Sunday, September 27, 2015

French Food

This morning I was reading a news article about American school lunches. Because of the increase in childhood obesity, the federal government mandated new nutrition standards for school lunches, increasing whole grains, reducing fat and salt. The article says more food is being wasted because more food is being thrown away. Although the support for that statement was only anecdotal, if true it would not be surprising. What was surprising was that the typical French elementary school lunch, including baguette, butter, cheese, and fruit, would not be allowed under the new guidelines. One wonders what the purpose of the guidelines is. Ostensibly the idea is that children will learn to eat food that is good for them, to grow up healthy and trim but most children in my experience eat what their parents eat. They don't run home and tell their parents to cook whole wheat pasta and serve it with kale just because the school gives them that for lunch.

As Gary Taubes writes in his copiously researched books on nutrition, scientific data is woefully inadequate because people can't be locked up for long periods of time simply to control everything that goes in their mouths. A controlled experiment is virtually impossible. There are also numerous other variables that determine weight and health. So many food shibboleths have been upended but even the science that upends them is not from human controlled experiments. Anecdotal evidence does not count as data.

The difference between French food and American food is always brought home forcefully when my husband and I fly to Paris. On the way there we eat American airline food, nearly inedible but similar in content to school lunches here. Then if we have to fly from Paris to our end destination we usually get a small meal that is very, very good, similar to the school meal described in the news article--a small piece of grilled chicken, a lightly dressed salad or crudites, a hard roll with cheese and real butter, and often some small fruit tart. Though hardly Michelin starred food, it is simple and good.


Friday, September 25, 2015

More Reasons Why

When I was 10 years old I was entering sixth grade in a new school in a new state. I had visited Texas before since my father's family lived there, but this was my first experience living there. It was a complete shock and most of the shock came from my stubborn nature butting up against my teachers. Although there certainly were other Roman Catholics in my school, they had grown up in Texas and understood the culture better than I did. They also were far more retiring about political issues. So I was sent to the principal's office for the first time in my school career for any number of different offenses not least of which was pointing out that the teacher was incorrect on many matters including her use of English and her pronunciation of certain words. The dictionary always bore me out but the teacher still sent me to the office for insubordination. But I also refused to say school prayers. I knew for sure that they could not be required but they were still a part of the daily routine in this public school in south Texas in 1961 and they were very obviously Protestant prayers from the King James bible.   The teacher was reprimanded by the principal for that one but that only compounded my problems. Back then students in public schools were required to memorize a certain number of lines of poetry and then declaim them. Ordinarily each child was allowed to pick the poetry but because my teacher wanted to teach me a lesson, she assigned mine from that same King James bible.

I should have been relieved when I moved up to junior high school but I knew from my sister and brother who preceded me that the algebra teacher was going to be a problem. Every Monday morning during roll call students were asked if they had attended church the day before, and if they had, where they had attended. Certain faiths were given extra credit with Baptists getting the most. Some faiths were neutral neither gaining points nor losing points. But Roman Catholics lost points every single Monday whether they went to church or slept in. Besides the fact that I wouldn't have lied to satisfy this ridiculous woman, it wouldn't have done me any good since I was notoriously and infamously Roman Catholic even though my family was far from staunch. So every Monday I endured the ritual. More than fifty years later I still remember both of these women.

This kind of bullying still goes on. Where I live now a different faith is in charge but the problem persists because far too many people think that freedom of religion only means freedom of their religion.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Mammogram Normal, Flu Shot Received

My mother had breast cancer and a radical mastectomy when she was 49. Because of that, and an abundance of caution, I have been getting mammograms annually for what seems like at least half my life. I have to say that the machines may have gotten better at the imaging, but they have gotten worse at the procedure. I had my annual exam on Tuesday. The hospital upgraded to the 3-D imaging machine and it was even more uncomfortable than any previous machine. I never complain about the compression. After all the closer that they can smash your tissue, the better the image. But the whole put your foot here, lift that elbow half an inch, shove your face into this piece of plastic that doesn't fit a human face at all--that's just crazy. This new one moves in one direction and then in another. The technician says, "Don't breathe," then, "You can breathe," and then less than one second later, "Okay, don't breathe." I am glad my scan showed everything is all right, but I need to get some of these young women who come to me with ambitions of being either doctors or bio-medical engineers to improve these stupid machines.

There is no way a man would let his testes be treated this way and doctors seem adept at diagnosing testicular cancer with ultrasound. Yes, I know the tissue is different but somehow the women are being subjected to the medieval torture while the men have the medical advances--again. 

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Can You Hear Me Now?

My  husband's hearing has never been particularly good. Back when he was in college he had a physical prior to being commissioned in the Navy and was told that his hearing was not good enough to be a Navy officer. He claimed he had a cold and they passed him through but even when he was a younger boy his brothers used to make fun of him with a rhyming Japanese chant that ended (phonetically), "Tsumbo daka-ra". The loose translation of the little rhyme is, "Butch forgot because he is deaf."

Well my father was very hard of hearing, supposedly because of artillery noise during WWII, so having a man who was hard of hearing around the house was pretty normal for me. So was having a man who was bald but that's a different story. But as the years have gone by and we both have gotten older, hubby's hearing has gotten worse and worse. He tried some hearing aids a few years back but was driven crazy by the amplification of all the background noise. Besides that he found out that after 60 years of not having to pay attention to anyone, now he had to hear everyone whether he wanted to or not.

The problem has gotten so bad though that people besides me are noticing. So on Tuesday he is being fitted for some temporary hearing aids and then later he will get some of the brand new variety that fit in the ear. I don't expect any miracles but I am curious to see how he reacts.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Sewn and Ready to Mark

I got the Princess Feather top all sewn. Tomorrow I will mark it. There are some odd seams because I swore I wouldn't buy any new fabric for this one. It's just pinned to an old sheet so it looks very wiggly right now. I am planning some fancy trapunto so it may even end up wiggly. It is going to be a bed quilt, not a wall quilt so that probably won't matter, especially since my antique bed has high side rails and a tall headboard and footboard.


Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Baby It's Cold Outside

We have had a few days of very wet and windy weather and right now it is 48 outside. Two days ago it was about 90 so this is a sudden change. Even the weather service cannot keep up because I checked their forecast and they say the low today will be eleven degrees higher than it is right now.

So far I have only one student asking for help with his college essays.  I did get queries from two others but they haven't produced any writing to critique as yet.  The young man is such a nice kid I want to send his father a note to thank him for doing such a good job but I am not sure how good his English is. The family speaks Russian at home and that causes some problems with the boy's writing no matter how smart he is. Higher than a 4.0 gpa, all good scores on national exams, and he wants to go to Caltech.  As I have mentioned before, I don't write these essays; I advise and suggest. This student, like many students, thinks that using passive voice and what is called future pluperfect in Latin, though I think it is now called past perfect in English, sound more educated. That's total rot but so common I don't react as aggressively as I used to, but this kid's first essay was filled with the total rot.

Recently, because it is election season, many people have been complaining about the bad outlook for the United States. Donald Trump's slogan is something like, "Make America  Great Again." The students I work with, like this year's young man, are often first generation Americans. They are all optimistic and grateful, eager to help solve problems. Anyone who is pessimistic about the future should help a young person go to college.


If your child is applying to college this fall, read the essays. Present tense, active voice are the default choices for these essays. Besides being easy to remember so that tense inconsistency doesn't happen, present tense combined with active voice clarify the argument and enhance the sincerity.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Essays, Essays

The school year started and I got my first set of AP Literature practice essays to score. While most of the students in the class are only juniors rather than seniors, the national norm, that is still no excuse for the poor writing I am seeing. The students are mostly quite bright, mostly identified as gifted by some testing done when they were wee ones, mostly determined to go to prestigious colleges. But they cannot form arguments, cannot keep a consistent tense, cannot attach the proper pronouns to nouns, and so on and so on. They all seem to understand Crime and Punishment, but what should be the most basic elementary grammar and writing skills elude them. Then the ones who are fully convinced that they are geniuses, write so pedantically with such convoluted and complex constructions that they often forget where they were going when they started the sentence. They end up with noun/verb disagreements at worst and simple confusion at best. Those who do well in the class and exam are given college credit in many schools.

One would hope that students who are assigned to an Advanced Placement class would have reasonable skills from elementary school. Unfortunately that is rarely true. It seems that all of their teachers wanted to make what they read relevant by letting them make dioramas for their book reports. It really isn't rocket science.


Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Do You Really Want A Religious Government?

The situation with the county clerk in Kentucky is infuriating. I don't care what her religious beliefs are nor should you. What is important here is that Rowan County can't have religious beliefs and  I have a hard time believing that anyone wants the county to have religious beliefs. Even if every single resident of the county were an Apostolic Christian, which seems quite unlikely, Rowan County cannot impose that belief system on its taxpayers. That's what Ms. Davis is trying to do. She isn't standing up for religious belief, she is standing for the tyranny of a particular religion over all others. She can worship goats if she wants to but she absolutely cannot make taxpayers support her goat worship.