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I was a little concerned that the boys would be disappointed in their Halloween haul, as the houses are far more spread out in our new neighborhood than our old one. They did hit fewer houses, but lots of people were giving out full-size candy bars, so I don't think they feel deprived.
T gets all the credit for the costumes.Bonus points if you know who D is dressed as -- he was quite annoyed that very few of the adults knew the answer.
Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about Brijit, a new website that abstracts newspaper and magazine articles down to 100 words or less, and rates them. The idea is that it's news for people who don't have time to read, or something. Anyone can sign up to write abstracts for them, and they pay $5 a pop if they use them.
It's certainly true that my to-read pile grows far faster than I can keep up with. But I'm not convinced that this is a solution. For one thing, it covers mostly sources that I actually do keep up with -- I don't read the NY Times cover to cover, but I usually look at the front page, and scan the list of "most emailed" articles, and I think I get as much out of that as I would out of the Brijit summaries.
My favorite source for telling me what I would like to read if I had another 5 hours a day is Jenny Davidson at Light Reading. She almost never suggests things that I've already read, and often includes a few paragraphs that capture the heart of the article.
On a related note, she recently linked to an interview with Pierre Bayard, the author of the wonderfully named book "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read."
(No book review today -- I'm in the middle of 3 different books, and not far enough along to talk about any of them. I did watch the movie of Maurice last week; I think it was a mistake to watch it right after reading Birdsong, because all I could think about was that they were all doomed.)
Last week, someone advertised a bunch of used toys that her kids had outgrown on the neighborhood email list. A couple of them looked interesting, so, for $25, we got some k'nex, a snap-in circuits kit, and a bunch of tubes that connect together to make forts and stuff. The tubes came with a manual, but some of the things that they showed required more pieces than we got, so I went online to see if I could find some more pieces.
It turns out that they're Playskool Pipeworks, and are almost as old as I am. The good news is that if my kids decide that they're not interested in the forts any more, we can sell the pieces for a lot more than we paid. The bad news is that I'm not buying more pieces, not at those prices.
And then today, via Daddy Types, I found out that my sister's old dollhouse furniture is also apparently collectible.
Who'd have thunk? Not me.
The past week just kicked my *ss. Busy at work, terrible traffic due to the rain, lost power 5 minutes after I got home one evening, had to put the cat to sleep. And it really doesn't help me when it's totally dark out when I'm getting up.
I like the idea of trick-or-treating before it's totally dark out, but otherwise, I think this extended daylight savings hours idea stinks. My boys keep asking me, with quizzical expressions, whether it's really morning as I shake them awake. The streetlights are still on as the high school bus rolls down the street.
And does anyone really think that it saves power?
When I wrote about my criteria for keeping or discarding books, I said that one of the reasons that I keep books is to be able to lend them out. This week's book is one that I don't think I'd ever have picked up if my father hadn't said it was wonderful and then put it in my hands. The book is Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulkes. And I wouldn't have picked it up because it is, as the subtitle says "A Novel of Love and War," and I'm not a huge fan of either romance novels or war stories.
I'm still not sure the book hangs together as a whole -- the primary story from World War I is cut together with scenes from the life of the main character's granddaughter, 60 years later, which exist mostly to let Faulkes make a point about how quickly forgotten the horrors of WWI were. But the descriptions of trench warfare are both engrossing and horrific. Faulkes shows soldiers seeing their friends killed, and having to keep doing the exact same things that led to their deaths, and doing it again and again and again for weeks or month on end (often with the rotting bodies still in view).
And, as Faulkes points out, the idea that the world managed to do it all over again just 20 years later is hard to believe. Reading this book, I had some sympathy for Neville Chamberlain's position for the first time.
Last summer, I wrote about two social lending sites, one for money and one for stuff. Borrowme seems to have gone under, without ever building up any steam. But Prosper seems to still be functioning well, and hasn't been totally swamped by the mortgage meltdown.
When I wrote about it, I hadn't put any of my money into Prosper, but I did so in the fall. I've now made 36 loans over the course of the past year, all of them for $50. Two of them have already been repaid (ahead of schedule) and two of them are 3+ months late, and barring a miracle, likely to go into default. Netting out the defaults, I've made a little more interest than I'd have gotten from the bank, but the difference is probably under $40. So, not a particularly good return on the time spent reading through loan requests. Although there's a certain fascination with reading people's stories... I still think the real potential is for loans among people with 2nd and 3rd degree real life connections, but I see little evidence that's what's happening.
I'm slowly moving almost all of my real banking into the online world. My main checking account is now at Ebank, which I love because I can take out money from any ATM without a fee. I'm trying to figure out whether I think it's unethical to keep our savings at Countrywide, which is offering awesome savings rates, presumably because they're desperate for deposits to keep from sinking under all their bad loans. (Yes, it's FDIC insured.) But they've got a reputation for being particularly unhelpful to borrowers in trouble.
D has been saying that he wants to save his money for a Nintendo DS. I'm not thrilled at the idea of a handheld game system, but if he has the willpower to save that kind of money on a $1 a week allowance, we're going to allow it. I'm trying to convince him to open an account at a nearby bank that offers generous rates on kids' accounts, but he likes having the piles of coins to play with and count. We need to figure out if they offer safe deposit boxes -- if so, we're going to say goodbye and good riddance to SunTrust.
I was at a conference last week on accounts, assets and access. It was a real eye-opener for me. Call me naive, but I hadn't realized how much money banks were making off of poor people on overdraft and late fees. Now that it's been pointed out, it seems obvious -- the dollar amounts that low-income people borrow are typically so low that even high interest rates don't amount to much in dollar terms. The killers are the fees.
Here's an example of a card advertised as available to people with bad credit. Not bad interest -- only 9.9% APR. But check out the fees -- $29 set up fee, $95 one-time fee, $48 annual fee, $7 monthly fee. And if you're in this situation, you probably don't have this cash on hand, so all of these fees are charged to the card when you get it. So if you get the minimum possible credit limit of $250, your card will come to you with a balance of $179 and available credit of $71. Oh, and they charge $11 for each autodraft (which actually costs them less to process than a check) and $25 each time they raise your credit limit.
Compared to that, a payday loan with a 100% interest rate doesn't sound like such a bad deal.
Laura at 11d and Megan McArdle are going back and forth about child care subsidies today. The comment that struck me was this one from "buffpilot" at Megan's blog:
"We don't need to give a subsidy to anyone, but making a means-tested welfare, would be fine with mean. But base it on the income needed in Mississippi - since you can move! If you want to live in NYC make the money, don't have kids, or move. Its YOUR choice. But don't ask me to give you money so you can live your lifestyle without making any sacrifices. That's what you want."
Similarly, when Bitch PhD posted last month about how unaffordable housing is, even given that her family has a good income, she got lots of "that's what you get for living in California" type comments.
I really don't have a good answer for the public policy question of how to handle cost of living disparities. As has been pointed out repeatedly during the SCHIP discussion, a family in NYC living on $60,000 is in a fundamentally different situation than a family in Iowa with the same income. But at least some of that difference is a matter of choice. Are you willing to tax an Iowa family with a potentially lower income level to help that New York family? Or do you tax the New York family more? In spite of the federal tax deduction for state income and property tax payments, richer states -- with higher costs of living -- tend to pay more in federal taxes than they get back. This is justified in the name of progressivity. But if you you take the cost of living argument seriously, progressivity might cut in the other direction.
As I've said here before, I'm not quite ready to get on the Hillary bandwagon. But I have to give her kudos for the set of work-family proposals that she laid out at her YWCA speech yesterday. No one else in either party is talking about these issues at all, and she's got all the key points there -- child care, paid sick days, expanding the FMLA. She's even included a "right to request" flexible work conditions, modeled on the UK law.
If you had told me in 1992 that one day Hillary Clinton was going to be a candidate for president, this is the kind of thing that I would have expected from her.
Hopefully it will make the other candidates, at least on the Democratic side, feel that they have to address these issues as well. I know that one of Obama's senior aides used to work on these issues, so I'm sure she's got a list of suggestions.
After some hesitation, I've accepted the blogad that you'll see on the side of this post, from something called the Smart Television Alliance. According to their website, it's a coalition of nonprofits "united by a shared commitment to improving what our nation's children see on television." That sounds like a decent goal. So why the hesitation?
Well, the site does have some useful information, although I think they're out of their minds in suggesting that Harry Potter might be appropriate for the 3-6 year old crowd. But my main concern is that the site is also an ad in disguise, for TiVo, which is sponsoring the alliance. I generally dislike ads that are pretending to be something else. But, that said, I do believe that TiVo is a terrific tool for parents who want to control what their kids watch, and have so said so repeatedly on this site in the past. It lets us zap out commercials, it lets us show kid-friendly fare at times of our choice, and it lets us save the kid-inappropriate stuff for when they're safe in bed.
Coming from our little ad-free world, it was a real shock to be visiting my parents Columbus Day weekend and to encounter all the commercials in the baseball games. (Although merseydotes says it's better than the football games.) Since D doesn't see commercials all the time, he was fascinated by them. I kept on reminding him that they were ads by asking him what they were selling. (Best answer, in response to a Marine recruiting ad, "uh... war?")
In related news, I just got a copy of Lisa Guernsey's new book on tv and kids, Into the Minds of Babes. Review coming when I get a chance.
I saw this meme at Kaethe's blog. She decided not to play, but I was intrigued enough to pick it up (especially since I'm beat from N's birthday celebrations). It's a little more complicated than your basic meme, but not as much work as writing a real post.
The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme
A blogging and scientific experiment.
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is ...".
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable. Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the "parent" blog you got them from to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
My great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is The Flying Trilobite.
My parent is Pro-Science (by adoption).
The best time travel short story in SF/Fantasy is:
The Lincoln Train, by Maureen McHugh
The best feminist movie in scientific dystopias is:
Aliens
The best sad song in rock is:
Hallelujah (as sung by Rufus Wainwright in the Shrek soundtrack)
The best cult novel in Canadian fiction is:
Not Wanted On the Voyage, by Timothy Findley
I'm not going to tag anyone, but anyone who wants to play is invited to do so. Comment or trackback here if you do.
In writing yesterday's post, I realized something funny. Somewhere along the way, after giving up on being "normal," it happened anyway...
At least from the outside, I look pretty darn normal: I'm in a monogamous heterosexual marriage, in a house in the suburbs with a mortgage, two kids and a minivan.... Needing glasses made me stick out in third grade, but are pretty common now. I still read too much and don't wear enough makeup, but in grown up life, that doesn't seem to matter a whole lot.
In the movie Pump Up The Volume, the Christian Slater character has a line where he says "At some point, I realized I was never going to be normal. And I said, f--- it, so be it." I saw this movie with a friend from high school, at a theater somewhere in the middle of Queens, and I laughed so hard at this line that I literally fell off my chair and the few other people in the theater all turned around to stare at me.
I was reminded of this line by Laura at 11d's comment this weekend that "I think it helps that I have never placed a whole lot of stock in normality." It made me realize that while I've long ago made my peace with being weird, I'm not quite there yet with respect to my kids. I want them to be happy. D's already come home saying that kids have teased him, and I know that's part of life, but I still want to strangle them.
D says they call him short. And you know what? D is short, and he's probably always going to be short. Physically, he seems to take after me, and I'm short. Plus he's on inhaled steroids for his asthma. So what can he do? He can ignore it, or try to turn it into a joke. He can tell them they hurt his feelings, or find other kids to hang out with. He can try to fight the kids who tease him, or tell a teacher. Mostly I think he needs to get a little thicker skinned, but I don't think that's something you can learn by being told -- you need to figure it out yourself.
He's also said that kids laughed at him because he was licking the sweat off of himself after they were running. I had to work hard not to laugh myself when he said that. D can't control that he's short, but I don't think it's crazy to think that he could choose to save licking his own sweat for when he's in private. I wouldn't suggest that someone pretend not to be smart, or hide her sexual orientation in order to fit in, but this doesn't seem like such a fundamental thing.
When we were talking about Madeline L'Engle after her death, one of my friends who does a lot of work with gifted kids commented that Meg clearly thinks it makes sense to pretend not to be as smart as she really is; she only gets in trouble because Charles Wallace is totally incapable of doing so, and Meg gets in fights defending him. The problem with pretending is it's hard work, and you miss out on friendships with the people who might actually like you the way you are, and if you're good enough at pretending you sometimes forget who you really are.
The best fiction I've ever read about these issues is a comic called Zot! by Scott McCloud. Zot is a teenage superhero from a parallel dimension, but in the last 8 or 9 episodes that McCloud wrote, he gets stuck on our Earth and hangs out with his not-quite-girlfriend Jenny and her group of weirdo high school friends. They've never been published as a trade paperback, because the press that put out the earlier volumes of Zot! went under. I just found out that HarperCollins is going to publish all of the black and white Zot! episodes next year, as a single volume. I'm really pleased. (The Zot! book is now available for pre-order.)
A month or so ago, I got an email from FlavorX, asking if I'd be interested in a sample of FlavorIT, their new home kit for adding flavorings to medicine. I responded with an enthusiastic yes.
I'd heard of FlavorX a couple of years ago, but at the time, they only had products for use by pharmacies. Pharmacies add the flavorings either free or for a nominal charge, but generally only for prescriptions that they fill -- it's a way to stand out from other companies, in what is basically a saturated market. But because we have a HMO, we have to get our prescriptions filled at the HMO's pharmacy -- and they don't do flavorings. So after much calling around, we finally found a kindhearted pharmacist (at Alexandria Medical Arts, for anyone in the area) who was willing to do it. (We had our cat's prescriptions filled there, so they did make some money off of us.)
So, I was thrilled to hear that these flavorings were now available for home use. But, I didn't want to post about it until we had actually tried it, and D has been relatively healthy of late. But the other day, he complained of a stomach ache until we broke out the Zantac, and gave it a try. The kit comes with a bottle of sweetener and four different flavorings. I think we did a drop of the sweetener and one of the bubblegum. He still grimaced at the taste -- but he drank it.
So, if you have a kid who resists taking medicine, I'd definitely give this a try. The one thing that I wish they did differently is provide a medicine syringe for mixing the flavorings in, rather than a spoon. The syringe wastes less medicine, and is good for shooting the medicine into the back of the mouth, so there's less opportunity to taste it.
Leslie Bennetts has been very harsh about people who criticize her book, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, without having read it. So I'm here to report that I slogged through the whole thing, and now I feel perfectly entitled to criticize it. Here are my major complaints:
1) Bennetts says repeatedly that she's not making a moral judgment about the value of stay-at-home parenting, only pointing out the economic risks of dependency. But I just don't believe her. She refers to stay at home parents as "parasites," to singularly focused lives as "sterile and stultifying," and suggests that the children of such parents will be overly dependent. As far as I can tell, she believes that devoting your full energies to parenting is waste of brains as much as Linda Hirshman does, but doesn't have the courage to stand up and say so.
2) Bennetts is unbearably condescending towards Gen X (and Gen Y) women. She's fallen hook line and sinker for the story that Gen X women are looking at Boomer Women and rejecting their attempts to "have it all." So she thinks that Gen Xers are lazy/wimps/expect to have perfection handed to them. But there's no evidence that's true -- mothers' labor force participation has declined slightly from its peak, but is still higher than it was in the 1980s or earlier.
3) She doesn't take the issues of lower-paid mothers seriously. In the section on child care, she blithely writes that "the horror stories about negligent or malignant baby-sitters do not reflect the reality of quality child care as those with reasonable means typically experience it." That's probably true, if you define reasonable means as earning $60,000 or more a year. But that's not most families. And she rhapsodizes on about the importance of having meaningful intellectually stimulating work, with hardly a nod to the possibility that not everyone has that kind of work.
4) The issue of economic vulnerability is a real one. While I've said here before that I think Bennetts overstates the risk of divorce, she's totally dead on about the long-term financial consequences of breaks in labor force participation. But where Ann Crittenden talks about these same issues and asks why should a 5 year interruption in work reduce your earnings for the next 40 years, Bennetts just scolds women for making bad choices, even as she quotes people like Pamela Stone as saying that these were constrained choices.
Towards the end of the book, Bennetts quotes a working mother who reports on what her pediatrician said: "I have taken care of thousands of children from all kinds of backgrounds, and the one consistent thing in raising well-adjusted children was parents who were happy with their choices." Pity that Bennetts didn't seem to hear what she was saying.
Some interesting conversation going on at 11d, Asymmetrical Information, and Raising WEG about the ethics of hiring people to clean your house. Long time readers may remember that I've written quite a bit about housework before.
I don't think there's anything inherent to housecleaning that makes it less moral to hire someone to vacuum your floors or scrub your toilets than to hire someone to mow your lawn or cook dinner. And while Jody's points about the lousy pay that most housecleaners get are totally on target, there's a huge swath of the economy that is just as underpaid, but not as visible. And most of us eat at restaurants without interrogating them as to what the busboys are making.
We don't use a housecleaning service these days (we got a roomba!), but I didn't feel guilty when we did. My personal moral line is that I won't use one of the big services (e.g. Merry Maids, that sort of thing), because too little of the money that you pay goes to the people doing the dirty work. (And Barbara Ehrenreich also convinced me that they don't get the house particularly clean.) I know a few people who have worked as housecleaners, and while it's hard work for not a whole lot of money, the fact that they have multiple employers gives them a degree of independence that lots of low-wage workers don't have. (I do think the DC area is probably atypical, in that the Zoe Baird history has created a real market for housecleaners and nannies who are legally allowed to work and are reporting their income for taxes.)
The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has a really good action packet you can download with information about ethical treatment of domestic workers. It talks about things you can do, from treating any workers that you hire justly, to advocating for expansions of various labor standards to include domestic workers. It also includes a link to this article from Lilith magazine that offers a Jewish feminist perspective on hiring a housecleaner.
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