Inspiration, and a couple of chain links
Jul. 28th, 2006 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumMaia kiboshed my going with her. She's probably right. I am probably doing less well than I think. She has noticed, all week, that I'm not well, and while I feel less than perfect, I don't feel I ought to be visibly unwell. I have noticed a lack of co-ordination. Sigh.
But that's not really what I wanted to talk about.
I wanted to talk about Jamie, the son of, "The most dangerous professor in America," (per David Horowitz) has Down's Syndrome. He is also, acording to his father a wonderful person, irrespective of this.
But this post is not about Ted Leo. It’s not even about the Rapture. It’s about Jamie....
___ He loves more forms of animal life than most people are aware of, and he’s always game for learning more. Habitat, diet, means of reproduction, salient characteristics, you name it. He’s a shark fanatic and a marine specialist, yes, but he can also get excited by sitatungas, bison, sparrows, salamanders, crocodiles, eagles, jellyfish, baboons, and snakes (on planes and off). “Is that an emu?” I asked him as we stopped at Clyde Peeling’s Reptileland on our way back from Syracuse. “Yes,” he replied. “It’s related to the ostrich.” Though he doesn’t have quite the same enthusiasm for plants, being somewhat kingdomcentric and all, his fascination with animals is a genuine intellectual curiosity, and it shows no sign of letting up.
___ His intellectual curiosity is also the reason he loves to travel. He initially resisted going to France this year on the grounds that we’d been there before; he suggested we go to Germany. He also wants to go to Japan, China, and New Zealand (for starters). He’s quite good at geography, but for him it’s not just a question of maps and capitals; he knows that the planet is populated by a dazzling variety of people (some of whom are not wholly devoted to slaughtering each other, though the Slaughtering Party just happens to be in the ascendant), and if he had his way he would meet them all, just to find out what they’re like and what they eat and how they talk.
___ He did his best to speak some French in France. This fact, together with his knowledge of the world’s geography, makes him a most atypical—and very cool—American traveler. Jamie took French in seventh grade, and though that little experiment wasn’t so successful as to get him producing French sentences on his own, he did master the days of the week, the months of the year, the numbers up to 60, and an armload of basic vocabulary words. The fruits of his labor became clearest in the grocery stores, where he was able to see the names of products (including fruits) and had much fun reading them aloud as he walked through the aisles. Although this made him irrationally exuberant at times, greeting strange people and chattering too loudly, it also inspired him to address the woman at the cheese counter politely, and to say, with my prompting, nous voudrions du fromage de chèvre, s’il vous plait. Jamie knew what he was doing: he loves goat cheese. Which is also cool.
The whole thing is worth reading.
To talk about Michael Bérubé, it's a pretty good blog, earlier in the week we had, On July 6, my second day in Dublin (after seeing the Yeats exhibit in the National Library), Janet said, “I’ll take Jamie to the café for breakfast, and you can go check out the Book of Kells exhibit at Trinity College.” Janet advised me that I should arrive promptly at 9:30 when the doors open, because the Book of Kells is quite popular among students, tour groups, graphic designers, and the International Ninth-Century Illustrated Manuscript Society. And I had my own reasons to check out the Book of Kells, not least of which was the fact that when I was a senior at Regis High School in 1977-78, I helped to paint an enormous version of the front page of the Gospel of John for the gymnasium of St. Ignatius Loyola across the street. You know, Jesuits think that this kind of thing intimidates visiting basketball teams, and they’re usually right.
On a more prosaic note, The Slacktivist has a good post pointing out that You're not allowed to kill civilians There really isn't a whole lot more to say on the subject, but lots of people are trying to explain (Dershowhitz being castigated by me recently, but the hosts who are in league with him are Legion) that really it's ok to kill some civilians, so long as they aren't American.
Jim MacDonald has a great post on hyperthermia to go with the one he wrote in the wintertime about hypothermia over at Making Light either of which will as he points out, kill one deader than dirt.
Other than that, I've not got much. I'm not yet back in the rythm of my blogroll, much less the tangential paths it leads me down.
But that's not really what I wanted to talk about.
I wanted to talk about Jamie, the son of, "The most dangerous professor in America," (per David Horowitz) has Down's Syndrome. He is also, acording to his father a wonderful person, irrespective of this.
But this post is not about Ted Leo. It’s not even about the Rapture. It’s about Jamie....
___ He loves more forms of animal life than most people are aware of, and he’s always game for learning more. Habitat, diet, means of reproduction, salient characteristics, you name it. He’s a shark fanatic and a marine specialist, yes, but he can also get excited by sitatungas, bison, sparrows, salamanders, crocodiles, eagles, jellyfish, baboons, and snakes (on planes and off). “Is that an emu?” I asked him as we stopped at Clyde Peeling’s Reptileland on our way back from Syracuse. “Yes,” he replied. “It’s related to the ostrich.” Though he doesn’t have quite the same enthusiasm for plants, being somewhat kingdomcentric and all, his fascination with animals is a genuine intellectual curiosity, and it shows no sign of letting up.
___ His intellectual curiosity is also the reason he loves to travel. He initially resisted going to France this year on the grounds that we’d been there before; he suggested we go to Germany. He also wants to go to Japan, China, and New Zealand (for starters). He’s quite good at geography, but for him it’s not just a question of maps and capitals; he knows that the planet is populated by a dazzling variety of people (some of whom are not wholly devoted to slaughtering each other, though the Slaughtering Party just happens to be in the ascendant), and if he had his way he would meet them all, just to find out what they’re like and what they eat and how they talk.
___ He did his best to speak some French in France. This fact, together with his knowledge of the world’s geography, makes him a most atypical—and very cool—American traveler. Jamie took French in seventh grade, and though that little experiment wasn’t so successful as to get him producing French sentences on his own, he did master the days of the week, the months of the year, the numbers up to 60, and an armload of basic vocabulary words. The fruits of his labor became clearest in the grocery stores, where he was able to see the names of products (including fruits) and had much fun reading them aloud as he walked through the aisles. Although this made him irrationally exuberant at times, greeting strange people and chattering too loudly, it also inspired him to address the woman at the cheese counter politely, and to say, with my prompting, nous voudrions du fromage de chèvre, s’il vous plait. Jamie knew what he was doing: he loves goat cheese. Which is also cool.
The whole thing is worth reading.
To talk about Michael Bérubé, it's a pretty good blog, earlier in the week we had, On July 6, my second day in Dublin (after seeing the Yeats exhibit in the National Library), Janet said, “I’ll take Jamie to the café for breakfast, and you can go check out the Book of Kells exhibit at Trinity College.” Janet advised me that I should arrive promptly at 9:30 when the doors open, because the Book of Kells is quite popular among students, tour groups, graphic designers, and the International Ninth-Century Illustrated Manuscript Society. And I had my own reasons to check out the Book of Kells, not least of which was the fact that when I was a senior at Regis High School in 1977-78, I helped to paint an enormous version of the front page of the Gospel of John for the gymnasium of St. Ignatius Loyola across the street. You know, Jesuits think that this kind of thing intimidates visiting basketball teams, and they’re usually right.
On a more prosaic note, The Slacktivist has a good post pointing out that You're not allowed to kill civilians There really isn't a whole lot more to say on the subject, but lots of people are trying to explain (Dershowhitz being castigated by me recently, but the hosts who are in league with him are Legion) that really it's ok to kill some civilians, so long as they aren't American.
Jim MacDonald has a great post on hyperthermia to go with the one he wrote in the wintertime about hypothermia over at Making Light either of which will as he points out, kill one deader than dirt.
Other than that, I've not got much. I'm not yet back in the rythm of my blogroll, much less the tangential paths it leads me down.
