Personal Narrative

“Tending Cows”

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I have learned a lot with our hobby farm. I learn the most from discussions I have with farmers – I mean guys who do it for a living every day. I ask a lot of questions because things that they do so naturally I have to think about and read up on.

Ann Althouse linked this piece by Meredith Small, who is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University. In the piece is this bit:

That cultural expectation is now creeping earlier and earlier as 3-year-olds go to preschool and 4year-olds start kindergarten. Everyone sits quietly at their desks, thinking and thinking, just when they’d rather be out tending cows or weeding the garden.

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TSA Patdowns

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Took a flight recently and in my security line they were putting everyone through the scanner. I didn’t want to be scanned so I asked for a patdown instead. Interesting experience. I don’t recommend it except that I sort of do (keep reading). It’s no fun having some gruff fellow with a shaved head run his hands up your legs and under your waistband. My impression is that the screeners do not enjoy this work, and that their attitude is that if you are dumb enough to ask for a hand search they are going to take some satisfaction in giving you what you asked for, good and hard. Or maybe they just don’t like it when passengers make work for them. Much easier to run everyone through scanners.

Perhaps more travelers should ask for patdowns, to slow down the system and pressure Congress to junk it or at least eliminate its worst features.

A while ago I traveled to Israel. On the way back an American guy in the security line started taking off his shoes, and a screener told him to keep them on because this isn’t America (unspoken: and here we do things rationally). Why is it so institutionally and politically difficult for us to treat airport security (and other issues) rationally?

New Rose, The Damned (1976)

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I went to a hipster wedding on Saturday. The bride was once in a band with my wife. The groom is into what might be called “vintage punk” — i.e. the stuff I grew up on, while he was probably learning his A B Cs or even how to go potty. I don’t think I will ever again be at a wedding where the bride comes down the aisle to New Rose. Groovy stuff. The first punk rock single ever.

Good luck, kids. We love ya.

(I used to have a copy of this single on colored vinyl, bought circa 1979. I wonder what happened to it?)

What’s Up, Doc?

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Sorry I haven’t been posting much recently but the truth is that the Cartoon Network has been showing reruns of old classic Warner Brother’s cartoons, so I’ve been preoccupied with…uhmmm… cultural research.

Okay, I haven’t. Truth is that I’m trying to boot strap a little software company and that means coding 12 hours a day. So, no blogging or much of anything else save a little family time. I haven’t even been listening to the news or reading Instapundit. When I really have to concentrate, I shutout the news and blog reading because if I hear something that piques my interest I have a terrible urge to write about it and I don’t want the internal distraction of the urge.

However, the Cartoon Network has been showing old Loony Toon cartoons and I have been watching those during my regrettable “brain off” periods.

I really enjoy those old cartoons far more I think than a person of my theoretical maturity should. They evoke for me not childhood but an almost tangible cultural history. They are redolent with the rich undertones of the era’s popular culture. By their very nature as mere schematics, their creators perforce had to anchor the stories, gags and iconography on concepts widely understood by the audiences of the time. As such, they capture the feel of their times in way that other art forms just can’t quite convey.

Ah, who am I kidding? I’m just a sucker for pre-political correctness cartoons. Give me the old stuff with firearms, explosives, falling anvils, cross-dressing and moonshine!