Archive for December, 2003

Dec 07 2003

Christmas Pageant (’Hi Mom!’)

Published by jrittenhouse under china, criminals, holidays, idiots, meredith, military, pollution

The last couple of days have been pretty busy, so not much time to write. Right now, I’m working in the basement office on a Christmas project, while doing laundry and whatnot, and sneaking in time to do this.This morning was the big event - Meredith’s school’s Christmas Pageant. I was the sound man for the thing - duped together the songs on CD and ran the CD player. We had a videographer in to do DVDs of the thing, and Susan said that they sold pretty well…

Susan and Alicia’s mom were the PTA-oid parents who were in charge of the production of the event, in alliance with the staff at the school. Considering that getting a mass of preschoolers to do anything together is truly like herding cats, they did a great job in getting things to work. Sorry, no pictures - both of us were way too busy. I may have some stills from the DVD later. Meredith’s group did ‘Must Be Santa’, and she stood up there and belted it out - missing words here and there, but with a lot of gusto. And curtsied. Very cute, and much practiced, in her new red velvet dress.

The other kids - well, the only group that were good and fun were the kindergarteners (the oldest group) who did ‘I’m Getting Nothing For Christmas’ in song and acting, and were a riot. The youger the kids got, the more the songs were lost, and the more the action was centered around individual kid reactions (The kid who cried out of fear of All Those People, but in an endearing fashion, or the other kid who was a total ‘hi mom’ ham. That sort of thing.) than anything else. You had to be there, and you wouldn’t have been there unless your Dick or Janie was up there on the stage.

Susan and Meredith were otherwise very low energy; I think they both caught another virus, and Susan’s low defenses and high stress levels from dealing with the contractors on Wednesday last (she’s been mentally fried since then) made her a wide-open conduit for it.

The Christmas Tree is up in the living room - but not yet decorated. Susan wants to do some more surgery to the thing, to get it evened out - and that will probably drop the best part of a foot from it. Sad, but probably necessary.

We did run around tonight and look at the Christmas lights in Lisle, including a huge luminaria display; Meredith has been griping a lot because we don’t have a huge light display outside, and of course, we’ve been far too preoccupied with everything else under the sun, and have had no time to set up anything like that. She was impressed by some of the bigger displays, but hunger and tiredness made her ask to eat and go home early.

If you’ve been reading the papers about the snipers shooting up the roadway near Columbus, Ohio, I have a chatty friend who reads this journal, and who has been giving me a blow-by-blow description of the situation. He’s not far from the school that was shot at, but he claims he’s really not that scared by the whole thing, even though he has two school-age kids.

When I was living in Milwaukee in the end of the 80s, my van ended up with bullet holes in it, and so did my house near my front door. I wasn’t the target; there wre just too many rogue crack dealers in the neighborhood shooting at each other. Here, in Lisle, 30 wiles west of the Loop, the worst I have to deal with is a family up the street with a kid that run tow trucks and fast cars and like to rev ‘em up up and down the street at night. Or let his doberman run around without a leash. Or marauding raccoons tearing into my garbage - or maybe that’s the doberman again, hard to say.

Items in the News:

  • If the Saudi government follows through on its pledge to shut down the Islamic affairs offices in its embassies here and around the world, “It would be the first visible sign of an effort to tone down decades of extremist Wahhabi propaganda,” said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, a counterterrorism think tank. Wahhabism is a puritanical strain of Islam that sometimes views non-Muslims and Western cultures as enemies of Islam.
  • In the ethnic conflicts that surrounded the collapse of the Soviet Union, fighters in several countries seized upon an unlikely new weapon: a small, thin rocket known as the Alazan. Originally built for weather experiments, the Alazan was transformed into a terror weapon, packed with explosives and lobbed into cities. Military records show that at least 38 Alazan warheads were modified to carry radioactive material, effectively creating the world’s first surface-to-surface dirty bomb. (Fascinating Article!)
  • Whether a true account of libertine philosophy or a straight-talking testimony of sexual exploits, Muzimei’s diary is a reflection of a sea of change in China’s attitudes and the country’s behavior toward sex. There is no regret expressed about her life of sensual pleasure, not a trace of guilt in her accounts and no underlying chronicle of use and abuse. The diary also confirms new findings by Chinese sexual sociologists over the last few years that virginity has lost its traditional social value as a crucial part of China’s sexual morality. And as the country quietly copes with a subtle sexual revolution, premarital sex has become the norm rather than the exception. According to research by Li Yinhe, a researcher with the China Academy of Social Sciences, in 1980 the rate of premarital sex in Beijing stood at only 15 percent. But the same study revealed that by 2002 this rate has already reached 80 percent.

Links to several stories in the New York Times about working conditions in China:

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