I’ve been following a couple of discussions regarding public schools and private schools and vouchers and all that kind of thing, and there’s something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen addressed in the whole voucher discussion: what happens if the voucher doesn’t pay for the entire tuition bill at any of the private schools? Are those parents screwed? Can they use the voucher to pay tutors? Do they have to take out student loans just to get their kid through grade school? Just wondering.
Hmmmmm…should the blood gush, or merely trickle?
In the course of writing my fantasy novel-in-progress, I’ve found myself waffling on the extent to which I describe violence in the battles. Not that I’m squeamish, really, but there’s a balance to be struck in that kind of thing. But after reading about one-fourth of The Iliad, I’ve got a lot of new perspective. That work is chock full of passages like this:
“With that he [Diogenes] hurled and Athena drove the shaft
and it split the archer’s nose between the eyes – –
it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze
cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw
and the point came ripping out beneath his chin.”
And that’s one of the more tame bits of violent description. It makes me partly wonder if all the hand-wringing about violence in our media might not be, just a teeny-tiny bit, a lot of sound and fury over nothing. The Iliad is one of the central works in all of Western Literature, and a lot of it is blood, guts and gore.
(Translation of The Iliad by Robert Fagles.)
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It is surely to their credit….
A surprising consequence of Hurricane Isabel last week is that, as the storm approaches, the soldiers whose duty it is to stand guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery were given permission to abandon their posts.
They remained at their posts, maintaining a tradition of stewardship and a continuity of service that has lasted since 1930.
I take enormous comfort in the knowledge that, even in times like these, such commitment to duty still exists.
(Jason Streed posted on this over at Collaboratory as well.)
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I do not think about things I do not think about.
From the Associated Press: “I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news,” the president said. “And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
Wow. We now have a “Navel-gazer-in-Chief”.
Yeah, that’s probably a cheap shot, but are we really to believe that Bush’s own advisers are “objective”, and that their decisions and recommendations are not driven by ideology at all? And is the President really admitting that he makes no effort to educate himself and to learn for himself the vagaries of the issues facing him on any particular day? At least with Presidents Clinton and Bush the Elder, I got the feeling that even if I thought they were full of crap, which was quite often, the President had at least made some kind of thought process on his own.
(No, I didn’t get that feeling with Reagan either, which is one of many reasons I tremble for my country when I head GWB referred to as Reagan’s true political heir. As for the earlier Presidents of my lifetime, I wasn’t really aware enough of Carter to know one way or the other. But I suspect that it was that way with him, and with Ford and most definitely Nixon, from what I’ve read of their Administrations.)
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I hope you never do, Wesley!
Wil Wheaton reports that he’s never done any drug outside of alcohol, and he’s not entirely sure why. No, not that he sees no reason to avoid drugs, but rather that he’s never been terribly tempted to do so.
Funny how Wheaton avoids making any mention of the anti-drug speech Wesley Crusher receives from Tasha Yar in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Symbiosis”, which is one of the most horribly-awful moments in all of Star Trek. I’m assuming that Wil blocked those memories from his brain.
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That’s just what they’ll be expecting us to do….
Via Oliver Willis, I note that former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, some of whose beliefs might be more appropriate in the skull of a person named “Fox Mulder”, is being courted by the Green Party.
I’m taking this as official permission for me to pay no attention at all to the Green Party in 2004.
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This Isn’t Denmark, but There’s Still Something Rotten
One of my favorite TV shows of all time, Millennium (at least its first two seasons), is not available on DVD in the United States.
This show, however, is.
Harumph.
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Soon to be More Machine than Man
Nefarious Neddy links to a photo of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episode III, complete with longer hair (meant to bridge the prequels with the 1970s-hairdos of A New Hope) and a look in his eyes that says, “Whoever I’m looking at is about to die, most horribly!”
What impressed me most about Hayden Christensen’s portrayal of Anakin in Attack of the Clones was how much he relied on his eyes to convey emotion, and not just in the obvious scenes like when his mother dies in his arms. In the waterfall scene, when he breezily proposes that a dictatorship might not be the worst thing and Padme blows it off as a joke, there’s something in his eyes that says, “Yeah…I’m joking…not serious at all…”
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Guilty, Your Honor
Via His Swankness, I perused the Museum of Bad Fads for a bit. And yes, I did spend at least two of my college years wearing Zubaz pants.
Yeah, tacky-as-hell, I know. But for a college student who rarely got more than five hours of sleep in any one night, they were perfect. It also helped that my college was in the relative backwaters of small-town Iowa, which allowed for a certain “What the heck is he wearing?” factor on the part of people who had never seen such a thing before.
The problem with Zubaz pants, though, was how incredibly thin they were. So in winter, when the winds would kick up in Western Nebraska and proceed uninhibited all the way to Ohio, well….frostbite was a concern.
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Asian Art
Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out a gallery of art by Yoshida Hiroshi (from a Smithsonian collection), a Japanese artist who blended Western and Japanese techniques in making his prints of Far East locales. It’s all gorgeous stuff. Teresa links individual prints, so check her post for the good ones. One which really caught my eye is this, the Island Palaces in Udaipur, India:
Fans of the James Bond movies should recognize the Island Palaces from their use in the film Octopussy.
When perusing these, make sure you click through to the larger versions. For instance, in the Island Palaces painting, when you check the larger version the attention to detail in the reflections of the Palaces and the distant mountains in the water is much more evident.