• Anatomy of an evening

    Having kids is a lesson in equal opportunity, taken to extremes. Take this evening (please). First, Adam is happy with his bowl of Crock-Pot special (mommy and daddy’s diner of choice). Enter Beth, with her bowl of specially prepared, left-over Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Sooner than you can say, “mommy, mommy,” Adam was out of his chair in search of greener pastures.

    Since we are parents of questionable metal, we prepared a fresh bowl of left-over Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for Adam. Enter Beth with her cup of orange juice. Sooner than you can say, “Adam don’t throw your macaroni,” the boy was up in arms over his drink selection. Going back to the issue of metal… Adam gets his cup of OJ. But of course it’s not in the right kind of cup… so we put it in a cup with a built-in straw, like Beth’s… but of course it’s not the same color as Beth’s… so we find Adam’s OJ mixed in a bowl with his freshly prepared, left-over Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

    Long after we should have turned to an alternate strategy… Adam finds himself finished with dinner…

    Faster than you can say, “shower time.”

  • Please put some wean in Halloween

    My first mistake every fall is buying Halloween candy that I like. It’s never a sure thing that we’ll have any left when the last Trick-or-Treater comes by the house… with me going through the candy like an 80’s rock band went through hair spray. On Halloween night you can find me in my recliner, looking like some caricature of good ‘ole fashioned American Excess. I’ve got one hand on the remote and the other in the candy jar, sitting in a pile of my own empty wrappers.

    I’d have more self-control at a 1/2 off sale at the Apple Store.

  • The “PC” defense

    There was a great article in the St Pete Times several months ago (11/1/2006).

    The gist of the article was that a couple of right-wing-nuts from Hernando County went off on a Muslim group that wanted to have a party at a county park. It started with a Hernando County Commissioner’s wife writing a letter to the editor of the St Pete Times, the Times making a follow-up call for comment, and moved on to the whole thing turning into something a little ugly. Lest we think these were isolated folks, voicing a lonely opinion, the piece characterized the couple in question as “the first couple of Hernando County’s Republican Party.”

    Here are some excerpts from the article:

    A Hernando County commissioner said Tuesday that he is “in total agreement” with a letter his wife wrote calling Islam a “hateful, frightening religion.”

    “Overall, worldwide, it certainly is,” said Commissioner Tom Hogan Sr. “Don’t you read your own paper?”

    “There’s a saying out there, and there’s some truth to it, that not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. It’s their thing.”

    “Even if they have gotten citizenship, they are not true Americans in my opinion. They all want to kill us.”

    … political correctness keeps many from speaking out. “These people are trying to kill us. They want to kill us. Why can’t you understand that? They say that. It’s written in their bible.”

    She said moderate Muslims haven’t done enough to condemn and stop terrorists. “I don’t want to sound like a raving maniac, but I think some raving is in order,” she said.

    Do these people have a legitimate beef against the “sensitivity police,” or is this nothing more than the raving of people whose beliefs have fallen victim to stereotype and prejudice?

    You didn’t ask but I’ll tell you what I think anyway: right or wrong, it was an irresponsible thing to say. The fact remains that there are millions of peacefull muslims in this country and this kind of talk smacks of justification for mistreatment or abuse.