On Friday night we went to see the Bowie Baysox, a minor league team, play the Binghamton Mets. At $6 a ticket and free parking it is hard to go wrong and there is enough other stuff going on to make you forget that no one has scored in 8 innings. Our daughter did not really notice the game itself which was far less interesting than the carousel and moonbounce just behind our seats.
Maybe the Baysox need a new mascot. “Louie,” a green furry thing with pink hair is not a specific species and strikes fear into the heart of no one. On the other hand, he is fierce compared to the battle cry at my alma mater which was “Go Violets!”
It was Navy night at the ballpark and since the U.S. Naval Academy is only 16 miles away there were hundreds of midshipmen seated together, including a lot of plebes (class of 2012), in their summer whites. Naturally, they all sang Anchor’s Aweigh a couple of times, which made our daughter quite happy. She and her friend Alexandra even made it to 10pm to see the spectacular fireworks show.
After visiting the base library and playing on a jungle gym yesterday, I brought Citrus to the nearby Burger King for dinner.
They now serve macaroni and cheese, with a side of “apple fries” (apple sticks) and milk, and a nice set of Crayola crayons, all for $3.50.
I tried not to like it. There is a lot of fat in that meal. Surely there is too much sodium. It is insulting to even be offered the “low-fat” caramel sauce for the apples. It is a terrible disincentive to healthy eating to charge 50 cents more for apples than fries. It is not even USDA organic, which is only 95 percent organic. The ingredients are processed, not in their natural state and have a huge carbon footprint. The calves are weeping for their stolen milk, drawn from the bodies of growth hormone injected cows.
I am sitting there watching my daughter munching away, thinking back to the early ’80s in Berkeley when someone spray-painted “Agribiz rapes the land!” on the side of a Safeway. And about Berkeley High School where you could count on returning from the school holiday for International Women’s Day (March 8th) each year to find that the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade had spray-painted the school buildings with
Break the chains! Unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution!
This slogan was usually accompanied by a picture of a panther. Since I do not have one handy, I have included a picture of my kitty (RIP) in this blog post as an illustrative aid.
And so I sit there knowing that somehow, somewhere, this meal oppresses women. Or, as Berkeley-raised cult figure Bob Avakian would say in layman’s terms:
What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these ‘outmodeds,’ you end up strengthening both.
Citrus liked her meal just fine. I just can’t figure out if it undermines the GWOT.
We visited the Montgomery County Fair for the first time, figuring it was a good chance to see a bit of the rural side of county life. Or at least what is left of it. A lot of farm land has disappeared for development — Washington DC is only 30 miles away from the fairgrounds in Gaithersburg.
In some respects it is an entirely different world from our part of the county. I guess I was brought up wrong because I have always thought that Funnel Cakes Are the Answer. I know that I am not alone because someone felt that this was a good way to proselytize. Here we see Jesus looking toward the fried dough.
The annual folk festival near our house includes several left-wing community groups, while the county fair had a lot of churches as well as a pro-life group handing out happy face balloons (”We are glad you are here” or something like that). The Baptists were giving out balloon animals. I thought I might be able to convince Citrus she would like face painting but did not notice the huge “Evangelizing the Children” sign behind the kids.
Instead, we opted for a few tame rides with no strings attached and I went on a circle coaster that did nothing but fly me upside down, generally something you should only do to signal distress.
The animals were the best part. I milked a cow for the first time but Elysia was unimpressed having had a child. We also saw sheep being shorn, goats, and giant angora rabbits.
I will probably feel guilty if we win the 4H raffle to take home a pig or lamb “dressed and ready for your freezer”.
The weather was perfect today so Citrus and I went to the National Zoo and had a little breakfast picnic of scrambled eggs, apple slices and some cinnamon buns Elysia made last night. No bacon because someone took every last slice to work. (Supporting our troops, in this instance, is overrated.)
As long as you get to the Zoo before the summer camps, it is a fairly peaceful place to be.
Thankfully they have not added a McDonald’s or Taco Bell, as a recent zoo survey seemed to suggest they were going to do. They seem to have added carts with good quality snacks, although they have also installed hot dog vending machines. Those generally scare me — how long has that hot dog been in there? — but the vendor was fixing the machine and giving out free “test” sausages. It was good and we shared one before cooling off in a mist of water being sprayed on the crowd.
Citrus was also pretty excited to go visit her Mommy at work and will undoubtedly not forget that there is an ice cream shop inside the Pentagon (only 14 out of 31 flavors available). On our way back to the car two Chinook helicopters flew overhead and I pointed them out.
Oh, I’ve seen those at school.
Not impressed. It’s not like we knitted her such things when she was an infant.
It was part procrastination, and part concerns about privacy that delayed my launching this blog for about a year. Until 1992 I participated on a lot of USENET listservs, spouting off about pretty much anything under the sun. At the time you couldn’t really search for much and there was no real understanding that what you posted was out there forever.
Then in 1995 Deja News came along and archived all the posts, and Google now owns those archives. Everything I wrote pre-1992 became available through a search, and without context other than the year of the posting. I had to make more than 150 individual requests to Google to remove all the miscellaneous junk I posted.
Now, as has been the norm for for well over a decade, I don’t write anything without the understanding it could be accessed by anyone at any time. So I work at AARP but I generally do not write about the organization, erring on the side of caution. I do volunteer work with service members who need financial education, but client conversations are kept confidential. And, like other military/milspouse bloggers, I am always aware of OPSEC (operational security) issues and watch what I say even about mundane things. Loose lips can sink ships etc.
Besides, it was established early on in our relationship that there will be things Elysia cannot discuss related to her work. I still listen for interesting things but not much is tossed my way. This week, for example, all I learned is that she has to bring in breakfast foods tomorrow morning and there was a request for a plate of bacon.
You heard it here first, folks: some JAGs apparently do their best work fueled by bacon. And for inquiring minds, my contribution to the mission was cooking about four pounds of it.
A couple years back, a company introduced a toy tattoo parlor for kids with a “realistic vibrating pen”. It is still around under another name but no one bought it for our daughter’s third birthday. We like to think our daughter is advanced for her age, but I guess it really is meant for kids six and older.
According to sailor lore, an anchor tattoo represents a surface crossing of the Atlantic. Is a sunset cruise of the Chesapeake Bay close enough?
[Tattoo by Kapten Hanna at Just Good Tattoos]
Creepy news about a Greyhound bus in Canada, where a 22-year-old was sleeping and his seatmate decided to stab him 50-60 times and decapitate him. I guess there is something to be said for metal detectors at airports.
When I was 20 I moved to New York City from California by Greyhound, partly for the adventure and mainly because it was cheap. A one-way ticket was $59 (or, as the policy wonk voice in my head says, that is $104 in 2008 Dollars according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator). Leaving Oakland, I had $300 in my pocket, two small boxes of stuff in the cargo hold, a pillow, music, and a huge bag of chocolate chip cookies made by my roommates. And hair.
The “express” bus took four days, stopping in major cities for about an hour and picking up passengers in smaller towns. You stay on the same bus and they change drivers along the way. Having seen America from dozens of Greyhound bus stations, it is not entirely surprising to read that a nutcase was on board that bus in Winnipeg. By about 900 miles you know who is going the entire route and figure out who you want to sit near and who to avoid. Unless, of course, you are sleeping when someone sits down next to you.
Faced with 2,000 miles ahead of you, one of the tricks you quickly learn is to pull all of your stuff down and pretend you are asleep as the bus pulls into a stop. At least if there are other seats available. In Iowa, I was slow to do this and a young woman from Ames sat next to me, also headed to NYC to start anew.
Thankfully we hit it off, and my Walkman had two headphone jacks and a Bob Marley tape. By Chicago we were dating and went out for lunch. By Pittsburgh we were in a relationship. We dated for a few months after getting to NYC at the start of summer.
Two children, shipwrecked alone on a tropical island. Nature is kind. They thrive on the bounty of jungle and lagoon.
I have not taken a long bus ride since. When moving to Seattle from Brooklyn, I drove and tried to take smaller roads most of the way. I have driven through Nebraska twice and the only excitement I can recall was my cat wanting to pee at night. I turned the car onto a dusty farm road, put the cat on a leash and illuminated her litter box in the headlights. She was not amused, so we headed for Wyoming.
[Although I don’t like Motley Crue, the title is from their lyrics “Took a Greyhound Bus down to Heartattack and Vine with a fistful of dreams and dimes”]