The Elephant's Child

Out of Pocket.

We're headed out on a road trip to visit family several states away. 

Most of the comments have been closed down for the duration. See you all next week.

I Never Thought The Day Would Come.

If there's a "Transplanted Wisconsinite Living In Exile" membership card, I've just lost it.

For those of you who aren't in the know, those are bottles of ::cough, cough:: Budweiser ::spit:: in my refrigerator.  Budgetary concerns precluded our usual Sam Adams¹ the last time we bought beer. ::sob::

It's wet.  It smells like beer.  "It's mild and inoffensive," said Mad Musician. "Kind of like white zinfandel."  It doesn't bear much resemblance at all to the various craft beers, macro-microbrews (like the Sam Adams) and the Wernesgruener Pils (sold at Aldi)² that we usually get, but oh well. Please don't tell any Wisconsin people we know.  They might not let us back over the state line.  (Do we at least get style points for buying bottles?)

1. I had told Mad Musician that Miller has made me sick on occasion, but we should try some domestics to save money. So, he bought Budweiser.

2. We're not actually big fans of Miller, either. However, if forced to choose we would normally buy Miller simply on principle, since it's located in Milwaukee, even though it's no longer a wholly-owned local company. I'm pretty sure the only Budweiser-drinking people in Wisconsin are transplated Flatlanders.

The Educational Industrial Complex

Is this education?

"It’s safe to say that improving the workforce is one of two ultimate educational goals; the other being to prepare children to become participating, law-abiding citizens. If NCLB  [No Child Left Behind -ed.] — or any other program — can produce good workers who can stay out of prison, then we should be happy." (Source.)

Sure, I want my kid to be able to show up for work on time and to stay out of prison, as much as any parent does.  Is that to be the sole measure of the success of our educational system? I've said in the past that I've got low standards for Sparkle Kitty, but even my "low standards" assume a more fleshed-out education than the one described above.

I'm sure that the person who wrote the essay excerpted below is a good worker and can stay out of prison:

"When comparing and contrasting socialism with capitalism one can find good in both ideas of systems, it just depends on a person’s opinion. Also, I think morals also play a large role in which system a person would choose to follow. Socialism would be the system a moralist would more likely follow than capitalism. It appears that capitalists are greedier and care about what is better for himself or herself than everybody as a whole. Where as highly moral people tend to help others and care less about being wealthy and more how they are treated, along with their fellow workers. They like the government because they, and I also feel that the government does provide good programs for those in need." (Source.)

If you're going to go online looking for an essay to plagiarize for your writing assignment comparing and contrasting capitalism and socialism, you might want to pick a well-written one. 

Of course, you've got to be a minimally educated person to be able to spot bad writing.  I'm going out on a limb here, but I suspect you've got to be able to manage a bit more than being a good worker and staying out of prison.

Rather a Catch 22, I'd say.

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

Has TV Gotten Stupider?

We didn't install cable TV when we moved to this house four years ago. (We're cheap, not virtuous.)  In this particular location, we could only receive one PBS TV station, and since February, when that PBS station went digital ahead of the Federal deadline, we've not even had that.   (Shhhh! Don't tell Sparkle, but we have a converter box; we haven't hooked it up yet. I'm determined to see if we can survive without it.)

Now I've been laid up with a bad ankle for a few weeks, and I've been watching more "TV" via Hulu and Netflix. (Correction: I was before our router travails.)

Boy, has TV gotten dumb.  I've tried three times to watch an episode of 30 Rock, which someone told me I'd like.  I can't do it. I get a few minutes into it, and start thinking "Why am I watching this, when I could be getting caught up on one of the pol blogs I never seem to have time to read?"

I watched one episode of The Daily Show the other day, and it was mildly funny.  My big complaint is that too many of the gags and jokes get dragged out way too long. It's funny for 5 seconds, people, not 20.  Does it take twenty seconds for everyone to get the gag?  I tried watching another one a few nights later and I ended up not being sad that my router tanked and cut short my TV viewing.

I've looked through the listings on Hulu, looking for shows that I might like, and nothing but Futurama clips and episodes of The Simpsons seems even remotely interesting.  Even current episodes of The Office, of which I've seen Seasons One and Two and thought hilarious, seem less than wonderful.

Either TV has gotten even more stupid in the last four years than it was before, or my attention span is now so incredibly short that it's not even adequate for normal retarded television.

That's a scary, scary thought.

I think I'll go with the "just haven't found the right great show" angle instead.  Suggestions?

Radio That Makes You Cry.

Dear Pastor Wilken, Jeff, and Craig,

I've been listening to Issues, Etc on and off since about a year before your "hiatus" in 2008.  I enjoy the show immensely and have learned so very much.  I am blessed these days to be under a dear shepherd that teaches me the faith before I hear it on Issues, Etc. That has not always been the case, and I have Issues, Etc to thank for making me one of those "dangerously over-educated laymen."  Thank you very much for your show.

But, gentlemen, I have a complaint.  On Tuesday June 30th, you broadcast a show which I listened to in segments via download on Wednesday, July 1st, using my handy cherry-red 2 GB Sansa Clip.  (Thank you very much, by the way, for making the show so accessible to us lowly on-demand listeners.)  One particular segment featured an hour with Rev. Matt Harrison of Lutheran World Relief and Human Care.

This segment made me cry. Never before have I heard "good works" so perfectly portrayed as a can't-but-help outpouring of the fruit of the Gospel.

Talk radio isn't supposed to make a person cry. It's quite outside the norm.  I'm afraid I also have to call your attention to a segment which you recorded September last, with Rev. Todd Peperkorn, which was a frank and honest discussion about clinical depression. (Rev. Peperkorn has written a short book on the topic. I urge you to have him on your show again.)  Because I also struggle on and off with a milder form of depression, this segment also made me cry.

I have come clean and tell you, dear brothers in Christ, that it is a very good thing indeed that I'm a girl and I'm used to crying at the drop of a hat, or I'd have to stop listening to your show.  And we wouldn't want that!

Congratulations on your first year.  May you be on the radio until your grandkids are pushing you up to the boards and microphone in a wheelchair. We'll all be listening from our nursing homes, and telling our own grandkids horror stories of archives-wiping, Lutherans protesting, and a Pirate and some of his friends working overtime to get a great show back on the air.

In Christ,
Jenny / Elephantschild.

Router Rooter, Where Are You?

We continue to have router trouble.  If I power off the router and plug it back in, I can get 10 minutes to about 45 minutes of internet usage before it goes blooey. (That's the technical term.)  I can either walk downstairs, unplug and re-plug the router, go back upstairs, wait, and then maybe enjoy a few more minutes of internet connexion before it goes blooey again or I can wait several hours, after which it seems to work for about half an hour or so.

My internet connexion itself seems to be just fine. If I connect Mad Musician's six year old laptop directly  to the internet cable, it works beautifully.  Wow, and fast, too!  Guess I knew that the wireless slows things down, but I didn't realise it was THAT bad.

The wireless signal from the router to my computer seems to be fine, as I can get a local connexion without trouble.  If we plug the laptop into the router with a cable, we have the trouble as described above, so it's not related to the wireless aspect of the setup.

Is my router just dead?  We did a reset with a paperclip, set it back to the factory defaults, re-configured our user name, password and SSID, after which we got, yup, about 45 minutes of internet connexion and then it went blooey again.

Help me out. I've done as much forum-trawling  ("FIRST!" "No, i'm FIRST"  "u suck!" "dude, look at my cat!" "RTFM, moron!") as I can stand, and that taught me to check if there was a "firmware" (note: that is not a supportive undergarment) update for my router. Nope. I looked.  The router is four years old.  Couldn't find an update.

Now, this would all be moot if I could get a wire up to the second floor easily.  I'd prefer the desktop computer to be wired anyway. We set it up wirelessly simply to save drilling holes in floors, wrestling with fish tape and all that fun stuff.  We're not hardcore gamers, so lightening speed wasn't a huge issue.

Apparently, we've just enough of a nerd-point rating to know to lock down the network and change the default password and SSID, but not ONE single nerd-point more than that. 

Suggestions?  I'd rather not go out and buy another router until I'm sure this one is completely bricked.  And I'd rather not start squatting my blogging life on the six-year old laptop downstairs. I've gotten quite comfortable up here with this big stash of RAM and this large, sparkly clean flat panel monitor!

Have Fun Putting In That New Fuel Pump.

The Sun Is A Mass of Incandescent Gas.

This morning Sparkle told me all about sunspots.  She and Daddy were reading Exploring Creation with Astronomy last night before bed.

The kid knows stuff about the sun that I don't know.   She can also sing this song very well.

You can find the rest of the great old vintage songs here. Scientific accuracy not assured, and some of them are just downright weird.

(Firefox and Vista collude to hate Quicktime, so I've got just a plain black bar for the audio file playback. I can play it if I click where the "play" button would be if I could see it. And before you start laughing at me because I'm running Vista, this is the ONLY problem I've had with Vista. Only one. So there.)

Please Say You're Sorry For Calling Us Meanies.

President Obama finally says something the other day about the violence in Iran.

Now President Tom would like an apology.

"Um, no, " says President Obama. 

I dare say, that's perhaps the first thing President Obama has ever said that I like.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Iran's Guardian Council has hired the Iraqi Information Minister as a consultant.  "That was the cleanest election we've ever had!" they say.

That's all for tonight!  We now return you to your regularly scheduled Micheal Jackson Love Fest, so very conveniently timed to allow the mainstream media to limit coverage of both the voting on the cap-and-trade bill and the continuing crackdown in Iran.