Do the Yak

I know I'm obsessed with these people and I thought I'd sampled most of the media droppings about them, but I wasn't aware until I read The Sarcastic Journalist yesterday that they have a web site . It includes links to fun facts (Hey! Did you knoiw she's been pregnant fot a total of ten and a half YEARS?) and some insight into their apparently highly satisfactory relationship with God . I just can't get over these people – I have this horrified fascination, like when you see photos for the first time of gigantic slimy sea worms living miles deep in the ocean in boiling water from volcanic vents, or watching a graphic movie about nuclear war. You're awed, you're amazed, you're disgusted but you can't tear your eyes away. On the bright side, I had a better-than-usual ride into work today. I was playing my iPod through the nifty device Ben got me for my birthday, and the music turned out to be really interesting stuff I blindly downloaded from strea

Plastics. I have found plastics Nirvana . I can now fully indulge my bizarre fascination with Things for Holding Other Things. I have found little squeeze bottles in all sorts of sizes for shampoo when traveling. And big plastic jars for flour and sugar. Not to mention all manner of buckets, pails, bins, barrels and drums. AND! Did you know that we ordinary mortals can also satisfy all our pump , valve , and pipe/duct/blower needs from the privacy of our own computer? Take a deep cleansing breath... OK. The rest of life pales in comparison, but for the record, it's been the usual whirlwind of grocery shopping, taking the kids to the dentist, a family outing to go apple-picking (SO New Englandy), and visiting my dad, which was really nice last night because my brother from Texas was in town, so we stayed and talked until the kids sent a latter to the dining room via registered mail that said WE ARE DAMN TIRED AND CRANKY – WOULD YOU PLEASE BE RESPONSIBLE PARENTS AND TAKE US HOME AND

All this global jihad, all this conservative Christianity... so bogus. These days the media's focus is on Islamic extremism because of Iraq and the 9/11 anniversary. As a side note, ABC recently aired a docudrama about 9/11 that raised hackles over some right-leaning inaccruacies, as noted by Defective Yeti . But the show apparently sucked in other ways and no one watched it. American Christian fundamentalism is no longer big news (remember Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and "God hates fags"?). In the eyes of today’s Islamic hard-liners, all Americans, Jews, etc. are infidels, of course, but The War for Islam in the Boston Globe discusses the intra-Muslim struggle that’s also happening. The article notes that the "Islamic Reformation" is fueled by growing literacy and ease of access to the Koran, and varying interpretations thereof -- including the old-style puritanical views by bin Laden et al. Thanks partly to the Internet and widespread translation of the Kora

So we just shampoo the child and she's cured and we go on our merry way, right? WRONG. We shampooed, we combed afterwards per instructions, we found nothing alarming, we relaxed, and then we decided to do the same for Sarah just as a precaution. And we painstakingly combed out her hair with the special ultra-fine comb (after first using a regular comb and incinerating it). "Painstaking" is just the right word, because Sarah has longer and much finer hair than Sarah, so the comb caught all the time no matter how gentle I tried to be. So this precautionary task involved about 45 minutes of intermittent shrieking and sobbing, which was no fun for anyone but would have been easy to put behind us had the exercise not revealed a LOT of tiny brown... things, some moving and some not. All I can say is... ICK ICK ICK. It appears Becky may actually have caught lice from Sarah, who had commented in preceding days or even weeks that her head itched, but of course it never occurred to

I was in the car on the way to work. It was a Tuesday and therefore a very hectic production deadline day for the weekly newspaper I edited. Just as I got to my desk, Ben called to say he'd heard on NPR that a plan had crashed into the World Trade Center. I hung up thinking that was pretty stupid of the pilot, since the weather was perfectly clear; I assumed it was a small plane whose pilot had a seizure or something. Then I heard that a second plane had hit the other tower. I immediately logged onto CNN.com but of course got nothing due to the totally overloaded bandwidth. I was the only one in the office with a radio, so people crammed into my cubicle listening to the local public radio station. The plane hit the Pentagon; there was a report of a car bomb at the State Dept. All flights were cancelled indefinitely. A colleague burst into tears. I kept putting the paper together because no one told me to stop, and I figured that someone might just send me a new story in the afterno

Another academic year begins. Sarah started first grade today, which is the Thursday after Labor Day. Tuesday and Wednesday we had no options except to bring her to work, which I did for most of the day Tuesday and then Wednesday afternoon. I must admit I had mighty low expectations of getting any actual work done, but she surprised me. She spent most of her time being coy and mute with my office mates, killing a whole forest's worth of paper with my three-hole punch, coloring, cutting, and playing with my desk animals, complete with intricate and dialogue under her breath. At one point, though I was actually concentrating on something and she kept interrupting... Sarah: "Mom? Mom?" Me: (only a tiny bit impatiently) "Just a sec, sweetie, I'm working on something." Sarah: "I told you it would be annoying having a kid at work." Actually she told me no such thing, nor did I tell her any such thing, so I have to conclude she's already adept at pick