Weekend linkage

1)

This week in the Adventures of Ellie: she ate dandelion seeds, found Jared's hunting knife,  figured out how to pull tissues out of the box, hid her Crocs in my rainboots, tried to uproot my pepper seedlings, made it over halfway up the stairs before we discovered her, and dropped as many things as she could into the bathtub.

I've been sorting through a lot of pictures, deleting the blurry ones and so on. While doing that, I decided that for the first seven months of Ellie's life, I looked utterly horrible . . . flat hair, puffy face, lumpy and schlumpy. And then, sometime right before Thanksgiving, I suddenly got my hair-and-clothing mojo back.

At least that's what I think now. At the time, though, I felt beautiful and confident: I had a gorgeous little baby, I was busy, I was healthy, and I wasn't putting any pressure on myself to lose weight or anything. It's only a year later that I feel so critical. Weird, huh?

2)

Frivolity: 20 Curious Victorian Words and Sayings, Charles James' extraordinarily heavy dresses, the quest for the Holy Cookie, and what's in a chef's fridge.

4)

Here's a great obituary: Walter Walsh Dies at 106, Terrorized Gangsters and Targets.

On his 100th birthday, in 2007, his family served three cakes. One bore the F.B.I. seal, another the five rings of the Olympic Games, and the third the seal of the United States Marine Corps. He was also the guest of honor at a re-enactment of the Brady Gang shootout in Bangor and was given the key to the city.

So you can imagine the stories that guy had to tell. Read the whole thing for some real-life heroism.

5)

David McCullough's five history lessons for high school students. McCullough is so wonderful. I learned history without memorizing dates-- as he says, it's more important to know what happened and why-- and I remain convinced that this is why I still love history.

6)

"The Left's Line on School Choice Is a Joke from the 1800s."

For millennia, philosophers have agreed that people should rank their families above other duties, even important ones. To Aristotle, to Aquinas, to the Confucian sage Mencius, this principle was plain as day. Common sense accords with their teachings.

Handicapping your own kids to provide an unproven benefit to a few other children is neither honorable nor brave. Prioritizing your kin is not a sin to atone for. It is a marker of moral humanity.

7)

Provocative piece on the British Empire in Africa, written by a Nigerian: "The Glory That Was Empire." Please note that it contains some graphic descriptions of barbaric execution methods.

Surely the time has come to question openly what went so terribly wrong. And, surely, we owe it to ourselves to make our questions frank, searching and to the point. How and why, under British rule, did matters progress from mediaeval barbarity to emergent modern statehood in one 50-year timespan, only to regress so soon after independence into mediaeval barbarity again during the next?

8)

This is cool: "Humble Hero Saves Teen Fell Onto Subway Tracks."

After he helped Xue, the father of three went home and barely mentioned the incident to his family or to his colleagues the following morning. “I give all the glory to Lord Jesus,” Garcia concluded. “I was glad to help and to show her that there are good people out there.”

9)

If you'd like a thoughtful and irreverent podcast to listen to this afternoon, here you go: the latest episode of The Hinderaker-Ward Experience. All the news that you've been hearing about anyway, but with more realistic (read: conservative) commentary.

10)

What We Et:
Meatballs and pesto pasta + salad
Rosemary lemon chicken kebabs + balsamic broccoli
Thai chicken salad + oranges
Chicken marsala + brown rice + salad