Misdeeds

The boys and I didn’t stay long at the library this morning.

Daniel kept trying to sneak out of the building. He would open the front doors by pushing the buttons meant for disabled people.

There was nothing for it but to drag him home, and Samuel too – just when he was occupied with the library’s Lego collection.

The protestations!

Samuel can be so quiet, one forgets that he has no sense of decorum. It’s usually all right to take him places, but, occasionally, one regrets it.

They really like it here, I told the librarians who watched me pull my shrieking children past the circulation desk.

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I viewed soccer this afternoon and came away from the TV to find Samuel “cooking” grits. It was his idea to add the taco seasoning.

Here is a more flattering depiction of the brothers. They supped at Karin’s dad’s house last night and managed to pose for him, more-or-less obediently.

Karin & I were busy celebrating our anniversary. We got haircuts and ate salad. We like the salad bar at Macri’s. It’s simple, but the ingredients are good: I especially like the beets.

We usually can’t finish the entrées we order with the salad, so we eat them the next day. They taste better after cooling and reheating.

Having eaten our salad, we went to a hardware store and looked at some macabre weeding tools.

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Today I have a cold. I feel as though my nose will fall off.

I’ve begun reading a book I swore I’d never touch: Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. As I age, I have less and less appetite for camp, but after the 8,392nd TV reference, the urge got the better of me.

I’ve also been reading Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread; various previously mentioned books (Tolkien’s dwarves keep reminding me of the twelve tribes of Israel); and some Platonic dialogs I hadn’t gotten to (more on them later).

As I type, Samuel threads a USB cable through a grate in the floor of our house.

Toads

Now viewing Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) with Daniel, a.k.a. Toad. He likes movies with “little animals.” We rotate through various David Attenborough productions. The reptiles-and-amphibians series (Life in Cold Blood) has been an especial hit. Hence my search for more toad-content. Cane Toads, dir. by Mark Lewis, is basically what an animal doc would be if helmed by Errol Morris. (I guess Morris has made a couple of near-animal docs: Gates of Heaven, and one-third of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.) The toad movie has talking heads (politicians, scientists), historical “re-enactments,” dramatizations of humans’ encounters with toads, and sentimental old Queenslanders on their back lawns waxing lyrical and tearful about the cane toad’s essential decency.

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The next stop on my fantasy reading tour is The Hobbit, to which I’m returning after some decades. The first 120 pp. have been pretty much as I remember them, almost line-for-line. Disappointing, in a way. But then comes the “Beorn” chapter with quite the wittiest passage so far:

“If you must know more [said Gandalf], his name is Beorn. He is very strong, and he is a skin-changer.”

“What! a furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when he doesn’t turn their skins into squirrels?” asked Bilbo.

“Good gracious heavens, no, no, NO, NO!” said Gandalf. “Don’t be a fool Mr. Baggins if you can help it … He is a skin-changer. He changes his skin: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard …

There is a fearful hour – 9:30pm, more or less – when, his brother having dozed off, Daniel – normally so sweet, so docile – a virtual Dr. Henry Jekyll – transforms into someone (or something) more like the wicked Mr. Edward Hyde.

That hour is now upon us.

Bathtime; speech patterns; Orwell, pt. 2

Sick kids today. Right now they’re feeling OK; they’ve been medicated and bathed. Samuel has been granted six more minutes in the tub. I don’t want him to drown, but I don’t want to sit by the tub all that time, either. I’m a busy guy.

Sing to me, I tell him.

(I want him to make noises while I’m out of the room.)

No.

Sing “The Greatest Adventure.”

No.

(Alas, Samuel is no bathtime Pavarotti.)

I keep suggesting songs for him, he keeps saying no, and then it’s time for him to get out of the tub. That’s one way to do it.

Now the boys are chowing down on sandwiches. They wouldn’t eat the chicken noodle soup I cooked earlier tonight.

I usually drain the water out of it, says Karin.

Indeed.

Uh, says Daniel.

He means Ziva. He’s picked up the habit of saying only final syllables (or, in some cases, vowel sounds). If I put him to bed, he’ll say er, meaning pacifier. Suppose he’s talking about planets. He’ll say Nus. I’ll have to use contextual clues to figure out whether he means Venus or Uranus. He knows how to say full words; he’s just awfully casual.

Samuel, on the other hand, distinguishes every word, every syllable, every audible letter, with the utmost care. No “Mairzy Doats” for him.

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More Orwell. I’ve reached his Spanish Civil War essays. Not having read Homage to Catalonia – or any survey of that war – I find myself pretty badly out of my depth as to what all the different parties were trying to achieve. But then, Orwell’s point seems to be that the conflict was largely misunderstood outside of Spain, and that the few who did understand it used it for their own ends, as propaganda.

Interestingly, as the volume’s content becomes more complex and abstract, Orwell’s tone gets angrier. Traveling to Spain and fighting with a haphazardly chosen militia must have been a whole other kettle of fish than going, soused, into the clink for a few hours with burglars and embezzlers.

Back to the WIC doctor’s

… went the children yesterday. Daniel is in the 99th percentile, height-wise, and Samuel is in the 42nd; when he was Daniel’s age, he was in the 5th or 8th or thereabouts, so he is coming up nicely. We collected our WIC points and, to celebrate, bought McGriddles and hash browns (not with WIC points). Later my parents came over for Daniel’s birthday, and we ate burgers and chocolate cake. Daniel received cards, motorcars, dinosaurs, and books; Samuel, whose birthday it wasn’t, received a road map of Kentucky. And The Hobbit. Today I scolded him for coloring over Tolkien’s maps.

Samuel’s Hobbit is a gift for me, in a way, because I get nervous whenever he pulls my Hobbit off the shelf, which he started doing after he watched the cartoon starring John Huston and Orson Bean. I bought myself an extra Hobbit, too, just in case.

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“Indiana Bill Threatens Faculty Members Who Don’t Provide ‘Intellectual Diversity’ ” (Inside Higher Ed).

Ours is the latest state to have its universities meddled with.

In John Williams’s novel, Stoner (1965), a young academic ruminates with two colleagues about the purpose of the University:

“And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.”

The speech is recalled later in the book:

“Gordon, do you remember something Dave Masters said once?”

Finch raised his brows in puzzlement. “Why do you bring Dave Masters up?”

Stoner looked across the room, out of the window, trying to remember. “The three of us were together, and he said – something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn’t mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as – as the world. And we can’t let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as … The only hope we have is to keep him out.”

Is it a good idea to sponsor a refuge for brainy misfits? Maybe; maybe not. But force it to look like the world, and it’s no longer a refuge from the world; it’s no longer a university. It’s just another department of the world, doing the same things the world does (but issuing lots of publications). Which makes it redundant, inefficient, and certainly not worth paying for, doesn’t it? I see what you’re really up to, GOP.

Silver Blaze

We got a new stationary bike. When we aren’t pedaling on it, we store it between an armchair and a sofa.

A coupon lowered the cost from $89 to $77. Ordinarily, I’d mistrust such a cheap piece of equipment, but the reviews won me over.

We named it “Silver Blaze” after the horse in the Sherlock Holmes tale. Other names I considered:

• “Orcrist the Goblin-cleaver”
• “Glamdring the Foehammer”

The bike is supposed to weigh only 40 lbs. If you need to, you can pick it up and wield it like a sword.

The kitties were very keen. They wanted to play with all the different parts of the bike. After I assembled it, though, they lost interest.

I pedaled for five minutes, mostly on the toughest setting, and now I’m very sore. Karin pedaled rather comically for ten minutes. The bike’s pedaling mechanism seems quite good. The screen, which is powered by two triple-A batteries, gives the basic facts: distance, time, pulse, and kcals burned (I suppose this last measure is fallible).