Two notes from James Lileks “Bleats” page (whose odd archiving has gotten still odder, so this link will only work today, and I have no idea what it will be tomorrow).
First, on Memorial Day:
Once upon a time I sat in a chair and chatted with friends; now I leap up every 90 seconds to rescue Gnat or steer her away from the Marinas Trench of an egress window well, or help her climb the steps on the slide. Since we all have young ones now, everyone’s doing likewise, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Well, you can do something – stake them down like Gulliver trammeled by Lilliputians, for example, but it takes forever and you have to stand there and brush off the ants, so it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Exactly. One of the great advantages of having family over (not to mention friends) is that they are often willing to pitch in corralling Kitten for a few valuable minutes, allowing some chair time for Mommy and Daddy.
(Which reminds me of an unexpected problem I encountered this weekend. Margie and I are, of course, Margie and Dave. But we talk in the third person about ourselves with Kitten, so we’re Mommy and Daddy. But then my folks were out, who are Mom and Dad, of course. Except to Kitten they are Nono and Nona. I lost count of how many times I called my mother “Mommy” over the weekend, amond other misidentifications in the midst of changing with whom I was talking. But I digress.)
Second, and also, I suppose, regarding Memorial Day:
It says something about America that you can’t blow up an average skyscraper without killing people of every race and creed on the planet.
It says something about America’s critics that fighting Arab Islamists is automatically racist – and the murder of diverse peoples by an ethnically homogenous group is explained as a response to . . . racist American policies.
Hear, hear.