matching tracksuits

fun in threes, sometimes fours

g

It’s Fine When We Do It

Monday 19 October 2020

A lot of people are supporting Trump because, although they don’t think he’s an ideal candidate, they see him as better than the boogie-man-Stalinst-wannabe straw man they fear Biden is. In other words, they see it as a question of the survival of the republic: if Biden wins, he and far-left radicals will work to turn the US into a socialist/communist country, they fear. The United States will cease to be, they say.

Yet some take it a bit further:

Someone like Wiles would likely be willing to let Trump be president for life, and make it hereditary — get rid of elections, in other words — in order to protect the US against this perceived threat. In other words, to save the country, he would be willing to destroy the country. Shades of the Battle of Bến Tre.

This sort of worship of Trump is surprisingly common in the evangelical community.

For a group that calls itself Christians and swears never to put any god above their god, they certainly do that an awful lot with Trump.

Sunday at the Park and on the Trampoline

Sunday 18 October 2020

Saturday Morning

Saturday 17 October 2020

Getting the dog’s energy out…

Perfection

Friday 16 October 2020

The girls pulled it off: a perfect season. They lost not a single set. And L had the championship-winning kill tonight.

Our Country

Thursday 15 October 2020

His justification:

All this has been lurking just below the surface in our country for years, and it just took one man to bring it all out. There are historical parallels that are too awful to mention.

 

Today in School

Wednesday 14 October 2020

We had the PSAT today, so many students were out during class. No matter — it’s recorded and posted on Google Classroom.

We began the day with a short open-note quiz on the two poems we just finished and on poetry in general. We followed that with a short viewing (about a minute) of the Stanford Viennese Ball’s opening waltz:

This was in order to provide students with some perspective about what a waltz looks like when we read “My Papa’s Waltz.”

Our reading of “My Papa’s Waltz” was a cautionary tale. At first it seems like so many words have connotations of abuse that the poem is actually about an abusive father.

  • The “whiskey on your breath” line makes us think he’s inebriated.
  • “Death” has obvious bad connotations.
  • “Battered” and “beat” are abusive words.

The problem, though, is this is not a close-enough reading.

  • Notice: his knuckle is what’s battered. Along with the “palm caked hard with dirt,” this suggests he’s a man used to hard manual labor.
  • He’s beating time and nothing else — he’s tapping the boy’s head 1-2-3 to help him keep up with the waltz.
  • The text shows he’s had something to drink; it doesn’t say he’s inebriated. (“Remember what that waltz looked like?” I reminded the students. “Do you think he could do that if he’d been inebriated?”)
  • Note who puts him to bed: the father.

So this was a cautionary tale about reading too much into the connotations of a poem. Don’t overdo it. If there’s no evidence in the text, it’s likely not a valid interpretation.

Finishing the Toolbox

Tuesday 13 October 2020

Yesterday was the cut day; today we assembled everything. I struggled to figure out how much to do and how much to let him do, to decide how many mistakes to correct and how many to let slide.

“Oh, Daddy, that nail is actually coming out of the bottom.” That’s one to correct.

“Daddy, I didn’t evenly space these nails.” Just pat him on the head and say, “It’s not a big deal, buddy.”

In the end, it wasn’t perfect, but he’d done almost all of it — a good reason to do your best Dr. Seuss character imitation. (“Daddy, why do so many of the characters go around with their eyes closed?” he once asked. I’d never really noticed that.)

Close Call

Monday 12 October 2020

The Girl's volleyball team finished the regular season with a perfect record. Beyond perfect -- not only did they win every match but the won them all in straight sets. Which is to say they lost not a single set. And most sets they won convincingly. Brutally.

Today was the semifinals of the year-end tournament.

Before the game, there was a special short recognition of the eighth-grade girls who would be leaving. "As you can see," said the coach, "they're the majority of the team." Next year will likely not see as many in the win column as this year. But it's still this year.

The girls made it straight to the semifinals due to their record, and they faced St. Mary's today. They won convincingly earlier this year in the regular season. And the first set today they won easily: 25-9. That's not just an easy win. That's a brutal beat-down. But the St. Mary's girls never let it get to them. They were enthusiastic and hard-working the entire set as the lead mounted and become the monster that it was.

In the second set, the Langston girls started getting sloppy, making some silly errors. Before we knew it, they were down by four, almost all the points coming from their own unforced errors. Still, I don't want to take anything away from the St. Mary's team: they were playing much better in the second set. Our girls cut the lead to one and then started slipping again. Cut the lead and then started slipping again. And then the unthinkable: set point.

Yet the girls rallied and kept their perfect record just that.

It would have been a great surprise for the St. Mary's girls to bump the big dogs off their perch (I just intentionally mixed those metaphors so thoroughly that you could serve them to James Bond).

"Did you hear? The Langston girls finally got taken down!"

"Really? By whom?"

But it was not meant to be, I suppose.

One more game -- the championship on Friday afternoon against Shannon Forest again. They almost took a set from the girls a couple of weeks ago, and in the 2019/2020 season, they took a set from the Langston girls each of the two matches they played. Including the championship.

In the evening, after dinner, the Boy and I worked on his scout project. We measured and cut all the boards, ready for assembly tomorrow.

Around the House this Evening

Sunday 11 October 2020

The End of What?

Sunday 11 October 2020

Press Release - Radio Interview with David C. Pack

Just a little over a week ago, religious huckster and conman David Pack said that Jesus would be coming back by the end of his group's little religious retreat known as the Feast of Tabernacles. He was absolutely sure it would happen during that convention, and in a sermon leaked onto the internet that he gave during the first day, he said he would be shocked if they made it halfway through the conference before Jesus returned. As Wednesday rolled into Thursday, marking the halfway mark, I wondered what he was saying to his flock. "Just wait -- I know it's coming!" Who knows.

Well, the whole conference is over. Everyone was heading back to their homes today despite Pack's assurance during his first-day sermon that they wouldn't be going back home. Are they finally beginning to doubt the man? Are they going to leave his group?

The fallout will be interesting to watch, but it certainly is not without tragedy. Members of this group have given everything to this man. They've signed over their homes to them. They've taken out loans to send him the money. As with the Branch Davidians or the People's Temple, they've surrendered their whole lives to this man in the belief that he is God's appointed one on Earth, an apostle on the same level as the New Testament apostles. I don't think they will end with a firey confrontation with government officials or in a mass suicide, but that doesn't make the tragedy insignificant: anyone who leaves this church would have to start all over. I'm not even sure they could stay in their houses if they signed them over to the church.