Comments on: Mystery meat.

By: brian stouder

brian stouder — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:59:33 +0000

What I recall about kindergarten was that there was one kid (not me!) who seemed to have wet his pants every day at story time. No doubt, those ignominious moments in his life are still etched in his brain, somewhere. And — in kindergarten they had the coolest carboard building-blocks. Invariably, the girls would build a house and have a tea party in there, and the boys (including me) would burst through their walls and say “Superman!”. We must’ve worn out our teacher

By: LAMary

LAMary — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:40:28 +0000

I found my kindergarten report card, which was all satisfactories except for my grade in speech. I got an unsatisfactory with the note,“Mary has so many interesting stories to tell, but she must learn to use a bigger voice.”

By: paddyo'

paddyo' — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:03:04 +0000

Jolene –
Obviously a classic and early case of what today is known as “senioritis”!

By: Jolene

Jolene — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:17:08 +0000

Dorothy:

Although not quite so sexy, my sibs and I had a chuckle when we found my father’s senior year report card after he died last spring.

He’d been an excellent student as well as a fair-haired boy who was liked by both teachers and students all the way through. But he had a devilish side too, and, as graduation neared, it seems that his less wholesome impulses grew stronger. His academic work held up, and he graduated as valedictorian. But, at each marking period, he received a lower grade in deportment than the time before, ending the year w/ a D.

We enjoyed knowing how much he likely enjoyed getting that grade.

By: Dorothy

Dorothy — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:47:17 +0000

I feel the need to steer (oooh, another meat term) the conversation in another direction so here goes. Last night among papers we were going through, we found some goodies. One of which was legal papers filed by some guy, absolving my father-in-law of all wrong-doing, etc. etc. in 1953. It seems they had a fight of some kind and my f-i-l beat the shit out of this dude. He was 25 at the time. Mike said he thinks he’d heard whispered stories over the years. Mike’s maternal grandfather paid the guy off, so charges were dropped. Our kids are getting quite an education as to the checkered past of their beloved Grandad!

By: coozledad

coozledad — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:17:44 +0000

I never had any faith in the idea of the “invisible hand” notion that producers would be compelled to self regulate. Working for Union Carbide taught me that corporations will be murderously negligent, and willing to spend millions attempting to circle the wagons, when it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper, and efficient to be good citizens. Bhopal was in the works for awhile, and chemists had been warning the company repeatedly that the plant was a disaster waiting to happen for several years.
When it finally happened, my wife told me one of the guys in management just shrugged and said,“What’s a few hundred dead Indians?“
So fucking much for Adam Smith.

By: Connie

Connie — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:26:25 +0000

As I listen to the debate about Afghanistan, I am reminded of attending the National Veteran’s Day memorial service at the Arlington Cemetery amphitheater in 1982, and hearing the entire crowd, mostly Viet Nam veterans in town for the dedication of the Viet Nam Veteran’s Memorial, come to their feet and cheer when Caspar Weinberger said “Never again will we enter a war that we do not intend to win.”

By: beb

beb — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:53:59 +0000

Afghanistan really is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. The Russians couldn't tame the country, the British couldn't tame the country. There's no reason to think we'll have any better luck there. But we're such a war mongering country that the idea of retreat s considered unacceptable. So we're just going to pin down our army, spend trillions of dollars , bleed thousands of lives for decades to come with no obvious accomplishment.

By: alex

alex — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:48:45 +0000

J(tmmo)—

Fascinating stuff. I remember first coming across articles about the holy stones when I worked for Rand-McNally writing about the local histories of various destinations. (This was back when then the company seemed to think CD-ROM would be the new format to replace the hardbound atlas.) I remember coming across a few articles about the stones that seemed to give them more credence, although I find Brad’s article you linked to very interesting in that I’m an underground railroad/abolitionist history researcher in my spare time (also with a book inside me desperately trying to get out).

I’ve learned a great deal about religion and politics in the nineteenth century by dint of my research, but this is perhaps the first effort of which I’m aware in which science or scientific fraud was pressed into service for the antislavery cause.

Lots of interesting Ohio antislavery figures with family ties in my neck of the woods. Rush R. Sloane’s father and sister lived in a town just north of me, as did the progeny of Philemon Beecher, the “swarthy black knight” who was an early Ohio congressman. His children’s and grandchildren’s personal papers are in the manuscript collection of Howard University. Philemon is remotely related to the Beecher preachers (some of whom were active around here), as were the Presbyterian Rankin brothers.

Fort Wayne discovered a few years ago that it has a Rankin house, and what’s more, that its architectural peculiarities mirror those of the landmark Rankin House in Ripley. It’s brick on three sides with a wooden edifice tacked onto one end while the basement is designed with a tunnel around the perimeter.

By: Dexter

Dexter — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:17:11 +0000

Petraeus had prostate cancer diagnosed in February and already has it controlled after radiation … I guess war leaders still have privacy in these matters. Politicians are monitored a lot closer than the military brass it appears. My point is that the military only tells us what they want us to know. And I guess Lt. General Stanley McCrystal really is stirring up bad feelings with Gates and the folks in the Pentagon. Gates basically told McCrystal to use the damn chain of command and shut the f@( l< up.
Did you see the animated story board of the attacks in the Afghan mountains last weekend that killed eight US military personnel? Slaughter it was…and guess what? NOW McCrystal has ordered that damn remote US military outpost closed next week. He hates sticking US soldiers out in those killing zones for apparently no good reason, so I give him credit. He also is clamoring for more and more US troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
Really, there is no end in sight, nor is there a reasonable hope of this going well until a conclusion happens. It is not going to end.