Or simply very OLD English songs, is that they often refer to a small number of birds with various symbolic meanings. Cuckoos herald warm weather (and also unfaithfulness), larks have to do with the morning, turtledoves are about... love? (you can't convince me that's not because the words rhyme nicely), nightingales sing nicely, and there's always magpie poems.

Yeah, none of these exist where I live. We have mockingbirds and American robins (not like English robins at all) and blue jays and cardinals and the hermit thrush, but those don't make much of an appearance. Mourning doves do, but probably because it exactly matches the scansion of "turtledove".

And you know, awkward as I might find it to try to sing a piece in Middle English, it's even weirder when you think that cuckoos don't come here in the warm months and never will. I'm not likely to see one in my lifetime, nor hear one. (Well, I mean, there are cuckoos in the sense of "birds of the cuckoo family" in America, but not the one people think of when they think of cuckoos, the one that makes the classic call. The only one that springs instantly to mind is the roadrunner, so... yeah.)

There's not much to be done about this. Trying to change the references to local birds (or plants, when that occurs and they haven't been introduced to the Americas) would be pointless and almost certainly wouldn't rhyme or scan or have the same "meaning" even if it ought to. But it just... nags at me. I mean, the whole refrain is a lie to me! "Loudly sing, cuckoo?" Not likely! Sure, the meadow is blooming and all that, and I'm sure the sheep and cows are acting like sheep and cows, introduced species that they are, that the deer are the same the world over - but there's that cuckoo again! Poor thing must be lost.

*sighs*

Do you ever think you overthink things?

They can't ask me the definition of any word and just get it, I have to take them through the etymology of it as well. (Plus I make them guess from context FIRST, and usually do charades as well. I'm easily entertained.)

My ultimate goal is to convince them to stop asking me, but I'll accept "educate them" as a (distant!) second answer. So when Evangeline asked me why I called "that thing" a "structure" I took her through CONstruction and DEstruction and INstruction as well. (One of the few concrete benefits of taking Latin, however poorly I may have done at that, is that I can rattle this stuff off without blinking.)

I also am prone to doing things like this if they ask me to spell stuff for them and telling them "sheesh, sound it out already" (my default answer - we're not supposed to tell them how to spell things according to the schools) isn't likely to work, I run through WHY it has the weird spelling it has (if, indeed, it has a weird spelling).

I'd rather have a sensible orthography, but that's not likely.

And what really bugs me beyond belief is the argument that if we had a sensible, reasonable, rational orthography we'd somehow lose all knowledge of etymology! It's a silly argument to begin with, but it's made even sillier when nobody (well, almost nobody) teaches this to kids to begin with! (Few people really grasp it even as adults, apparently, which is just sad, but that's beside the point.)

I browsed a list of tips for teaching unintuitive spellings the other day, and one of them was about using mnemonics. Well, I can go with that - but the example given was of a teacher who told her students that "grammar comes from Mars".

And that just bugged me. Why not tell them that it's related to the word grammatical (which it is, and also glamor and grimoire, the root concept for all of these being "learning", but neither of those words really is helpful in this instance, and I have the feeling it's a different sort of related anyway), which is equally mnemonic and also teaches them something useful? (That this has to be taught strikes me as strange, but if it were obvious people wouldn't get it wrong so often, would they?)

Interestingly, the case of grammar indicates another issue with spelling reform that opponents never ever mention, the question of whether we'd do everything totally phonemically (for whatever dialect we'd just have to pick or invent to do it all in) or whether we'd do it morpheme by morpheme. The first has the advantage of being really easy to spell and read, the second has the advantage of keeping similar spellings for words that vary only according to suffix (so grammar/grammatical would start off the same way, just like they do now, even though they sound like they have a different vowel.)

Opponents of spelling reform, though, hardly ever seem to have any good arguments. I've noticed that. I don't know why that should be, but I've noticed it. It's not fair that I should have to argue their side as well! (It's probably because it's never gonna happen, so they don't have to bother. But it's still laziness.)

Mostly.

Now, I realize that they are required to have a certain number of half-days and administrative days (where the teachers go in but the kids don't) in the year. And I can appreciate that you might want to put them near the end of the calendar just in case you have a substantial number of snow days and whatnot to mess with the plans. I get it.

But it's absolutely absurd to have a calendar that gives us a half day on Tuesday, a whole day off on Thursday, and then another half day on Monday. And the school year ends with a half day on Tuesday the 28th. And yes, they make you come in (or send your kids in) for that last half day, at least, they do if you intend to get a report card. (Well, it's better than last year, a damn half day on a Monday. WTF?)

The one advantage of these half days is that the nieces get to have a nice, hot, homemade lunch. I mean, lunch is served on half days, but I mostly send them with just a snack and make something at home.

The disadvantage of these half days is that the nieces get to whine about their nice, hot, homemade lunch. *sigh* Well, Ana does. She's the one who eats her breakfast, and her sister's too. Evangeline is the one who eats her lunch, and has Ana's for an afternoon snack. (And on that note, I'm going to try pasta puttanesca this Tuesday. Evangeline will eat it no matter what, and Ana won't, so I don't think it matters what I make.)

I keep thinking maybe it'd be better to take one of those half days off and go do something for the day instead. I mean, they're at the *end of the year*! (Now we see the secret plan. Nothing gets done on half days anyway, so why not put them during the month when nobody expects to learn anything?) If Jenn and 'dul okay it, maybe we'll take the Monday and head to a museum or something. Might hit the Tenement museum like I wanted to, make a day of it. I mean, I never went to school on a half day when I was their age, because we were really far from our school.

What I really want to do, this summer anyway, is GO SOMEWHERE. I don't just live in a city, I live in a city that's in a whole cluster of cities, and we never go anywhere. (Heck, like most people, we hardly go anywhere within our own city either!) There's no reason we can't take a day trip out of the city and do something else, if only I knew what I wanted to do outside of the city. Ideas?

It's really not such a far walk... or, I didn't think it was, but Google is telling me it's two miles. Whoops.

At any rate, this meant I cut through Hero Park (where I found the nest) and also that I walked past a cemetery. Or, more accurately, four cemeteries that all seem to abut each other - check out the map here! They're the ones right next to Silver Lake! Some gorgeous land, with great views, on a hill, and it's taken up with graves.

I remember as a kid reading various books where superstitious characters would hold their breath when going past any place that might conceivably have a grave. If you're that superstitious, I suggest you avoid the area entirely, as you'll end up in your own grave if you try holding your breath that long!

Normally, when I go past any of these cemeteries, I'm on the bus or in car service, so I don't take a good look. But I was walking, so I read the gravestones as I passed. I really ought to go in one day and look at them properly, the names are all mixed up just like the city. You have a Polish family next to an Irish family next to some guy from Pakistan in 1907... huh.

It was surprising to me, actually, how many graves there were with Muslim names and/or marked with a star-and-crescent. Well, not how many graves there were, but how old they were, with death dates starting in the late 1880s and moving into the 1900s. I knew there had been Muslims in the US for longer than most people assume, but I guess I hadn't really thought about it before. And look, there's all these old graves!

The scaffolding comes down when the roof gets fixed, and there have been delays with that because the contractor was overbooked. They can't just switch contractors because it's a historic building and their options are limited. And it all sucks all around because they're not going to build their new playground until the roof is fixed. The money is set aside for both projects, but nothing is being done there, and half the yard is eaten up with scaffolds.

But the kids, you know, the kids make do. Mostly by climbing on the scaffolds, but what can you do?

Yesterday, Ana told me about some third grade girls. They had climbed up in the scaffolding, "tangled themselves up", and told Ana to get some boy so he could "save" them, because (Ana said) they think he's cute. Ana didn't, and that's probably just as well. There's a lot wrong with this story, but you'll notice it all starts with these girls climbing as high up on the scaffolding around the building as they could.

And they're not alone. Just about every day we hang out in the yard a few minutes after school and see the kids, boys and girls, climbing and flipping and hanging upside down on the scaffolding... at least when their parents aren't watching. Every day I see them climbing on the fence. Right now it's the boys down the block who climb up on the garages and jump off, but two decades ago it was Justina and Precious. (Princess? We had one of each on our block point and I never could figure out which girl went with which name.)

So when I read old posts like this, it really makes my blood boil.

This woman has two sons who run down the block, climb on the scaffolding, and walk on walls. She doesn't remember doing that as a child (and I'm not going to point out how fallible human memory can be) and she saw this ONE girl ONCE walking sedately down the block, and she's decided that this is because boys are boys and girls are girls.

The complete lack of logic is what steams me. How can you make any generalizations from two brothers, your memories, and a glimpse of a stranger's kid?

And even if you could (which is absurd), how can you then take those generalizations and make sweeping statements as to why the difference?

What she describes her boys as doing is exactly what my nieces do on any given day, and exactly how I acted as a child. I remember clearly walking along one of the tree fences while holding my father's hand. I remember the book I lost in a neighbor's yard while jumping off their wall. (I found it several months later, brought it home, and dried it on the radiator. It was still readable!) I remember sitting on the scaffold outside my mother's job after an orthodontist appointment.

Of course, I didn't always do this. I'm willing to bet her boys don't really always do this either. I'm also willing to bet that that girl she saw doesn't always act so nicely. Maybe that day she was tired, or on her way someplace special, or dressed nicely. Maybe her mother discourages her from climbing instead of just letting her do it.

It's bad enough people see what they want to see in times like this. (HOW many times, when the nieces were little, did somebody inanely remark to me about how "girly" Evangeline was... as Evangeline pushed a truck on the ground? HOW many times did I hear somebody comment proudly that their son was a "real boy" and "didn't play with" dolls/cooking toys/dress-up clothes... and I looked over their shoulder and watched their son doing exactly that?) What really pisses me off is that they then take their little anecdotes and decide that gosh, it's all inborn. It's not that, say, girls act "girly" because we encourage them to do that, or that boys act "boyish" because we don't stop them. Oh, no, never.

Comments are closed, but I've had this conversation before. Somebody makes a wildly sweeping statement about BOYS and GIRLS on the basis of two or three small and specific examples. I make as many - or more! - examples contradicting them... and do they go "Oh, I hadn't considered that" or "You're right, I shouldn't be generalizing from only a few children" or "I guess the situation is more complex than I realized"? No, no they do not. Instead they go "Well, THOSE kids are the EXCEPTION" and "YOUR kids are not EVERYbody's kids" and "THAT is only TWO (or three, or four, or five, or ten) examples, THAT doesn't count" or "*I* know what *I* am talking about!"

It's the hypocrisy of the whole thing that I really cannot stand. More than anything else, I loathe hypocrisy.

Of course, I guess it does prove my point. They expect to see that girls and boys are DIFFERENT, and so they DO see that, and they refuse to see any evidence that contradicts this. I don't imagine I'm much different, I see what I expect to see too... but the difference is that what *I* expect to see (kids acting like kids) doesn't involve me ignoring a lot of what I *do* see. Not in this regard, anyway.

I just wish people would pay attention sometimes. They might be surprised for a change.

February 2nd is the start of spring. (Actually, I do this four times a year, but it's most noticeable in spring because I want it to hurry up by now!)

When you can actually poke your head outside in broad daylight at 4pm and you can hear the birds singing (as Evangeline delightedly pointed out to me) and see the trees budding (that was Ana) it's easy to see that spring is springing all around.

Which means that the snow is starting to melt! We had so much of that stuff I thought we'd see piles of it until June, and maybe we still will, but a lot of it turned into rivers Monday. Oh, it was so warm. I went outside without my jacket! Sure, yesterday it was in the 30s again, but we're holding on to Monday in our minds.

It's so funny about jackets and coats. When winter starts and you finally dig out your blankets and your heavy coat and your sweaters, it feels so nice and comforting and *safe* to bury yourself in them and be warm. But then when the first really warm day comes back and you throw them aside, you don't ever want to see them again. (And this is how I lose $20 every year from April until October. Whatever, it's a nice candy-cane bonus.)

In a way, it's the same with the snow. The nieces were thrilled with the first big snowfall, and absolutely fascinated by the way ice formed on top of powder (I remember being delighted with it in the last big storm of my childhood, in 96 - childhood, I say, but I was already in middle school!), but by the third storm they were begging the clouds to go away! There's one big advantage to spending the past month and a half wending through snow tunnels, though - underneath it all, the grass is green. Usually in February it's dry and brown, but this year it's bright green already. Evangeline, of course, was thrilled at a few bare patches she saw yesterday: "Grass, beautiful grass! It's so green, beautiful green grass! And the snow is pretty, but the grass is green!" She did a whole little song!

Or should a physical rehab center ice its ramp two days after the blizzard? Or at least adequately shovel the thing?

but then I found out that no, they really take a month or more to heal, and all those times I thought I was better within a week were anomalous (or, more likely, the ankle never healed which is why I keep having troubles with it).

So instead I'll post something else:

Today I happened to be thinking about The Maze in the Heart of the Castle, which is this awesome book that, sadly, is out of print. (Used copies go for an absurd price. I need a new copy. This displeases me greatly.)

Funny thing. I can't think about that book (and one particular chapter) without immediately hearing this movement from Rodeo. (And no, it's not the ground beef song.)

I know why, of course - this one time I read the book while listening to the whole thing on tape. I do adore Copland. But it's strange - I don't associate other movements with other parts of the book, and that's not the first nor definitive time I read that book either.

This is far from the only book/music combination I have. Scheherezade, for example, brings to mind A Wrinkle in Time AND (a different part) A Little Princess, and the Deep Space Nine theme song, aside from reminding me of Deep Space Nine, flashes me immediately back to reading the NY Times in my kitchen. (Boy, I haven't bought a copy of that in years, now that I can read it online!)

Now, aside from giving you all far too much insight into my childhood listening habits, I have to ask - is this normal? One of the problems of my life is that I'm never sure where normal is. (That probably is normal, sadly.)

So... is it normal to hear certain pieces of music and immediately and vividly recollect various types of reading material (and vice versa)? Or is it just me?

Down's Syndrome is a type of trisomy - they have an extra copy of chromosome 21.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneuploidy

1. If somebody with some form of aneuploidy has a child, is it heritable at that point?
2. Sometimes, closely related species seem to have vastly different amounts of chromosomes. Do we know why this can happen? I mean, this isn't one of those slow development things that makes sense to me. How do extra sets of chromosomes appear (or spare sets disappear)?

A palimpsest is, as everybody knows, a manuscript page that's been reused after scraping off old text.

It's also the outline of an old building that's been torn down on the wall of a formerly connected building.

I tend to use the word in my head to refer to the writing on a used book - like a note I cherish from an unknown young reader of my copy of "Where The Sidewalk Ends" who marked on one page "my favorit pome". (The writing in MY books tends to be phone numbers, recipes, shopping lists, and, from old books, homework assignments. Plus a number of "addresses" where I go from street, city, and state to country, planet, and solar system. But who doesn't do that?)

Is that a transparent enough extension that other people who know the word at all should get it without my having to explain it, or is it a neologism best kept to myself?