A small bit of Brain before dinner, sir?

Hilzoy on Obama's Veterans Speech

Hilzoy does a good job of defending Obama from the charge that he's going to "battle McCain by throwing boomers under the bus." Instead, she points out that Obama's real intent here is show that McCain is opposed to raising veterans benefits because that might encourage people to leave the service. When McCain writes, "a cause greater than yourself is the most ennobling of all avocations," what he really means is war.

Will male mouth cancer sway the religious right?

Saneblog asks the important question: would the Evangelicals approve the HPV vaccine if they knew their young men were also at risk? Or would preaching against cunnilingus be sufficient?

Abandoned library in Russia

An ineffably sad photographic essay. (via Bookslut)

Yamaraashi-chan at HPAC

Yamaraashi-chan at HPAC

Last Wednesday (my birthday), we had a family outing to the local performaning arts center. Yamaraashi-chan's school has a fabulous music program, and they'd rented out the place for an annual choir.

She was all bouncy for the event. We listened to them sing a number of songs, the most interesting of which was "By the Streams of Babylon," a difficult piece even for an adult choir, which the kids did great. Yamaraashi-chan had both a flute duet and, later, a xylophone piece (the photo is from the stage bow after the xylophone piece; I picked it because it shows off her eyes, which like her sister's, photograph beautifully; she must get that from her mother), and in general comported herself with grace and competence.

After that we celebrated both my birthday and her performance with dinner at Mizu, the local hibachi place.

Yes, I'm fully convinced my kids are both brilliant and beautiful.

Talking to Mom about Politics

Mom called while Kouryou-chan and I were at Starbucks.

We had taken a bike ride Sunday afternoon, just a quick jaunt up the street to the only intersection in our part of town with anything at all, in this case a Starbucks, a video store, a grocery store (with another Starbucks inside it), and an independent pharmacy. We went to the Starbucks where she got a chocolate oat bar and I got a coffee. It was surprisingly cold outside for the time of year, and it even drizzled a little.

I had called her earlier in the day to wish her a happy Mother's day, and she was calling me back. She seems to have gotten the impression (one apparently shared by a number of friends of ours) that being parents on top of our geekiness and businesses has made us so overwhelmed that we don't have time for socializing. She angsted and anguished about how neither Steve or Sandra (my siblings) had called her.

I mentioned my recent little election cycle job I had done, and Mom asked me who I was going to vote for. Once I'd clarified that she meant the general election, she said, "I don't think I could vote for Obama. It's so weird. He came out of nowhere, didn't he? And he's so convincing, so charismatic. It's like it's a cult. It's a movement, that's what it is, it's a movement." She went on this track for a while.

C'mon, Mom, we both know what it is: he's black. That's all there is to it. She doesn't like McCain much, and she wishes she could vote for Hillary. I spoke to her about Obama's actual record, his history in Chicago, how absolutely everything about him was available on-line at his website or reputable news outlets, and yeah, I'd actually read his foreign policy proposals and found it a lot more admirable than Hillary's or McCain's. I love Mom very much, but there are times when I'm grateful I'm not actually related to her.

The Roman Art Exhibit!

Despite Omaha's chest cold she was determined to go see the Roman Art Exhibit down an the Seattle Art Museum. To my shock and surprise, Yamaraashi-chan's mother agreed to hold onto her for another hour. (I'm not shocked that she wanted an extra hour; I'm shocked and pleasantly surprised that came to the phone at all, and I hope she'll agree that my asking nicely was preferable to her usual demanding posture.)

We drove down there and I dropped off the family and parked. I caught up with them just as Omaha was getting tickets. As it turned out, sadly, we were only going to be allowed in for about an hour and a half.

There were nine galleries in there. In the 80 minutes or so we had, Omaha had managed to get through two of them. I admire her dedication, but we were on a schedule to get home before Yamaraashi-chan got back and the kids had to go to bed anyway.

I hung out mostly in the "home living" section, as those are the details a writer often cares about. I was impressed by the amount of glasswork the Romans indulged; I had thought that everything was brass and silver, but there was a ton of fired ceramics and solid glasswork as well. It was very impressive. The indoor museum didn't do a very good job of capturing the scale of Roman living, from villas to farmhouses to dense four-story city apartments with no indoor plumbing, but that's hard to get done in that time. I thought an entire gallery dedicated to the hairstyles of Roman women a bit over the top, but apparently that's a very big deal to the Louvre, which owns the principal pieces.

The statues were all very beautiful, especially the ones of gods. The Zeus was nifty, and Phobos and Diemos were cool. Hadrian's satyrs were very cute. I wish I could have stayed longer. There were parts of the War gallery I really wanted to get more detail about. I took a few notes, the typical writer in me.

The crowd was such a mix-- college kids, lots of older folks, the whole gamut of Seattle society. There were several people making quick sketches of mosaics or statues.

I felt bad that we had to leave so early.