Mondays with Kouryou-chan

Monday is the one day of the week I spend with Kouryou-chan all by myself and get to feel all parental about it. It was fun today; we stopped and bought a book we can both enjoy, Tonari No Totoro in the original Japanese, a challenge for both of us. And then I went home and made home-made pasta sauce with ravioli; the local QFC has these really small, kid-friendly "raviolettes" that are great for her. Like every Monday, she ate everything and then gleefully downed half an Oreo ice-cream cookie sandwich-- truly a sinful invention of the latter 20th century. I showed her how to draw Calvin and Hobbes (poorly), and watched her try to draw me and Omaha. I tried to draw her, but she wouldn't sit still.

Later, I had to clean out three training pants, a practice that, really, requires a hazmat suit and decontamination afterwards. Then I pulled her bath. I let her bathe while I shaved. She said, "You're almost perfect, Daddy."

"Almost? What would make me a perfect?" I said, curious.

"You could be a girl!"

No word from her on why my being a girl would make me perfect.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

This is ridiculous. Government lawyers are fighting to keep the Norfolk, England farmer Tony Martin behind bars. His "crime" is shooting at two men who entered his home while he slept with the intent of robbing him. The lawyers will apparently tell a High Court judge tomorrow that "burglars are members of the public who must be protected from violent householders."

At first, I thought Theodore Dalrymple's recent article, The victims of liberalism, was over the top. Now I'm convinced otherwise. By the by, if you you've never read Theodore Dalrymple, start now.

Two strangers, in his home, in the middle of the night, known to be out for criminal intent, and he's not allowed to defend himself? What kind of logic is that? I love the phrase "violent householders." I suspect that Mr. Martin is no more violent than anyone else out to protect his family from those who are out to flagrantly flaunt the law.

In other news (fallenpegasus, you want to see this), the magazine The New Atlantis has launched. It's supposed to be a "balanced and fair" analysis of the new techonolgies and what they mean for the rest of us, but it has a distinctly Static feel to, at least to my reading. When the flagship article is by Leon Kass, I have serious worries.

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( The true zodiac lemming )