Monthly Archives: September 2006

If it’s Tuesday, it’s Harper’s.

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From Harper’s Weekly Review:
Worth repeated highlighting:

The Pentagon announced that civilian casualties in Iraq had increased recently by more than fifty percent, and death squads were said to be torturing and killing as many as 1,800 people per month.[New York Times] At least 200 Iraqis were killed in bombings, rocket attacks, and shootings, as were 19 American and British soldiers.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quoted Georges Clemenceau, who said, “War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.”[Washington Post]
SAT scores in the United States showed the largest decline in 31 years.


The following seem to be all connected to the actions of men, although Harper’s didn’t relate them in that way.

Warren Steed Jeffs, who reportedly has 80 wives and 250 children and serves as the leader of a polygamist Mormon sect, was arrested in Nevada on suspicion of arranging marriages between underage girls and older men. [AP via New York Times]
Researchers warned that countries with unnaturally high male-to-female population ratios, such as China and India, could foster violence, organized crime, and terrorism.
In a courtroom in Duluth, Minnesota, a cocaine trafficker ate his own feces;[Duluth News Tribune] a vigilante mob in North Carolina beat and killed the wrong man;[AP via CNN]
in Russia a participant in a sex-doll river-rafting race was disqualified for sexually abusing his rafting apparatus. “I think,” said the man’s friend, “it was an expression of his great desire to win.”[MOSNEWS.COM]
In the Indian state of Bihar, high-caste landowners were raping and gouging out the eyes of low-caste residents.[India eNews]


And these seem related to the ways of women:

Miss England, an Uzbek-born Muslim, declared that stereotyping leads to terror.
It was reported that the average British woman spends two and a half years on her hair during her lifetime.[Daily Mail]
A British professor announced that five-year-old girls were worried about their weight,[AFP via Breitbart]
A study revealed that the brains of nuns “flicker” in the presence of God.
A woman in Hohhot, China, crashed her car into another vehicle while allowing her dog to drive.


I can’t help comparing the unique newsworthy things that men do with the unique newsworthy things that women do. Which only makes me even more convinced that if there were a way to keep testosterone at a reasonable level in the males of our species, there would be less violence committed by males against those less aggressive and/or strong.
I don’t see much newsworthy violence being perpetrated by women.

the brown booties

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A photo from the 1920s of my mother (a pre-teen) and her two younger sisters when they came back from living in Poland for several years shows them dressed alike — right down to their scuffed high-top laced-up shoes.
My mother insists on wearing a pair of brown leather “booties,” which she guards with her life, convinced that someone is going to steal them from her. She has always told the story of how, while living in her grandmother’s thatched-roof farmhouse is Poland (along with her four siblings and their own mother), someone somehow got into the house one night and stole all of their clothes, even their shoes. Although I had never been sure that this story was true, it was verified by our 81 year old cousin who visited a few weeks ago.
My mother has become overwhelmingly paranoid that someone is going to steal her clothes, especially her shoes. Every evening she manages to hide her shoes somewhere else. Of course, when she gets up the next day, she doesn’t remember hiding them and believes someone has stolen them. She does this with her eyeglasses and her purses, too. It annoys me that I have to spend so much of my time looking for the things she believes were stolen. The fact that we always find those objects hidden somewhere in her room is irrelevant to her.
I’m annoyed a lot lately. But then I go over and read By Bea’s Bedside, where Alexandra muses about her bedridden mother for whom she is caregiver. They have such a different relationship than we have here. They obviously always have been close and communicative. Not so here. Alexandra’s attitude toward taking care of her mother is so much different from mine; Bea’s daughter never sounds annoyed.
I should be grateful that my mother is not bedridden (although when I have to spend an hour looking for her brown booties while she follows me around complaining about “those people, I often wish she were). And I don’t have to change diapers. Not yet, anyway.
My mother has never been much of a reader or a thinker or a doer (of anything but housework). She was not much of a television watcher either. So now, there is absolutely nothing that she is interested in doing except move things around in her closets and drawers.
Her attention span in front of the television is about 15 minutes, and she prefers programs from the earlier days of television — ones with no shooting and no car crashes and no expletives. So yesterday, I ordered a used set of seven VHS tapes of the Loretta Young Show from the late 50s. She always liked Loretta Young, and maybe those stories from more calm and secure times will hold her attention.
There was an item on the local news station the other day about a computer program that’s supposed to help older people revitalize their brains. The more I read about it, I realized it was much too complicated for my mom. I started searching for some pre-school DVD memory games, and they’re much more suitable for where she’s at these days.
I just wish I could find something that would interest her and get her mind off those damned brown booties.