Let’s see. I’ve finally finished Drake’s Lord of the Isles series (for the time being; there’s a new volume due out in November), so I’ll probably post a review of that tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve been riding around in my new car, working on Snit, and watching the Olympics.

We watched about half of the opening ceremonies before we fell asleep last night (pretty cool), and I’m watching Bob Costas blather on (competently, I’ll admit) as I type. The best TV commercial of the Olympics that I’ve seen so far was the Budweiser ad last night with the Clydesdale in the field, dreaming of pulling the Budweiser wagon–and I think I’ve seen it before.

They’re profiling a 16-year-old swimmer named Michael Phelps at the moment; he’s incredibly happy because he has a Cadillac Escalade like the ones the rappers drive. Hmmmm.

He’s fast, though–he just won the Individual Medley–and set a new world record time to boot. He was ahead of everyone else for the entire race. Another American named Vendt took silver.

Update: Yet another outstanding Budweiser ad–this time, it features a donkey who dreams of being a Budweiser Clydesdale. (He even tries wearing hair extensions.) Very, very cute.

Update: The U.S. Men’s Gymnastics team is turning in some really good routines all the while having some nasty problems. Apparently two of the team members were told just two days ago by the head judge that their high-bar routines weren’t going to be scored the way they had thought–to get the scores they’d need to medal, they’d need to change them. This is huge, as they typically practice their Olympic routines for at least a year prior to the event. What I want to know is, why was the scoring changed at this late date? So far there has been no word on that.

Update: Back to swimming, and it’s nearly 11PM. Time for bed.

Update (Sunday): Interesting. The high bar judge who devalued moves performed by three American gymnasts three days prior to the competition is Japanese. The team that’s in first place after the first rotation (just ahead of the American team) is…Japanese. I don’t say that the judge’s ruling was motivated by a desire to see his country’s team beat the Americans–but to date, I haven’t heard any explanation for the change, either. Apparently, the three gymnasts affected by the ruling used the moves at the last two World Championships without comment from anyone.

About 3 or 4 weeks ago, my husband and I made the decision to pull our
14-year-old daughter out of school and teach her at home. Not lightly or easily
either, I might add. We made up long pro and con lists, talked to
homeschoolers in the area, looked at the local school’s curriculum for high
school and counted the cost, literally. We debated, argued and reasoned with
each other. Then we gulped and decided to give it a shot. That’s when the
discussions really began in earnest. Then we had to think about exactly how
do you homeschool a kid in high school and do a good job. And what is good
job anyway? Are grades important? What is important? Yikes!

Fortunately, homeschooling has been around for a long time and going really
strong the last 20 years or so. There are a plethora of books out on the
market, most of which I either own or have read. Many are tales of happy
homeschoolers blissfully teaching their kids the love of learning. Bleh.
Most espouse their own favorite “approach” to homeschooling. They range from
a “unschooling” with no defined structure at all to classical schooling with
a prescribed 4 year cycle of learning. None of them is a perfect fit for my
daughter. So I am picking and choosing.

One book that is incredibly helpful in some sort of method is the
mother/daughter collaboration, [btitle “A Well Trained Mind”]. They outline a
Classical Approach based upon the grammar/logic/rhetoric sequence outlined
in an essay by Dorothy Sayers on education. The premise is that you start
children out learning about history/science/literature with the ancients and
move in a 4 year sequence thru modern times, repeating it for the entire 12
years of school. Each stage of the cycle has its own learning objectives;
facts come first, then logical analysis, then synthesis into a personal
opinion. Latin is begun early on, in 2nd or 3rd grade, with modern languages
added in after the basics of Latin are learned. Readings become
progressively more advanced as the child grows and matures. Writing
progresses until the child is doing a long thesis in the senior year of high
school. There is a great deal of emphasis on writing to learn and
independent study on the child’s part in the later grades. Especially
helpful, the authors outline books to use if you choose or programs that are
well-written with homeschooling or school resources listed as suppliers of
materials. If begun early on, this whole book would have been my guide to
teaching my daughter.

Unfortunately, I have gaps to fill and skills that need teaching before I
could begin this method as written. I have, however, gleaned a few useful
items. We’ll be studying Latin rather than a modern language for now. With
my daughter’s language deficits from her learning disabilities, having a
solid base of word roots will help her enormously and the program I found
teaches English grammar very well. I will follow the general idea of a
history cycle with Western Civ, American History, 20th Century History and
Civics/Government. She’ll be doing the note-taking and-book outlining they
suggest, keeping notebooks by subject and reading many of the works outlined
in the text, if in an abridged version. I am using the math program they
suggest, published by Saxon and based upon an incremental direct-instruction
method of learning math.

We did have one hurdle to get over mentally before we made the decision.
It’s the big question that homeschoolers get about socialization of the
children. Will a kid learning at home be as well socialized as a peer in
school? My husband and I struggled with this. It’s a tough one.

On the one hand, being around other kids may teach them valuable skills for
getting along with people. I am a little dubious about that one, especially
after my son came home from kindergarten proud as a peacock because he
learned to play “smear the queer” on the playground that day. It’s a form of
dodge ball, in case you are wondering. But there are some useful skills
learned about give and take in having friends your own age whom you see
daily. On the other, there is peer dependency and “the looking glass self”
mentality where kids define who they are based upon who they are with. In
high school, that gets really scary with things like drugs, sex and
rock-and-roll out there.

In the final analysis, I agree with the authors when they say “in this age
of endemic family breakup, teaching your high schooler to live peacefully in
a family is probably the most important feat of socialization you can
accomplish.” That made a huge amount of sense. Family life is the heart of
life as I see it and living well in the family is almost a key to a
fulfilling life no matter what your occupation or work is. And my sister,
ever good with the advice, pointed out that the last time she was in a room
full of people exactly her own age was at her last class reunion. She also
reminded me, the wretch, that neither of us went to prom so my daughter
won’t be missing anything there either.

It’s going to be a journey for all of us. I am frantically reading books
trying to put together a Western Civ course that will challenge her and
still teach very basic skills. I realize that this won’t always be rosy.
There will be times when I want to chuck the whole thing and send her off on
the bus to let someone else deal with because I want to wring her wretched
little neck. There will be times when I want some time just to myself
without having to go into the bathroom to get it. There will also be times
when we get to giggling together over something or decide to take a break
and go for a walk. We plan on taking good weather days off rather than snow
days. Why not stay home and learn when the weather is yucky and go for a
horse ride or to town on a nice day. We’ll see.

Docendo discitur
— Seneca (One learns by teaching)

My first car was a four-door Chevrolet Chevette, the four-door model. It was a sparkly red color. I was grateful to have it, and excited to have a car to drive, but honestly there wasn’t much about the car to be excited about. It was ugly; it was underpowered; it had an AM radio. We called it the Grunt. And anyway, I wanted a blue car. I’m hazy on the details, but either it didn’t come in blue or there weren’t any available. My parents picked the Chevette because it was the kind of car the driving school used.

My second car was a snazzy Mazda 626 sports coupe. It had power windows and a nice stereo pre-installed; you controlled the balance and fade using this silly little joystick on the center console. Plus, it had oscillating vents–they went back and forth all by themselves if the ventilation fan was running. It had an all-digital dashboard (this was the in-thing in 1985), and I called it the Starship. It was a lot of fun to drive, and I spent a lot of time looking for fun places to drive it.

It was also a sparkly red, though somewhat darker than the Grunt was. I’d wanted a blue one, but I also wanted a manual transmission. Plus, I was buying it in the middle of the summer of 1985; the 1986s were coming soon, and there wasn’t a large selection to choose from. If I recall correctly, the only blue they had was a very, very pale silvery blue, which wasn’t what I was looking for anyway.

Well, somewhere around 1991 or 1992 the poor Starship was showing signs of age, and Jane and I decided it was time to replace it. We’d bought our first home a couple of years before, and money was tight, so I ended up with a Ford Escort. It was nicer than the Grunt but not nearly so nice as the Starship in its prime, but it was affordable–partially because it was, once again, mid-summer, and they were trying to clear out the old models to make room for the new ones. I don’t know why, but I’ve always bought cars in mid-summer. So the selection was, naturally, limited, and the only Escort that met our other requirements was, naturally, a sparkly red color. I didn’t call the Escort anything but “my car”; it was just transportation.

Our eldest son was born early in 1997. Later that year my mother got too sick to drive any more, and my dad offered to sell us her car, a 1995 Buick Le Sabre with low mileage and all the options. It was easily twice as big as my Escort, and the suspension was so soft it was rather like driving a sofa, which is what Jane called it–the Sofa. I enjoyed the Buick; it had a thermostatically controlled climate system, a huge trunk, big comfortable seats, and oodles of power. It wasn’t the sort of car I’d have picked out for myself, but the price was right, and the Escort was beginning to give us trouble.

The Sofa wasn’t sparkly red, for a wonder; it was sort of a sparkly golden beige. But then, it wasn’t new, either, so it doesn’t really count.

Anyway, it started needing repairs a little too often over the last six months or so, and we decided it was time to replace it. So last weekend, Jane and I went out car shopping. And after looking at all sorts of cars and taking a test drive, we decided on the PT Cruiser. I wanted a blue one, of course, and they had one–a beautiful sparkly midnight blue. It was gorgeous. Just walking up to it made me happy. It was just what I wanted.

And then I opened the driver’s door, and sat down.

And hated the interior. Just absolutely hated it.

One of the neat things about the PT Cruiser’s styling is the dashboard, which has metal inserts which match the color of the car. It’s a classy look, and makes the instruments really stand out. But in the blue Cruiser the upholstery was a light gray, and except for the nifty dark-blue inserts the dash was light gray above and off-white beneath. It was a color scheme calculated to get scuffed and dirty in about two minutes, and so far from standing out, the nifty dark-blue metal inserts might as well have not been there–what drew the eye was the off-white glove box.

The Cruiser we test drove, on the other hand, had nearly identical features. And the interior was much nicer–those dash inserts positively glowed. And it was, of course, a bright sparkly red–“Inferno Red” is the name in the brochure.

I thought it about for while, and decided that I was going to be spending more time sitting in the car than standing around admiring it…and it was such a nice bright sparkly red.

There was a certain inevitability about it, I suppose.

I’ve now started the fifth book in David Drake’s Lord of the Isles series; once I finish it, I’ll be writing a review of the whole series to date. I’d probably have finished it by now, except that Jane and I spent yesterday afternoon car-shopping; and then we spent a couple of hours today car-buying. So things have been a little busy around the Foothills.

Anyway, here’s more or less what my new ride looks like:

Some time in the last couple of weeks, an anonymous benefactor dropped ten bucks in our tipjar. Thank you very much, whoever you are!

This open thread at Making Light has a bunch of science fiction and fantasy book recommendations by a bunch of people. (Thanks to Mark D. for pointing this one out.)

And this post at A Small Victory has a bunch of fantasy book recommendations by whole ‘nother bunch of people. (Via Twisted Spinster)

As always with this sort of thing, your mileage may vary; but there are some good suggestions in there.

Yes, it has been quiet around here. It’s not that I’m not reading; it’s just that I’ve been re-reading David Drake’s Lord of the Isles series in preparation for reading the fifth installment, which is just out in paperback. And as each of the volumes is over 600 pages long, it’s been taking me a while.

Ah, well. Normal reviews will resume shortly.

Q: What did the Scottish bear say when he discovered his porridge pot empty and a little girl named Goldilocks asleep in his bed?

Continue reading →

This is a book intended for sale in museum gift shops, for people to buy
and give to small children under the illusion that they are bringing
culture to said children, when all they are really doing is parting with
their hard-earned money to no good purpose. This stinker of a book was
published by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, by people
who really should have known better. I hasten to add that none of the
fault lies with the illustrator, Lisa Canney Chesaux; the illustrations
are fine, and suit the story.

The story, now, the story might be salvageable; I’m not sure. But the
telling of the story is surely awful.

The story is straightforward. Philippe is a frog with unusually large
legs. And as he lives in France, he is in constant danger of having
his legs eaten. Indeed, two frogs of his acquaintance, shortly after
having mocked his unusually large legs, are captured and whisked off to
the kitchen right before his eyes. But lucky Philippe! He wanders into
Monet’s garden, where Monet is pleased to see him; he adds a dash of
green. Philippe is safe forever.

Not a bad plot, I suppose; it has definite humorous possibilities; but as
it’s executed there’s no rising action, no tension, no sense
that Philippe is ever actually in danger–despite having his two
acquaintances captured before his eyes. But it’s the words that are the
real problem.

The book is written in rhyming prose. I assume it was intended to be in
some kind of verse, but the rhythm changes from line to line so that the
rhymes don’t come when you’d expect them to. There’s no discernable
rhyme scheme. And the rhymes are often horribly strained. “Fried”
doesn’t rhyme with “good-bye”, nor “escape” with “fate”, nor “Philippe”
with “bleat”, nor a dozen other hopeful combinations.

In short, reading this book aloud is almost physically painful. Since it
seems unlikely that everyone connected with the project has a tin ear, I
can only conclude that none of them cared much about the words, or about
reading the book to real, live children.

Note to museum-goers–read the book, before you buy it for your
niece, nephew, or grand-child. Thank you.

The August issue of
Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line.

Alas, Craig Clarke was unable to contribute this month, which means that if you’re a regular reader of this blog there’s nothing in the issue you haven’t seen.