Rock and roll! What a empty generation.

Just had a nice interview with Dina Marie Hale of KBVM, in advance of the Catholic Women Rejoice conference in Vancouver, Washington this September.  I had nearly a whole hour to blather on!  I’ll post a link to the interview later, should you want to listen.

Then I was grousing on Facebook about how much harder it is to speak radio than to speak to a crowd in person, because you don’t get any reaction from your audience, and have no idea of whether you’re connecting or not.  My sister comforted me:  “Could be worse.  ‘In the old days you could get in there, hit ‘em with an apple or a grapefruit. Nowadays, you do dat, you need a new picture tube, fifty bucks!’”

This is a quote from an LP we used to listen to growing up.  Eddie Lawrence — weird, goofy, hilarious stuff.  Here’s the skit my sister was quoting from.  I laughed so hard, the kids didn’t know what to think.

“I say if you can’t vote six, seven times, stay home!  Supposed to be a democracy, ain’t it?”

 

At the Register: The Stupids Get a Dog

And this is the expurgated version.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to crap up the Register even further with personal pictures, but I can bring myself to do it here!
Here is our first look at the puppy, who is eight weeks old, and his name is Shane (yes, as in “Shane!  Shane!  Come back!”):

 

Here he is in the back seat, wondering who the hell we are, where his mommy went, and why we didn’t think to borrow a cage or crate for a three-hour ride, especially if the car is going to make horrible jerking movements and a grinding noise and smoke is going to billow out from the hood:

 

and here is my husband and the puppy on the side of the road, thinking about transmissions, and life and stuff:

 

Here I am after our thunderstormery walk down the highway, just starting to realize the gravity of our situation:

 

And here is the inside of my brain when my husband told me how much transmissions cost:

and here we are having a slightly illegal public aperitif before I sent him back for some food that was not corn nuts:

 and here is how things stood the very next day:

 

Sunny and happy, more or less.  Nobody has slept in four days and our house smells like pee, but PUPPYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!

#Free the Word! An apology, and explanation, and an appeal by Brandon Vogt

Brandon Vogt covers everything you need to know about the copyright issues surrounding the distribution of Lumen Fidei and other magisterial works.

 

He explains what the problem is with the current system and what a better solution would look like; and he apologizes for his error and (unnecessarily, in my opinion) for his initial reaction to the response he got from the USCCB.

He answers tons of common questions about this issue, and he has opened his comment box as a petition to the Holy See, to urge them to tweak their copyright policies so that that the light of faith can be spread more easily.

Please check out Brandon’s post.  He is a shining example of the New Evangelization:  enthusiastic, generous, orthodox, thorough, and innovative, and he makes it easy to participate.  Share his post, sign the petition, retweet his tweets. Brandon has a very good idea, and we need to help him make it happen!

The most disgusting thing you will read all day.

From some “bro-choicers” — a cheat sheet with four reasons why Texas guys should oppose #HB2.

These males — I can’t bring myself to call them “men” – shed a few crocodile tears over the health and safety of women, should — horror of horrors — abortion clinics who perform surgery be forced to adhere to the same health and safety standards of your typical LASIK eye clinic.

Because, as we know, women will only be safe once abortionists are free to shove sharp tools into their insides without having to bother with petty stuff like getting hospital privileges, or making halls wide enough for a gurney to pass through when someone made an oopsie and a bowel or uterus got perforated, or if some pesky lady is hemorrhaging again.

But then we get down to what’s really at risk, should late term abortions become harder to come by.  The bro-choicers warn:

Your sex life is at stake. Can you think of anything that kills the vibe faster than a woman fearing a back-alley abortion? Making abortion essentially inaccessible in Texas will add an anxiety to sex that will drastically undercut its joys. And don’t be surprised if casual sex outside of relationships becomes far more difficult to come by.

Vomit.  Vomit, vomit, vomit.  That’s all I have to say.  I know the protestors were just trolling when they chanted “Hail, Satan,” but Satan is not fussy.  Trolls make excellent fodder for the mouth of Hell.

“I have been brainwashed.”

I always knew I liked Dustin Hoffman. (via Upworthy)

7 Unquick Takes, Because I’m Really Tired, and I Talk More, Not Less, When I’m Tired, Unlike Most Men, Who Do the Opposite

 

1.  Today, I’m very pleased to be part of a neat website called 3 Things for Mom, created by Lauren Warner (who is the wife of Matt Warner, of Flocknote andRead the Catechism in a Year fame).

 

3 Things for Mom delivers bite-sized nuggets of information and insight from one mom to another, with a truth, a tip, and a find.  Their line-up includes moms who are, oh, editors-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living and Redbook, writers for the NYT, producers of the Today Show, anchors of the news (is that how you say it?) at ABC and CNN, and sitters around in their kitchens, picking their scabs at 3 a.m. because they can’t sleep because they’re worried their children can’t recite the seven deadly sins, and besides, it’s hot.

My entry includes very edifying photo of Benny sporting a huge mosquito bite on her eyelid, and spazzing out at the beach, wearing nothing but a swim diaper and a string of plastic beads.  They’re homeopathic beads.  For her mosquito bite.  Why do you fear the things you don’t understand?

2.  I love photoshopped “what if” pictures.  Not to be an overanalytical creep, but I often can’t help thinking, “Yeah, but if the change you’re depicting actually happened, that’s not all that would be different!” Like the series about what the sky would look like if other planets were as close to Earth as the moon is. 

 

 

Pardon my scientific pea brain, but if Saturn were that close to the Earth, wouldn’t the Earth also be drawn to Saturn and pulverized more or less instantaneously?  Or is Saturn, like, gas or something?  But it still has gravity, right?  Or else it wouldn’t have rings.  Can you be pulverized by getting drawn into gas?  Or doesn’t it have an ice core or something?  This is why we don’t homeschool anymore.

Or here, as long as I’m ruining stuff, there’s this gorgeous series, that combines city scenes with starry nights from another place on the same latitude, showing what the night sky would look like if there were no light pollution.

 

 

But I can’t help thinking that the scenes would only exist if all the people were suddenly dead.  Because the only reason the bridge is there is because there’s lots of people who need to cross it, and if there’s lots of people, there’s going to be lots of light.  I’m not really complaining; I’m just saying that these are works of art, not portrayals of anything possible or even desirable.

Sort of along the same lines, we have Celebrity Makeunders, which imagines what famous faces might look like if their lives were a little bit more like the lives of me and thee.

 

Scientology would be like, “Never mind, forget it, you can go now.  Sure, sure, you’re clear, just go!”

I actually play the opposite of this game in my head all the time — trying to spot people who, if they had better clothes and a personal makeup artist and didn’t work at the Walmart dressing room, would look like models or movie stars.  O fortuna!

3,  Speaking of fortuna, did you realize that there’s such a thing as tuna Jello salad?

 

 

Apparently the advantage of this dish is that the Jello really binds the tuna together, so.

4.  Today you can read Lumen Fidei, started by Benedict XVI and finished by Francis. Brandon Vogt, the second most helpful man in the world, has converted it to several popular formats so you can download it for free. The most helpful man in the world is the one who got my van unstuck from that unexpected median in the Citizen’s Bank parking lot.

5.  Despite my gloomy ruminations, we had a lovely day on the Fourth of July.  My teenage daughter read the entire Declaration of Independence out loud.  My brother, who studied Jefferson very closely in college, says that the description of the “long train of abuses” was actually the heavily edited, carefully toned down version of what he actually wanted to say.  Things were, apparently, much much worse than what they describe.  I asked why they heck they would do that, since they were already declaring their independence.  Why make their case weaker?  He says that some of the signers were hoping to sort of make a clean break with England, without any bloodshed.  Just kind of, “Hey, we’re just gonna . . . go over here now, okay?  Cool?  Cool?”

I don’t even want to tell you how long I just spent looking for a photo of George Jefferson giving the thumbs up.

Anyway, my parents, two brothers, nephew, niece, and mother-in-law all came over, we grilled meat, drank beer, argued about movies, laughed and told stories, and set off fireworks.  It was great.

6.  This is Benny on Albuterol.

 

She struck this pose and then froze until I took a picture of her.  Lots of moms told me that Albuterol makes their kids nutty, but this is actually what Benny is like all the time, except when she can’t breathe.  She’s much better now!  Still coughing, but her lungs are clear, and the fever is gone.

7.   I had a fascinating two-part interview with the charming and talented Steve Gershom

 

planned for this past Wednesday and Thursday, but I didn’t want it to get overlooked because of the holiday.  So I’ll save it for Monday and Tuesday.  It’s tentatively titled, “Ex-Gay:  Is That Even a Thing?”

Check out everyone else’s 7 Quick Takes at Conversion Diary, where Jen is contending with a huge and daunting deadline.  We all know that she is awesome enough to absolutely crush it, but still, a prayer couldn’t hurt.

Support for former homeschoolers?

A reader writes:

I know you used to homeschool but you do not anymore. Since stopping, have you found any blogs or support groups or anything of like for Christians with kids in public schools? Our kids are going to school in the fall and I am NERVOUS.

Oh, yes.  Nervous. The decision to stop homeschooling was one of the hardest ones I’ve ever had to make.  Lots of nightmares about whether it’s worse to send my children off to be eaten by wolves, or simply to cut our losses and eat them myself.

 

We’re very, very happy with our charter school, and more or less happy with the public high school, but it wasn’t easy to figure out how to get what we needed, appreciate the good things we hadn’t anticipated, fix the things that weren’t working, and let go of the rest.

I have written a bit about our transition.  First, there was Why We’re Dropping Out of Homeschool, which includes a photo of something that would make Charlotte Mason herself make tracks for the admissions office of the nearest Stefani Germanotta Memorial School.

Then I wrote one actually useful one for the old Faith and Family Live: From Home School to the Classroom:  Tips for Transition.

And then I wrote this quiz for the Register: Home School to Classroom:  A Quiz for Anxious Parents, which I intended as a self-deprecating jaunt into the realm of parody, but which many homeschoolers took as proof that I’m anti-homeschool, as well as anti-education, anti-child, and plus I make yearly pilgrimages to poop on the grave of Elizabeth Anne Seton.  (I’m not, and I don’t.  I’m just anti-sticking with things that just aren’t working anymore.)

So, back to the reader’s question.  Have you made this switch?  Do you have any advice, or do you know of a discussion group or something for people dealing with the transition?  Or at very least, can you offer a prayer for the reader’s peace of mind?  Thanks!

At the Register: the Earth Is a Nursery

How lunch with friends turned a little bit Children of Men-ish.

And that’s all for me today, folks!  I got home from the ER at 3:30 this morning with a baby with bronchiolitis.  Never had to deal with that before.  Baby is doing much, much better today, but I think my husband and I are going to need some oxygen to get through the day.  My hat is off to all the parents who deal with medical emergencies — asthma, diabetes, CP — as a routine thing. I don’t know how you do it.  I’m feeling so grateful for my normally healthy kids.

Also, it would be nice if you could spare a prayer for the man in the hospital room next to ours last night.  He had lost an eye and was having some kind of crisis with his remaining eye.  I heard the nurse talking about morphine and hospice.  He was so gentle and patient, trying not to put anyone out of their way.  Other people’s fortitude just blows me away.

For all the Double Hitlers out there

Treated a little harshly on the internet yesterday?  Liz Lemon feels your pain.

I’m so quotable

This is kind of weird, but you can buy greeting cards and fridge magnets printed with a quote by me.  It wasn’t the most brilliant thing I ever said, but someone at Quotable Cards plucked it off the internet and wrote up a contract, so I signed.

Got a kid who is graduating or otherwise leaving the nest?  You could go with Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” or Robert Frost’s “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” or, heaven help us, Dr. Seuss’ most tedious work, “Oh the places you’ll go.”  OR, you could send them a Simcha Fisher original:

 

Cards and magnets available here.  Because what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t hawk stuff?