Number 55
I bet some of you have photos of your child's first Christmas. There's a commercial running now ~ for dogfood or cameras or something, doesn't matter ~ about a young couple ga-ga over their dog's "first holiday," buying it presents and taking its picture and so on, and they have a big Christmas tree in the room. It's not a Chanukah tree or a Muslim tree or a "holiday tree." It's a Christmas tree. So why be coy about the dog's "first holiday"? If it's necessary to be absolutely all-inclusive about the holidays, they're going to have to get rid of that Christmas tree, or maybe run a series of ads, one for a dog's first Chanukah and another for a dog's first Kwanzaa and another for a dog's first Ramadan and so on and on.
I don't want to be too critical of people's taste in Christmas ornaments. At this time of year more than ever, we should remember that it's the spirit that counts. But ~ this year I'm seeing 8-foot tall illuminated Christmas figures ~ Santas, trees, snowmen, etc. ~ on people's lawns and porches that I don't remember seeing before. These aren't the old, familiar, hard plastic illuminated Santas and Nativity figures, but soft inflated plastic, huge plastic, more suited for a grocery store or car dealership. I wasn't crazy about them but I thought, hey, at least kids will love them. But some people don't want to leave the air pump and lights on all day, so my charitable thoughts disappeared on seeing these nightmarish icons deflated. When you turn off ordinary Christmas lights ~ which are never ordinary, even the smallest, biggest, gaudiest, or faintest are beautiful to me ~ you just have a non-lit space; maybe the cords are visible close up. But when these monsters are turned off, they sink into a limp, soggy looking heap of wrinkled plastic on the lawn. The meager charm of the soft glow of gigantic plastic snowmen is more than cancelled out by the daytime mess, which looks like (1) a pile of large, colorful trash bags, or (2) huge, festive, used condoms.
One of my neighbors has been decorating with giant plastic ever since Halloween; giant witches, pumpkins, turkeys, and now Christmas figures litter his lawn. I'm afraid he's going to find some for every other holiday of the year, and for non-holidays too, blooming briefly at night and dying on the lawn every day.
Moi: I will unsubscribe you. I agree I'm not as knowledgeable as I could be, but I wasn't exclusively blaming big oil for the downfall of Hussein. The situation is more complex than that, but I do think that if the Mideast didn't have oil, we wouldn't have had much contact with them in the last century, and thus much conflict would have been avoided. For example, we don't have a lot of interaction with the peoples of the Sahara desert. The conflict is cultural and religious, not only economic. Good luck to you too, and to all of us. I hope we win.
If I were a better writer, maybe this reader would have grasped my intended point, or maybe not. I do think it would be naïve to imagine that our leaders have no economic motivations. But at the same time, there are clearly other reasons for the war in Iraq, and I touched on some of them, with oil being only one in the list. Some readers find far-reaching implications in simple statements that may not be accurate. I find that some people think I'm a knee-jerk liberal while others think I'm leaning toward the right, on the basis of the same stated opinions. Writing is a little like creating Rorschach tests. People read what they want into them, and sometimes they mentally rewrite everything they read.
A couple of readers pointed out that "May you live in interesting times" was a Chinese curse. True. But I've always been up for cheap thrills. Of course, it's easy for me to say that here at home, in relative safety, while our soldiers divert the fighting to a far distant battleground. A faithful reader pointed out an error in last week's PO, an "it's" that should have been an "its." Then I found another one of the same. Just so you'll know I know. My readers remind me that sheep go in pens or in folds, which I think of as fenced-in areas. The soldier may have spotted an enclosed building, and called it a sheep barn. Since they were searching for Saddam, it seems more likely to have been a building, although of course the famous hole was covered up out in the open in a farmyard, wasn't it?A year ago, in PO 3, I wrote about the naming of places this and that Center, and especially Centre. Yesterday I found a web site with a link to a Mapping Center, which was simply a page of links to various maps for the real-life place I was interested in. First of all, "mapping" was a poor choice of words because it sounds to me as if you're going to make your own maps. "Center" is a poor choice, worse than the Professional Centers and Medical Centers I complained about a year ago, because ~ well, it's just a web page with links to maps. They should have just called it "Maps." Harrumph.
I just bought the 2004 Old Farmer's Almanac, published in New Hampshire. I buy it every year. There are other almanacs, which are probably good too, but I stick with the same one, because in this case longevity and consistency are the point. The OFA with the yellow cover was founded in 1792, and says its "North America's oldest continuously published periodical." I think my grandparent farmers (both sets) probably bought it.
One of the things I look for every year in the Alamanac is the winter solstice, because that's when the days start getting longer, and we get more light, a little more every day. On page 70 of the 2003 edition, I find that that the shortest day was December 21 (length of day, 9 hours and 4 minutes), making yesterday, December 22, the winter solstice. Today, December 23, is the new moon.
From www.Engrish.com:
All the things that it is reflected in the eyes are fresh, and it can be impressed by the heart. Let's walk slowly.
Perhaps this is a variation on the Thai proverb:
Life is short. We must move very slowly.
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