Jennifer Rubin: The Jokes Just Write Themselves

For those who don't love The Game known as Politics, Jennifer Rubin is a "conservative columnist for the Washington Post." She's famous (or infamous, I suppose) for being the most obviously partisan pundit on the American scene right now, blindly praising every Republican speaker as "honest," "exciting," and "direct," while describing every Democratic speaker as "deceptive," "boring," and "ineffective," almost to the point of parody. "Clint Eastwood's speech was more talked about than Obama's," "the Republican bench is deep, the Democrats don't even have one," "Obama put forward no numbers and no plan, unlike Romney," and so forth.

But on the last day of the Democratic convention, there was one tweet that got my attention. It had nothing to do with politics. She has teenagers, and it's back to school week: "I don't think I could pass a third of these classes. When did high school get so hard?"

High school is preparation for life. Everyone should be able to get through it, and every class should be manageable by any adult. I don't expect everyone to be able to able to do French I immediately, but I do expect every adult to be able to follow along, help their child through every topic, and if necessary familiarize him or herself with the child's effort.

Jennifer Rubin's not merely a bad pundit; she's also a bad parent. By proclaiming herself unable and unwilling to navigate the skillset our community agrees is the minimum necessary to survive our technologically advanced civilization, she's telling her children it's acceptable to do the same.

A mild Discardia

I practiced a mild round of Discardia this weekend, getting rid of some broken electronics and some cat gear left over from when Dinah was around. Damn, I miss that cat. Our latest, an aloof shorthair named Necco, only appreciates me when I feed her.

I take advantage of weekends when Omaha is out of town (she was at Pax, which is the same thing) to let loose the cleaning Elf: I vacuumed every rug and mopped every hard floor, whirlwind tidied the office space, cleared and tossed the contents of at least one junk drawer, replaced a broken desk lamp and bought a new 2TB mirrored NAS with RAID-1 to reduce the backup clutter of WD Passports and DVDs and even a few dozen CDs. I also got my short-term checkbook balancing done. I felt oddly productive.

The girls were helpful, decluttering the living room and hallways as I vacuumed my way through the house.

That was fun, but I still feel like I only got done half of what I wanted to do. Part of that was due to the first lamp purchased being broken: I had to take another two hours out of my day to run back to the hardware store and replace the damned thing.

Wild Waves annual trip

Since school is almost here, Omaha and I took Kouryou-chan to Wild Waves for one last summer experience last week.

Unfortunately, the day didn't start out well. After planning for almost two weeks what day I could take off, and busting our butts to make sure we were completely caught up professionally before deciding to run out on our jobs and play hooky for the day, Kouryou-chan announced she didn't want to go. After trying to reason with her, Omaha gave up and went downstairs to the office to get work done after all.

I'm afraid that I went into full-on Dad mode and laid it down for Kouryou-chan. What she had done was rude, because she knew what the plan was, and deciding the day-of that she didn't want to go without her sister or other peers was rude to her family, who had planned this so we could go as a family together. She was going to go down and apologize to her mother, and if she sounded contrite enough, we might go.

We went.

We had a good time. I can't tell if it's that my daughters are approaching their jailbait years, or if I'm already closing in on senescence, but jailbait just doesn't appeal to me all that much. I can't perv out anymore.

We brought lunch and ate out in our cars. Kouryou-chan's first ride was the big roller coaster at the far end of the park, followed by the log flume. We spent a lot of time in the wave pool, but Omaha and I wanted to do the slides, so there was a lot of waiting in line. Yeah, we even went into the giant toilet bowl Riptide, which always reminds me of a certain Dr. Fun cartoon

Sunburned, waterlogged, and tired, we went out to a restaurant for dinner, and fell into bed around 10, pausing only long enough to wash the chlorine out of hair and skin.