How Does One Get “Air America”?

Anybody know? I’m in the market . . .

Why She’s Not Sending Her Daughter to High School

School Gate blog:

“Personally, I am aggrieved at the need to intervene in my child’s education. It dismays me that the State has no credible substitute to a century old, and frankly redundant, system. . .”

UPDATE — here’s a 15-year-old homeschooler’s view.

Mad for the Women Behind the Men of Mad Men!

Favorite Daughter and I love everything about this show. At the end of WSJ’s feature on the woman-dominated writing team, I was struck by this trilateral approach to the meaning of life: the story of our lives isn’t so much simply public versus private life, but also “private” life distinct from “secret” life. And a compelling character’s story involves all three so that the conflict that rings truest is mainly within one person between his or her three different lives. (Sort of why fairy tale wishes come in threes and Freud saw id, ego and superego? Why Eve won the academy award for Three Faces in 1957, not just two?)

The ‘Mad Men’ Back Story

To craft story lines and develop characters, the writers track three categories: each character’s work, private and secret lives. . .

Even if your own private and/or secret lives haven’t discovered the guilty pleasure of Mad Men yet, you can play this “intelligent design” game and let us see whichever parts of your life projected into that world you want, as “a suit or a skirt.”

Madmen Yourself

I made a JJ but couldn’t figure out the download-to-blog trick.

UPDATE – see also On Mad Men: Drama Confronts a Dramatic Decade

Seeds of Unschooling Europe Planted In Culture Curiosity

Favorite Daughter and her fond companion Kiki are home again. I have had my hugs and gotten some presents, though surely not heard all the stories yet. As they adjust to Florida time again and catch up on their sleep, I’m sitting here trying to adjust to Facebook and I just realized there is a category called “notes” where one can post blog-type essays. Favorite Daughter apparently has been doing this more than blogging at her own Cocking a Snook Too! in the past several months.

So in her Facebook “notes” I found the perfect precursor to the Unschooling Europe tour. This is EDUCATION, and while it can serve them well in school settings too, that’s only because some school settings really do still appreciate and reward real education.

Assuming that most thinking parents will not be FB friends of Favorite Daughter’s thus wouldn’t be able to read this there, I’m adding it as a permanent page here under “First Thinks First” — as unschooling culture commentary and the true beginning of the wonderful adventure they haven’t had a chance to tell me all about yet . . .

UNSCHOOLING EUROPE tag

Why Tea Party Tactics Aren’t Healthy for Health Reform

Betty’s thoughtful, gentle, Christian voice of non-partisan or post-partisan reason can’t even be heard on the health care crisis, if these well-funded warmongers get away with it yet again.

How Come CBS Journalists Can’t Recognize Paid Lobbyists When They See Them?”:

Freedomworks isn’t some “organic grassroots” outfit. It’s run by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey — corporate lobbyist, global warming denier and ladies’ man. The President and CEO of Freedomworks is Matt Kibbee, who was trained by Lee Atwater. . . .
Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Paul Krugman noted, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin nexus, as well as other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.

Freedomworks has a long history of skunk works. In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a “single mother” in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.

David Koch is also Chairman of the other major outfit heavily involved in these “organic” uprisings, Americans for Prosperity, whose members lynched Democrat Frank Kratovil in effigy. Koch is the 19th richest man in the world. They recently renamed the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center the David H. Koch Theater.

These aren’t just some organizations that these guys gave money to. They run them.

This extreme violent behavior is being organized and funded by those at the highest levels of the conservative infrastructure. It’s not some sideline, some quirky hobby. It is the function and purpose of these organizations to threaten and intimidate elected officials in order to subvert the will of the electorate to a corporate agenda.

Don’t believe her? Need more FACTS before you make up your open mind? No problem, see Digby: “This is not about policy. It’s about incitement to violence.”

Or never mind where it comes from, and just ask yourself if it makes SENSE. Do their scripted war-whoops hang together as anything that looks to your thinking parent eye as progress for America and Americans, or would they already be locked up at Gitmo as clearly fundamentalist radical bomber types bent on our destruction, if they weren’t so sanctimoniously wrapping their overthrow-up in countrified red, white and blue?

Favorite Daughter on the Tea Partiers, who turn out to be the same people as the Birther and Deather Brain Trust Against the President of the United States Making Things Better or Indeed, Living in the White House (or living at all?):

These people, as Jon Stewart so eloquently put it, seem “to have confused ‘tyranny’ with ‘losing.’”

While watching the Fox coverage of the protests (which was a mistake) I heard several gentlemen (I use the term loosely) posit that they did not, in fact, have any elected representatives, because

“All Will Come Right, Born Again the Glory of Mankind”

Young Son the history buff found this after reading his sister’s account of visiting Winston Churchill’s burial site in Westminster Abbey yesterday, during the beauty and peace of evensong services.

It’s fun to watch/hear (even after the tenth time, as I found out while he played it over and over lol) — but it’s some serious Power of Story too, for frightening times of war and rebellion, lies and spies, sabotage and infiltration. . .lift up your hearts and gird your loins and fight for humanity, the glory of MANKIND!

Transcript of the whole speech. . .

. . . the message which we send forth today to all states and nations, bound or free, to all the men in all the lands who care for freedom’s cause. . .lift up your hearts, all will come right. Out of depths of sorrow and sacrifice will be born again the glory of mankind.

King Richard III in His Kilt, Combat Boots and Crown

These were in the Tallahassee Democrat after the weekend’s two shows. My favorite of course, is Young Son as the murderous Richard enjoying his spoils:

Last Day in London With Darwin, Newton, Churchill — and Obama?

“Last Day in London and Subsequently the Trip”
Posted by kiki under England, London

Went to Madame Tussaud’s today…see accompanying photos.

Favorite Daughter and President Obama Enjoy Madame Tussaud's Together

Also went to the Evensong service at Westminster Abbey. The Abbey itself is absolutely gorgeous and just teeming with the graves of incredibly famous people. On the way in, we walked over the grave of no less than the likes of Charlie Darwin and on the way out the brilliant Isaac Newton and the portly Winston Churchill.

The service itself was breath-taking as well as a bit Phantom of the Opera-esque with the massive organ playing songs filled with entirely too many minor chords.

That was pretty much it because of the massive queue for Madame Tussaud’s in which we encountered this insufferable shrew with her adorable eight-year-old daughter. The woman had been waiting in front of us for about thirty minutes when

Thinking Parent Betty Malone Takes on Health Reform

Our own Miss Betty asks some very thinking parent questions and offers some sensible answers, light rather than heat for the health care reform debate.

And better than bi-partisan imo, her approach here is actually non-partisan. As in non-partitioning rather than two partitions, no walls erected on purpose to divide us against each other and segment us for easier market domination, separating us out and setting us against our own shared human interests.

Penultimate Day in LONDON Full of Tours

“Tours, Tours, Tours”
Posted by Favorite Daughter (penguindust)

Sorry for the late update, folks, but we have been on tours literally all day.

Forgot to mention yesterday that we saw the Tower of London before the show! It was very exciting, because the whole Bloody Tower portion is dedicated to a discussion of who murdered or “disappeared” the two young princes. They presented some evidence, at which point we, the public of hundreds of years later, could vote on the matter!

As my brother was performing his (I’m sure) tip-top Richard III yesterday, we thought the conclusion was obvious: My brother did it. We explained this emphatically to people in line, and, judging by the vote counter, he was winning by a landslide.

After our two tours today, we may well be qualified to write Master’s Theses on the Tower of London, as both our tours – the NewEurope Old London City Tour and the New Europe Grim Reaper Tour – covered the Tower in some detail. We strolled along the Thames and got to see the reproduction Globe Theatre from a distance, strolled down Fleet Street, and traced the path of Jack the Ripper. We even saw the actual Ten Bells Pub where he stalked his victims, which is still a fully operational pub, complete with crusty English gentlemen smoking and drinking ale and doing whatever else it is they do in pubs.

Tomorrow we’re going to Westminster Abbey – for free! It costs about £15 to get in normally, UNLESS you sneakily attend their Evensong service, which they begrudgingly still hold open to the public. Ironically, Charlie Darwin is buried there. Hopefully we’ll get to sneak a peek.

UNSCHOOLING EUROPE tag

Home Run: Homeschooling in the New Yorker

Cock of the snook for this story to Stephanie at Learning Through Living. Home Run for the arts!

Mary, like her three siblings—Lucy, fifteen, John, ten, and Jane, eight, all of whom were in the production—has been homeschooled her entire life. “We were part of a parent-run playgroup, and at some point everyone started testing to get into the right school, and I thought it was insane,” their mother, Erynn Albert, said. (As it turns out, all four Albert offspring have got into the most insanely competitive gifted-and-talented program of them all, the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus; the two middle ones will appear in “Tosca” this fall.)

Young Son is King Richard III This Weekend in “A Knock-Out”

We saw it last night and it’s a fresh, fun, abridged and interestingly site-specific (which means the audience moves around the campus with the actors from scene to scene) interpretation of Shakespeare. . .final performance tonight, hope we don’t get rain!

You may have seen the story and photos in the Democrat the other day.

The SAIL high school principal told me last night that this first annual Summer of Shakespeare Camp was a knock-out success and as far as she’s concerned, it will be hosted at SAIL as long as the FSU professor directing it, Cynie Cory, wishes to offer it.

Good call imo.