bless her heart, loaned me a book called What Every American Should Know About American History. It has some interesting chapters and brings some knowledge to the table, but some of the stuff is just so biased. My husband was the one who noticed that the cover of the book shows six photos that sum up American history...and one of them is of Rodney King! And I about died when I read the two-page chapter called "The Cold War Ends" and there was not one single mention of the words Ronald or Reagan. Give me a break. I love that The Girl sent the book to me (please don't hate me), but some of chapters just killed me.

The Pocket History book isn't that bad, but I think the Red Scare deserved a tiny bit more than a brush of the hand, at least if David Horowitz is even halfway truthful.

Posted by: Sarah at 10:25 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 As a history major I marvel at how very little politics played in our founding fathers. One of my favorite reads is the Federalist Papers a kind of behind the scenes thought process of those drafting the Constitution. There were definately two schools of thought, but each side professed their beliefs without attacking the other. Novel idea.

Posted by: Sgt Hook at January 02, 2007 04:14 PM (UEcVc)

2 I'm not offended at all - I actually laughed quite a bit when I read your analysis. The funny thing is the reason that book was purchased was a direct result of a different "history" book. Almost 10 years ago, I was taking a U.S. History class from my local community college in KY. My friend Ambrose was waiting on me to finish my take-home test so that we could go out that evening. I wasn't working quickly enough, so she decided to assist with my test. Granted, I'm from the "South," but she was amazed at the text & the questions showing such incredible bias. (She's a Yankee and all - haha - from PA.) I never will forget one of the questions... it was about the slaves "helping" their owners fight during the Civil War. I thought she was going to choke. At any rate, after she & her husband moved back to PA, I flew up to visit them. We spent an entire day in Philadelphia, doing the whole "tourist" thing. That book was purchased right around the corner from the Liberty Bell... after we walked in the store, and Ambrose shouted something about Lexington "not only" being in KY

Posted by: The Girl at January 02, 2007 08:26 PM (7avAQ)

3 Interesting to read your post today since I am finishing up a course in U.S. History. My current course covers the period from 1865-1945. I took a course a few months ago, before we left Germany, that covered U.S. History up to 1865. I have found the text for these courses quite informative and interesting. My next course covers the period from 1945 to present (or I guess up to whenever the book was written). All three courses come from the same text, which is "Nation of Nations." I have it in electronic format as part of my course. You might find it interesting. I'm glad I'm taking this course at this point in my life because I'm getting so much more from it than I did History classes when I was in high school.

Posted by: Robin at January 03, 2007 04:07 PM (V5aG3)

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I just had one of those moments like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride, where he goes nuts and starts pulling hotdog buns out of the pack. I think that someone at the window factory got together with someone in the blinds factory and decided to screw the American public.

We went to buy blinds. Our windows are 54" wide. Well, you can buy 52" or 59". And 59" costs ten bucks more. So we proceeded to buy 59"s and have them cut about fifty dollars worth of blinds off and dump them in the garbage. It's funny because I'm not really mad about the price -- I would've bought 54"s for the same price -- I'm just ticked that I had to pay to waste blinds, that I had to sit for an hour and a half and watch them throw our money down a hole. Literally.

But at least tomorrow the sheets can come down from the windows.

Posted by: Sarah at 12:55 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Dear Michael Richards,

This letter will remind you of the letter I wrote to the Abu Ghraib jerks. That's because I realized today that we've got ourselves an analogy here. Remember the SAT? Here's a good one for you:

Abu Ghraib soldiers : Iraq :: Michael Richards : race relations

Yes, Kramer, you're the Lynnie England of race.

The rest of us work hard to heal the wounds of yesteryear. We try to treat people fairly, we make sure we never say something that could offend, and we work to keep our country moving forward towards harmony between the races. And you come along and yell at someone about lynching.

What in the holy hell were you thinking?

When I first heard this story, I thought it was weird and dumb. But I really didn't think it mattered in the long run. Then I read this sentence in a completely unrelated article today:

If blacks are to fight the plague that is racial ugliness -- and racism remains one of the great threats to the Republic, no question about it, just ask that Seinfeld loser or Mel Gibson -- then we have to be honest with ourselves.

So now, thanks to you, people with an agenda can hold you up as the Paragon of Racism. See, white people are racist deep down: that Kramer guy called people the n-word. Just like how the Abu Ghraib soldiers destroyed the reputation of all the other honorable and admirable soldiers in Iraq, you have destroyed whatever credibility we white people have when we claim that racism isn't nearly as bad as some people let on.

Now my college roommate, who was afraid of walking across campus for fear of being lynched, will have more of a reason to think all white people really are out to get her. Now when some loser celeb says that the president hates black people, someone might honestly think that a tirade about lynching could just as easily come out of Bush's mouth as it did out of yours.

Black people everywhere will be waiting for the racist shoe to drop, thanks to you.

Most of us are not racist. We don't think lynchings are funny. We have enough of a moral or societal compass to know that what you did was completely out of line. And weird. Most of us don't have that crap bubbling right below the surface. Slight provocation won't give us n-word diarrhea of the mouth. We look at what you did as the strangest and most horrifying thing you can think of.

But to the black author of that article, it was just proof that "racism remains one of the great threats to the Republic."

Thanks a lot. All the progress that we white people have made to try to prove that we judge on the content of character: gone.

I hate you for that.
Sarah

Posted by: Sarah at 09:49 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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CaliValleyGenius has a post up about taxes.

I've written so many times here about fraud, waste, and abuse. I can think of dozens of examples in my own life of how the government wastes money in the military community. And if they're wasting it in the few places I've been, I can't stand to think how much waste there really is.

I've got one word to sum up fraud, waste, and abuse: Pearl.

Pearl was our education counselor in Germany. She was brought out of retirement to fill the position. She gave soldiers so much wrong advice that it makes me ill, she couldn't write a grammatical sentence to save her life, and she constantly brought me her work and asked for help because she didn't understand. I made $8.50 an hour; she made over $60,000 a year.

And if there's one Pearl, there are surely plenty of others.

The government doesn't spend money wisely, and there aren't many checkups once it's spent to make sure they're getting bang for their buck. I don't want the government to have a dime more than they need.

Posted by: Sarah at 09:30 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 Hi Sarah! Thanks for commenting on the taxes post. Your blog is fantastic! I can see I'll be a daily reader from here on out. Have a good day today!

Posted by: KC at November 17, 2006 10:40 AM (TSy2I)

2 Oh man, don't even get me started on Pearl. She surely has to be the biggest waste of the Army's money. Ever. (although I've seen some pretty awful waste and fraud in the Army.)

Posted by: Erin at November 26, 2006 05:39 AM (D8Fkq)

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The other night when my husband got home from his staff ride, his world had changed: a Democrat Congress, an Army without Rumsfeld, a potential slot in Civil Affairs, and a new deployment to a completely different country. He paced around the bedroom for a long time, talking out all the different possible futures and what he might accomplish in either Iraq or Afghanistan. I sarcastically added that, given the change from elephant to donkey, it might all be moot because the troops could be home. Agitated, he said, "I know, I know, that's why I have to get there as soon as possible so I can help before it's too late."

My husband's visible discomfort that he might not have another opportunity to put to use all he learned in Iraq, all he has digested and mulled over for two years, stands in stark contrast to the Iraqi quoted in this article:

“What was I going to wait for that would keep me on the force?” said Mohammed Humadi, a police captain who quit in August after one of his commanders was killed and beheaded. “Nothing was going to get any better. I have children, and if I were to sacrifice myself, it wouldn’t change anything.”

I struggle daily with the two opposing camps of the War in Iraq: those who say that the US has no business trying to set up a utopia halfway across the world, and those whose idealism bubbles over into dreams of playing Iraq in the World Cup. But the one thing I do know is that it's a knife in my heart that my husband would give his life for Iraq while this Iraqi would not.

A knife in my heart.

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Oh lord, here's what we have to look forward to: Democrat constituents screeching for impeachment.

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Here's something I don't remember noticing in July: Saddam specifically asked not to be hanged like a common criminal.

"I advise you as an Iraqi, if you were in a circumstance in which you have to issue a death penalty, you have to remember that Saddam is a military man and in this case the verdict should be death by shooting not by hanging," [Saddam] told the judge.

Justice, thy name is the gallows.

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I was intrigued by the MSN link called Women: 20 musts before 40. Geez, I've only got eleven years left! I'd better get in gear.

Uh, what?

All in all, MSN advocates $94,154 worth of consumer goods, plus pricetagless trips to see the Dalai Lama and a haircut from some famous L.A. barber.

Get real.

A Cadillac XLR roadster and Gucci luggage? That's what women need? Doesn't the average American household have something like $8000 in consumer debt? And MSN thinks that suggesting $4000 watches and trips to Mongolia is a good idea?

Seriously, what planet are these people living on? You know what women need by the age of 40? Maturity and self-respect. Then they won't fill that void with fancy suits, watches, haircuts, and cars.

Some of the suggestions were reasonable: a subscription to a smarty-smart magazine, a few jazz CDs, and some classic movies. Get people to broaden their horizons. Even a trip isn't a bad idea, though it's condescending to say that Europe is oh-so-yesterday and now the Third World is where it's at. Maybe MSN can encourage these women to adopt an African baby while they're there; it's all the rage, right?

I'm regularly disgusted and offended by the nonsense MSN prints, but this is just over the top. Who do they think their target audience is, suggesting a $78,000 car? Is Julie Greenwald hanging out on MSN trying to figure out what she should buy with her millions? I imagine most women who click that link are looking for more spiritual advice: find a hobby you really love, teach your children to waltz, volunteer for a charity that empowers you. Not more ways to spend money.

What the hell is wrong with our culture, that this passes as advice for women?

Posted by: Sarah at 03:24 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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I've been ranting about TV elsewhere because I usually get it with both barrels when I write about TV here. Yes, I know it's not real.

Anyway, Teresa pointed out that Hollywood is not very good at writing realistic marriages. I was shocked recently to see that KFC commercial where the young wife is on the phone and she "signs" what she wants for dinner to her husband. And her husband's buddy doesn't get it, so he explains their secret language. Every time I see that commercial, I keep waiting for it to change. I keep waiting for the punchline to be that the husband is complete dufus who doesn't know anything about his wife. As it stands, that commercial is really stinking cute. It shows married people actually working in harmony, knowing each other on an extremely personal level. You never get that on TV.

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1 And the de-lurking commences... Have you heard of the sci-fi TV show Firefly or its movie Serenity? Created by genius (and liberal) Joss Whedon, it's funny, fascinating, and thrilling. Of the crew, the captain is vocally libertarian. Two of the characters are happily married. One character is a "shepherd" or pastor/missionary type who is not a kook, fanatic, or two-faced pervert. You should try it if you haven't already.

Posted by: Sabbrielle at November 06, 2006 08:52 AM (C0EP2)

2 I've seen everyone in the blog world go nutso over Serenity, so I was planning on seeing it soon. My dad used to watch Firefly, but I just tuned in for John Doe afterwards!

Posted by: Sarah at November 06, 2006 09:19 AM (7Wklx)

3 I recommend watching Firefly first. There are fourteen total episodes. The Sci-fi channel is showing a Firefly marathon on December 12th. Of course, if your husband already likes the show, the DVD set would be a good investment. *shameless*

Posted by: Sabbrielle at November 06, 2006 10:35 AM (C0EP2)

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I'm reminded again of the absolute horror my Swedish friend felt when she saw me clapping and cheering the day Timothy McVeigh was executed. But I feel the same now about Saddam as I did back then: If someone called me today and said they're short a hangman and could I come give 'em a hand, I'd say, "Give me a second to put my shoes on."

Smash is right:

Unfortunately, the sentence is not to be carried out at daybreak. Appeals and due process will delay the execution for months, if not years. Saddam will get more consideration than any of his victims ever received, and arguably more than he deserves, but that's one of the many differences between freedom and tyranny.

I guess this is enough consolation for today. At least it made our household chuckle:

Thousands of Iraqis sang, danced and unleashed celebratory bursts of gunfire yesterday as Saddam Hussein finally faced the consequences of his tyrannical rule in a Baghdad courtroom.

Oh, the Iraqis and their celebratory gunfire.

The husband's leaving for a field trip tomorrow, or else a cake would be in order. I'll just have to remember the deliciousness of the dragging-him-out-of-a-dirty-hole cake. And dream of the deliciousness of the hanging-by-his-broken-neck cake I'll get to make someday. Yummy.

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We're only living here temporarily, which means that I haven't got much of a social life. I don't have a single, actual, real-life human being friend here, unless you count the apartment complex staff. The only "conversation" I've had in the past five months has been the internet kind, which is bad because I've been living in a bubble. When you spend that much time in the internet community, you forget that we're such a small slice of the population.

I just caught the tail-end of a radio trivia gimmick, where a caller had to answer some questions. She had no idea who Dennis Hastert is, she couldn't provide a line from the "Star-Spangled Banner", and she didn't have the first guess what the Dow was at...in fact, she thought "the Dow" was a new type of WMD. I am not kidding. It might've been funny if it weren't so stinking depressing.

So beware the internet bubble. And be glad half the country doesn't vote.

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Woohoo, the voodoo doll worked!
Go Cards!

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Whew, my heart can't handle being a baseball fan. I thought for a while that it might be my duty-Judy to be a Tigers fan next week, but now the Tigers can eat it.
All hail Yadier Molina.

And my sleep cycle can't handle Eastern time zone. Look at me, up until midnight. I'm so off schedule from all these late night games that Charlie and I slept until 0945 this morning. I haven't slept that late since college.

And I sure can't sleep right now; I have to wait for all those butterflies to calm down.

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Saw this on MSNBC today: A new study finds that even top undergraduates are woefully ignorant of history and civic government

I can't say I'm surprised at all. My college GPA was a 3.92 and I missed a couple on the sample test. Embarrassing. And my college did a pretty good job of forcing us to take a variety of courses. Still, even with all those requirements I never had to take economics, statistics, or anything like geography. I think we do a disservice to students by filling their schedules with stuff like "Environmental Global Warming" or "Gender and the Law". I took a class on serial killers, so now I know more than the average person about Ted Bundy but cringed when I got asked a question about the Revolutionary War. That's sad, but I have no one to blame but myself. I just wasn't mature enough from age 18 to 22 to take anything that wasn't fun. Fat lot of good my Russian literature and Japanese classes have done me since.

By the way, I've been looking for a good US history book because I think I could really use a refresher. Anyone out there have any suggestions?

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Hud found a study that tried to replicate the Super Size Me movie and had vastly different results. My husband and I would like to try to replicate Spurlock's stint with poverty. We watched him on Oprah talk about how impossible it was to live on so little money...and then he takes his niece and nephew to the movies and buys everyone popcorn and candy. So the moral of the story is that it's hard to live like a baller on little money? Duh.

I honestly think I could live on minimum wage. Heck, we don't even try and we only spend half my husband's paycheck, and I spend $400 a month at the grocery store on gourmet mushrooms and cheeses. If we really tried, like going to Aldi and having my husband ride his bike three times a day to work instead of just one, we could cut that down to next to nothing. And we sure as heck wouldn't be 1) going to the movie or 2) buying outrageous Junior Mints there. If we were so inclined (and we might not be, since I love cooking and cable TV), we could spend very little money. To be honest, all we could think about while watching Spurlock on Oprah is how hard it would be for us to stay on minimum wage. If for some reason we both had to start from the bottom again, we'd race each other back to the top. Night school, adult education, something so that we'd make more money. And we wouldn't spend a dime more than we had to. Spurlock just sat around his apartment and complained about how much better his old life was and how hard it was to be poor.

Actually, the real experiment we missed out on came as a tardy inspiration. I should've gotten a job at Walmart when we moved here and seen how I was treated for the six months. That would've been interesting blogging.

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I'm flying home this weekend for my reunion, so I looked up what is not permitted on the plane these days. I can take a corkscrew but not a chapstick? OK. I'm just taking my wallet and a book.

I also ran across this horrifying account of a mother watching her seven year old son get felt up by airport screeners (via RWN). She's right: is it really making us safer for someone to thoroughly check her kid's underroos? Sad.

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I just saw an interview with Maswan Rasmoudi from the Center for Islam and Democracy. (Or Raswan Masmoudi from the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, as the only google hit came up with. What the heck -- did John Gibson just get it totally wrong? I wrote it down word for word from the TV.)

Anyway, whoever this guy was, he gave the usual speech that Islam is being corrupted by a small minority of people who are attacking the Pope. Naturally, that's not mainstream Islam. OK.

It's easy to cherrypick certain ayat to show how messed up Islam is. Of importance now are the sword verses, those that say

to "fight and slay the pagan (idolaters) wherever you find them" (sura 9:5); or "strike off their heads in battle" (sura 47:5); or "make war on the unbeliever in Allah, until they pay tribute" (sura 9:29); or "Fight then... until the religion be all of it Allah's" (sura 8:39); or "a grievous penalty against those who reject faith" (sura 9:3).

These are certainly troubling passages, but there's plenty of troubling stuff in the Bible as well. In my opinion, the texts are not nearly as important as what followers do with the information.

I've never been 100% convinced that the Bible explicitly comes out against homosexuality. But I don't deny the fact that most Christians read the verses as admonishment and on the whole have adopted the worldview that homosexuality is wrong. No matter what the actual words of the translation of the Bible say, or no matter how I think they could be interpreted, it is a fact that most Christians aren't thrilled with homosexuality. It's the actions that matter, not the words that were written down 2000 years ago.

So when Raswan Masmoudi says that these Koran ayat are being taken out of context and abused by Osama bin Laden and a "minority" of angry Muslims, I call b.s. on him. It doesn't matter how he and his friends at the Center want to interpret the verses; what matters is that real live actual journalists were threatened with their lives if they didn't convert.

I can try to convince Christians that the verses against homosexuality are just as outdated as the slavery or "unclean during your period" verses until I'm blue in the face, but that doesn't make Christianity as a whole keen on homosexuality. Similarly, these folks can keep saying that Islam is a religion of peace and that jihad is a personal struggle, but that doesn't mean that it's going to bear out in reality. In reality, Muslims are threatening to assassinate the Pope.

You can't change the actions of a religion by claiming that verses of the holy book have been taken out of context. What matters is the actions.

MORE TO GROK:

Amritas makes a good point: A big difference between Islam and Christianity is that the words matter so much more in Islam. I remember accidentally starting a fight in my linguistics class because I asked how Allah could dictate the Koran but Mohammad wrote it down with no vowels. The vowels are what matter in Arabic! How could we be absolutely sure what Allah was saying without the vowels? It seemed like a completely illogical system. My teacher got really mad at me and asked how I dared call Allah illogical. And she was a Jew, go figure.

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In ridiculous celebrity news, Britney Spears had her second baby in a year. However, she can't beat my mother-in-law: Britney's babies are 363 days apart; husband and his brother are 357 days apart. Keep tryin', Brit.

And my husband noticed this article that Kevin Costner doesn't approve of the new movie where President Bush gets assassinated. The fact that not thinking the President should be shot is newsworthy and controversial really says something about Hollywood these days.

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