matching tracksuits

A Nation at a Loss - New York Times

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From the Wall Street Journal:

Housing starts decreased 12% to a seasonally adjusted 947,000 annual rate, after falling 0.7% in February to 1.075 million, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday. Originally, Commerce reported February starts 0.6% lower, at 1.065 million. Building permits also dropped in March. (WSJ)

Twelve percent?!

Anyone really believe the housing slump is going to end any time soon?

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This race has been odd for the religious right. First, there was the issue of whether or not to support a Mormon — a non-Christian in the eyes of many Evangelicals. Now comes the troubling Hagee endorsement of McCain.

Yet it’s not only those on the left side of the spectrum that are troubled by this — or at least, it shouldn’t be. Those same Evangelical Christians who hesitated to support McCain should also be leery of Hagee and his less-than-orthodox theology, as seen below:

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I was taking a modern American history course. The professor sent us home to watch television — ostensibly to watch history.

Little did we know.

I watched the fire and assumed an evil man had ordered mass suicide.

I assumed that for almost fifteen years.

I no longer assume that.

Waco: The Rules of Engagement.

Netflix members can watch it online.

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All photos are links to more pictures at Flickr.

The main goal of our trip West was to see the Grand Canyon. Dziadek, having been a geography teacher, had wanted to see it for as long as he could remember; K and I, not having had a vacation for years (literally), were eager to take him; L really didn’t care.

I first went to the Grand Canyon when I was eleven. During the intervening twenty-some years, I never forgot about how awe-struck I was when I first saw the canyon.

“I knew it was big, but that big?!”

K and Dziadek had similar reactions.

The GC in winter with a baby is a hectic schedule — into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car. Coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on.

It soon became clear to K and me that this was just a reconnaissance trip, for we must go back and hike the canyon.

A note to photographers: the rocks reflect a lot of light. We found quickly enough that it was necessary to underexpose most shots by 0.7 steps.

The cliche is that a picture is worth some ridiculous amount of words. That really depends on the author, I’d say, but all that notwithstanding, even pictures don’t do the GC any justice. It’s just enormous on a scale that is incomprehensible.

Two hundred and seventy-seven miles long. An average of ten miles wide, with the shortest trail from rim to rim being twenty-four miles long. Five thousand feet deep.

Six million years old, with the oldest layers of rock being well over a billion years old.

It’s like staring into infinity.

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Outside of Boulder City, on the way to the Grand Canyon, we encountered some truly other-worldly views.

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The first stop on our week-long trip was Hoover Dam.

To say it’s awe-inspiring is an understatement. Things of that scale are almost frightening, both its size and its implications.

The enormity of the structure is almost as breathtaking as that of the Grand Canyon. Approaching it, you know it’s going to be big, but once you see it, you think, “I didn’t think it would be quite that big.” And it’s not just the dam that’s huge — everything connected to it is enormous: Lake Mead is the largest man-made lake in America; the overflow tunnels, with a diameter of 50 feet, are big enough to drive a truck through.

But it’s the implications that are frightening. Built from 1931 to 1935, Hoover Dam was completed two years ahead of schedule and under budget! Six companies, from Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and California, pooled their resources to create a structure so complicated that procedures and tools had to be invented to complete it.

For instance, the heat created by the chemical reactions of concrete drying would have stretched the process of the concrete setting and drying to 125 years. To combat this, engineers designed a system whereby tubes were run through the concrete and cool water pumped throughout the whole structure. But a refrigeration unit that had such a cooling capacity? It didn’t exist. Yet.

So here’s all this innovation and creation and genius going into one of the most complicated structures in history at a time when a significant part of our population was treated like animals and a psychopath in Europe was laying plans to slaughter six million people because of their religious/ethnic heritage.

Humans can’t be manipulated as easily as concrete, I suppose. Well, I take that back. Humans can be manipulated just as easily as anything else, but most of the time, it’s manipulation towards evil.

More implications: Can anyone imagine an enormous project like Boston’s “The Big Dig” project going under budget and well within the projected time frame? Can anyone imagine Haliburton delivering its services on budget, let alone under?

Still, all these thoughts passed quickly through my mind: we spent most of the time in gaping-mouth awe.

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Yesterday we went to Rose Hill Plantation, an antebellum estate outside of Spartanburg.

More pictures at Flickr.

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Interesting article on Romney’s Mormonism at “Get Religion”:

If you’ve not followed the decades-long theological debate between apologists for evangelical Protestantism and apologists for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, brace yourself. You’re probably in for an extended mass media discourse on those differences, at least until the primaries settle who will be the Republican nominee for president. Don’t call him Brother Romney just yet » GetReligion

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Last Sunday we went to Chimney Rock.

Again…

When Dziadek was planning his trip, he’d looked through all the pictures of where we’d been with J (and where she’d bought spoons…) and decided that, having saved up some money, informed us that he wanted to go on one “real” outing, and the rest could be “little spoons.” (It sounds better in Polish.) So he came with plans to go on one big trip and instructions to bring home spoons from everywhere he’d been.

Chimney Rock was our first “little spoon.”

“Mamus juz tu byla?” he asked.

“Yes, she’s been here,” we responded.

“Nie musimy kupic lyzeczka, co?”

“No, we don’t have to buy her a spoon.”

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