The Variegated Delights of Deja Vu

Monday night, I did an inconsequential good deed: volunteered to officiate at a speech meet at the high school and ended up in deep deja vu..

Speech wasn't an activity when Cascade High was Aquin, though once I wrote a speech, found a sponsor on staff, and went to Senior High to deliver it. What an eye-opener! I felt and certainly sounded like a country bumpkin—the Dubuque kids were far more polished and presentable. Taught me a lesson that remains to this day.

It was obvious that some of the students were having the very same experience as I had long time ago—it's called learning! Tho' one facile performance brought back a resounding success with a Ferlinghetti poem that is still one of my favorites:

“Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass"
Kids chase him
thru screendoor summers
Thru the back streets
of all my memories
Somewhere a man laments
upon a violin
A doorstep baby cries
and cries again
like
a
ball
bounced
down steps\
Which helps the afternoon arise again
to a moment of remembered hysteria
"Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass"
Kids chase him

The judge looked at me shocked and said, “Miss McD, I never understood that poem. Thank you so very much.”
That comment taught me why we, the very special students I saw Monday evening do it--the deep desire to share what they know.

Getting on the Sex Offenders List. . .

isn't exactly cheap, if the judgment lodged against Toby Donovan of Cascade set down Wed. Feb. 19 is any indication. 

Last fall, Donovan plead guilty to a charge of Enticing a Minor and  last Wed. Judge Monica L. Ackley delivered the verdict: a 5-year suspended sentence, the 1^st year to be served at ”Elm Street Correctional Facility or until “maximum benefits are achieved.” So we could see him on the street sooner or later than next Feb. The judgment also includes a $750 fine, and a “No Contact with Minors” order and probation for the balance of the sentence. A probation violation will incarcerate him immediately.

Among other court costs (The Law Initiative Surcharge), Donovan will be assessed $250 to pay for a permanent place on the Iowa Sex Offenders Registry, which presumably relieves the rest of us of the expense of the mandated DNA test required of all individuals on it.

Elm Street told Critical Eye that residents there may not leave unless they have job obligations. Nice irony—he probably wouldn't be there if he had a job to begin with! It was rumored he was offered one here in town, but Critical Eye was unable to verify that.

This feels like an idle-hands-devil's-workshop issue, but Critical Eye intends to look into on the question of whether pedophiles can be “cured.” Considerable opinion maintains not. Check this blog for discussion of what experts think and what the stats reveal.

Back talking E-mailers

Talking back to e-mailers is such fun. Plus, they need the feedback. Last week somebody wrote asking me to sign a petition to “Tell the Texas Legislature not Allow Creationism Textbooks.”

I wrote back and said, “Good Luck, Honey, telling Texans anything!”

The flippant response masks a more serious question—Why should Texans live with what some Iowan believes, anyway? If Texans want to raise their kids believing something that may make them laughing stocks in the scientific community, should I or even the Koch Brothers interfere?

The Bros Koch apparently feel their billions entitle them to an end-run around democracy.

By god, I uphold the right of Texans to put whatever they want in their textbooks!

Costs of Development

So, Folks, how do you like them utility bills? Is bigger really better?!

You're in luck if you love them because they are going to be more that way, when the city gets around to building a new sewer plant. Which it cannot NOT do because we are outgrowing the old one. Here we see another of the hidden costs of development not paid by developers, but by the wider community. The public—that’s me and you, folks, paying various taxes that support local government—pays these costs.

Our previous developer is sunning his buns some place down south, and I warrant before long our current ones will be, too. The public providing them the margins for things like a 2nd home in the sun, is part of the reason ordinary Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, hand-wringing about the demise of the middle class continues unabated. Ironically, government itself is responsible (via the demise of unions, the big bank bail-out) and it will continue unabated until the citizenry insists that the people who are actually benefiting from development pay more of their share. Tell your the governor, the mayor, your councilman and representative there should be a infrastructure premium paid by developers.

O.P.Bs—Other People’s Books

Years ago when I was young and dumb and convinced I had miles and miles (so many I would never run out) to go before I slept, I spent three weeks in an NYC apt. babysitting puppeteer's cat. The on-tour puppeteer Theodora Skipitares was doing amusing research on scientific frauds--puppets as serious biz. A disconcertingly real-looking puppet of Marie Cure stared at me like an interloper or burglar whenever I came or went.

In her library I found an engrossing book that described out-and-out hoaxes Piltdown Man, the Cardiff Giant, and Paul Kammerer’s frog sex hoax over which he was sufficiently shamed that he committed suicide shortly after it was revealed.

The one I remember best was Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk, who, it is now known, fabricated part of his research on sweet pea genetics by extending it mathematically. He simply could not have brought that many generations of sweet peas to maturity and die at 62, as he did. He would have to be far older, but he is recognized as the Father of Genetics because his math was correct. Fatuous then, the book, whose title I have forgotten, kicked my skepticism up a few flights.

The Biologist Bro-in-law's I found a book called Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. The cover graphic of changes from a flightless, long-legged lizardy thing to a bird tells the story. But fossil record that extends meters into the sediment of the sea bed is incredibly vast and yields astonishingly exact explanations to tight to dismiss.

It is difficult to believe God created heaven and earth, and no way 10,000 years and 7 days ago. If a supreme being did set it in motion, it was something along the lines of “Let there be light; let there be carbon-oxygen ooze and let's see what it can do!”

A Critical Eye keeps looking till it dies.

Sunday in Sarasota

The “South” begins somewhere at mid-Florida—at least judging from the Spanish moss, that lacy, graceful gray-green stuff hanging from limbs and trunks of trees. Not a parasite like mistletoe but grows in minute deposits of dirt in tree bark. Nature walks with Biologist bros-in-law are best;  they know such stuff.

Best of all was a jaunt out to a weir--"a low dam built across a river to raise the level of water upstream or regulate its flow." The latter, one could see. A sign said --see below--but the rounded the flat top was an open invite. and most tourists did. I thought, “Damn, that thing was built before me!”

 The tenacious black snake, “Or salamander?” I said, protruding from a crack in the weir, refused to be intimidated by the tourists who almost trod him, stood his ground—ah, section of cement—undaunted. “A snake,” said the Biologist, for lack of eyelids and lashes.

“A crack in it!” I said, retreating to safer ground.

 At a distance herds of elegant, white egrets greater, lesser and cattle communed. Turkey vultures,a contentious race, jabbed, gabbled, and harassed one another. Gators lazed like logs in the water, waiting for a bird, fish, dog, or tourist misstep. One show-off fish lost his life before we left.

 At the parking lot of the baseball diamond where we had stashed the party's cars, sand cranes wearing little maroon baseball caps gave the Baltimore Orioles farm team their backsides intent on more interesting tidbits. In an afternoon chock with them.