Bookworm Room

Tweet I know I’m just grumpy, but this promotional mailing from Ithaca College rubbed me the wrong way: Ready to write environmental wrongs.  Ithaca College will turn your academic passions into unforgettable experiences — and make you ready for the adventure of your life. I know that the first sentence is meant to be a [...]

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Tweet Conservatives often talk about the fact that Progressives use children as a wedge issue for everything.  Changes in immigration law?  It’s to protect those poor children whose parents illegally dragged them across the border.  Changes in health care law?  It’s so that children, right up until the childlike age of 26, can get full [...]

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Tweet One of the things I find most distasteful about ObamaCare is its requirement that employers must provide insurance coverage for their employees’ children through their 26th year.  I don’t find this just economically wrong, I find it cosmically, morally wrong that our federal government has officially extended childhood until citizens are 26.  I cannot [...]

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Tweet On Monday, I noted that ObamaCare regulations requiring employers to provide full (really full) insurance coverage to all employees may make running restaurants, which have a famously low profit margin, so prohibitively expensive that many will go out of business. It turns out that we needn’t fear this eventuality, because we’re about to see [...]

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Tweet There are a couple of things about modern life that are hard to understand.  The first is why so many more children have potentially fatal peanut allergies than did in my youth.  I have no idea why this is so, and probably never will. The second thing that’s been mysterious to me is why [...]

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Tweet So much of parenting is about communication.  Because children listen with their hearts as well as their minds, that communication had better be honest.  If it’s not, your child will instantly know you for either a fool or a liar. Being honest, though, is not the same as being judgmental.  There is a time [...]

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Tweet Earlier today, I wrote that fearing a bad genetic outcome is the wrong reason not to get pregnant.  Tonight, completely coincidentally, I had the pleasure of attending a talent show in which the performers were all developmentally disabled children.  It was the best show I’ve seen in I don’t know how long.  Despite disabilities [...]

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Tweet PJ Media has had two interesting posts about whether familial genetic legacies are the right reason not to have a baby.  David Swindle passes on an article about the fact that well-known “comedienne” Sarah Silverman (I use the scare quotes because I don’t think she’s funny) announced recently that she will not have children [...]

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Tweet I love fairy tales.  I’ve always loved fairy tales.  Growing up, I devoured fairy tale books, with special emphasis on the Disney movies, with their beautiful princesses.  My personal favorite was Disney’s Cinderella.  I saw it once when I was a child and then, in a pre-video era, all I could do was replay [...]

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Tweet If you haven’t yet seen Time Magazine’s most recent cover, welcome back to earth from your extended journey to some other galaxy, far, far away. To bring you up to speed, here’s a copy of the famous (or infamous) cover for you to enjoy: The Mom pictured on the cover has promised to stop [...]

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Tweet Let’s put aside the laughable fact that the MSM has had to go back to 1965, when Romney was a teenager, to find something bad about him (or, more specifically, something bad about him and a putatively gay person).  This ridiculous attack has naturally generated attacks against Obama and Biden, both of whom, either [...]

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Tweet At first, I couldn’t understand why people on my Facebook page were posting excerpts from Where The Wild Things Are.  After the third post, I realized that Maurice Sendak must have died.  And so it is — Maurice Sendak has died, aged 83.  He was a prolific writer and illustrator, but he will always [...]

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Tweet From Season 1 of The Simpsons (waaaay back in 1990), comes “Bart the General“: After defending Lisa from school bully Nelson Muntz, Bart becomes Nelson’s latest target. Sick of the harassment and torment, Bart, Grampa Simpson, and Herman (a slightly deranged military antique store dealer with a missing arm) rally the town’s children into [...]

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Tweet I’m surrounded by tweens and teens, so I can attest to this poem’s accuracy: Hat tip:  The New Editor

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Tweet Last night, one of the neighborhood kids fell and broke his wrist during a vigorous after dark game, played without adult supervision.  That kind of injury would never have happened to me when I was a kid, because I wasn’t allowed to play rough or vigorous.  My parents, who had experienced the 1930s and [...]

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Tweet Ignore my post title.  In fact, I want you to read my blog today — and send your friends over too.  I want the big(ger) numbers to show me that my hard work is paying off, and that I’m creating something worthy. Given my aggressive, competitive blogging attitude, thank goodness I’m not playing middle [...]

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Tweet Every time I return from a Navy League or Navy event, I lament the fact that we in the civilian world do not get to wear our honors and accomplishments on our hats, shoulders, chests or sleeves.  The fact that there is no official boasting mechanism in my suburban Mom life, though, doesn’t mean [...]

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Tweet It would be so nice if my children had inherited only my best qualities, plus their father’s best qualities too.  Then, they would have been brilliant, talented and gorgeous.  But that’s not how it worked out.  For one thing, they’ve got qualities, such as athleticism and self-discipline, that neither my husband nor I have.  [...]

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Tweet Me, at Pajamas Media: I challenge you to find a news report with more layers, all of them misleading, than an ostensibly unbiased San Francisco Chronicle “news” article about a canceled art exhibition at the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland, California. The story’s core is uncomplicated: The museum agreed with an organization called the [...]

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Tweet My son wrote a very sweet essay about the people and things that made him what he is today.  I thought you all would enjoy these two paragraphs: I also admire the people in the Marine Corps and the Navy Seals.  They are willing to give their lives to fight for our country.  They [...]

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Tweet Sometimes the matched sets just write themselves.  Both of the articles I’m quoting here are from England.  The first in our set is an article saying that town councils across England are being told that they need to reinstate actual playgrounds.  The current versions, which are the kid equivalent of a padded room, are [...]

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Tweet Pedophilia is an up and coming subject, as pedophiles strive to become mainstream.  In an article about Dr. Earl Bradley, a convicted pedophile, Fay Voshell makes an incredibly important point: Dr. Bradley’s behavior is illustrative of the sort of things a pedophile does to his victims, including sometimes killing the child he rapes, sodomizes, [...]

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Tweet My daughter started high school at our local public high.  It’s a great high school.  It’s got a beautiful facility, high quality staff, all the bells and whistles you can think of, an involved parent body, and a whole lot of very nice kids.  I always knew all that, but I had that information [...]

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Tweet Rick, at Brutally Honest, struggles with an agonizing question that always faces moral nations when they embark on a war:  What about the enemy’s civilian population?  Is there ever a justification for targeting women and children, as was done at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  He links to an equally thoughtful Joe Carter post on the [...]

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Tweet As I’ve noted before, although merely (and gratefully) comfortable myself, I live in an affluent community.  I am a Marin resident, after all.  In response to this affluence, the local middle and high schools, both public and private, have all jumped on the bandwagon to require “community service” as a prerequisite for grade promotion [...]

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