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Our summer library reading program ended not with a bang, but a howl, then a whimper, then ice cream, and then more howling. It was an unfortunate combination of overtired kids, high expectations, generalized raffle anxiety, and a hideous game which I don’t know who thought was a good idea, where you tie balloons to your ankles and run around getting stomped at by bigger, faster kids. I guess there was a bang and a whimper for that part, come to think of it.

There were also some bad feelings among the other moms when I stepped forward to claim the grand prize (two movie tickets and a pizza dinner) on behalf of my two-year-old, who won fair and square by having some books read to her.  Too bad! The kid has really been looking forward to a night out with her husband, but she just can’t justify it in the budget right now. Fair’s fair.

There was one good thing, though: one of my kids won a card game called Snake Oil, and the whole family has been playing it steadily all week. Yay, no glowing screen!

One person is the customer. He chooses a customer card and announces his profession or state in life: nurse, billionaire, cheerleader, zombie, plumber, witch, etc.

All the other players get six word cards each.  So you might get: death, balloon, burp, button, lightning, water; or flag, coffin, glove, cheese, leg, regret. From these, you must pick two words to invent a product that the customer would want to buy. Everyone makes a persuasive sales pitch

to the alert, bright-eyed customer

and the customer awards his card to the person with the best product. (Pardon the rubble in the background; I am halfway through painting the living room!)

My kids are good improvisers, and huge hams.

The teenagers like playing, too, and so do I. It says “ages 10+” but it’s pretty easy to let the illiterate ones be “partners,” so really everyone can play this game, and the older ones are so full of ideas that they are willing to help out the little guys.

I can imagine it being fun for all adults, with enough liquor in them.  And you can do a full game in about twenty minutes! And best of all, we now have a new running joke to carry us through the next few months, courtesy of my slightly morbid eight-year-old daughter, who was hawking Water Snakes to a grave robber: “Pop! Out comes the corpse!” (She won that round.)

People keep telling me that I don’t understand Ann Coulter’s tone: that she speaks tongue in cheek, deliberately exaggerating her point so as to make us think.

Well, here is what I think about her piece Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded to Idiotic. As is often the case with a Coulter piece, it’s hard to tell what her main thesis is, so I’ll just focus on one paragraph:

If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world.

It seems that she believes that Dr. Brantly, who is a medical doctor, has some mysterious power as a Christian to evangelize “Hollywood power-brokers,” and it’s only his vanity (“Christian narcissism,” she calls it) that sent him off to the third world with his medical supplies, rather than — what, trotting up to Quentin Tarrantino’s gate, introducing himself as an M.D., and suggesting that Mr. Tarantino repent? And this would have been more effective than ministering to the dying in Liberia.

Let me explain something. The man is a medical doctor. He heals people’s bodies. He apparently felt the call to go far, far out of his way to minister to people in horrible need of his expert help. This is, in general, how good people operate: rather than always doing what is obvious or easy, and rather than doing something they are neither suited, nor trained, nor able to do, they do what they think they are being called to do.

Was Dr. Brantly truly called to travel to Africa and work with ebola patients? Who knows? That’s between him and God. But Coulter seems to believe that the very act of stepping across the border marks an unforgivable sin of . . .  pride, I guess? Show-offiness?

But that short paragraph of hers contains a second, even more hideous idea. Coulter says,

Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world.

Yes, isn’t that just like those benighted third world ninnies? So obsessed with this childish, petty desire to stay alive. Why can’t they think about important matters, like the spiritual state of people watching movies in America? No, all the time it’s, “Wah, wah, my eyes are bleeding” with them.  Ugh, foreigners.

Here’s the deal, for anyone who thinks Colter is kinda sorta mean, but kinda sorta has a point: yes, it is true that there is such a thing as missionaries who do more harm than good. Yes, it is true that some people claim to be serving God, but really they’re just trying to make themselves look good.

Is there any evidence that Dr. Brantly is guilty of any of that? I honestly don’t know. I haven’t been following the story. Coulter doesn’t give any evidence in this piece that she knows any more than I do from reading headlines.

Coulter is playing to the crowd who always say, “Fix America first.” And I always say, “Why?” Are Americans more important than citizens of other countries? Is their suffering more meaningful? If we evangelize them, does their conversion give less glory to God than the conversion of an American? If they die of starvation and disease, do their families grieve less than the families of dead Americans?  And if not, then what could possibly be wrong with going to help them in the way that you know how?

Xenophobia is just racism for people who think big. There’s nothing noble about turning your back on people who suffer, even if they’re people who speak a different language or live in places with silly names. If we were all just supposed to hunker down and play to the home crowd, then the apostles themselves were off to a pretty bad start, gallavanting all over Greece and Ethiopia, Persia and Turkey. Didn’t they realize there were still some people back home — their own countrymen — who could have used their help?

For that matter, why couldn’t Jesus just stay put? I guess he never heard of Fix Bethlehem First. Instead, He had drag Himself all the way to Jerusalem, and then climb all the way up on a hill, and then all the way up on that cross, as if to say, “Look at me! I’m saving everybody!” And meanwhile, I suppose His mother and his friends had to think about the hotel bills, the travel expenses  . . .

Talk about a Christian narcissist. Yeah, Dr. Brantly is just like that. What an idiot.

PIC ape man

Here’s a titillating story:

[W]hen the social-media specialist for a private Provo-based English language learning center wrote a blog explaining homophones, he was let go for creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda.

Tim Torkildson says after he wrote the blog on the website of his employer, Nomen Global Language Center, his boss and Nomen owner Clarke Woodger, called him into his office and told him he was fired.

As Torkildson tells it, Woodger said he could not trust him and that the blog about homophones was the last straw.

“Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality,” Woodger complained, according to Torkildson, who posted the exchange on his Facebook page.

This just doesn’t seem right to me. Isn’t there anything in the penal code to prevent this kind of thing? By firing this teacher, the school is being downright niggardly with its resources. If this were any other country, they’d have more sense, and would offer the poor man a faggot for his troubles (of course that would likely cause angina).  If I were in the school’s position, I’d probably want to contain the situation — you know, stick my finger in that dyke asap. Either that, or install a spillcock to relieve the pressure.

(This post originally ran in 2010. We’re planning on hitting the fair this week, so I thought I’d rerun it. I’m enjoying the old pictures of my kids, all shorter and chubbier, and my husband hairier!)

The fair!  Who doesn’t love the fair?

There! Now you can go to the fair.