Memnison Journal

This Christmas season was relatively low key, partially because Susan, Mere and I are all still Under the Grippe (or Mystery Colds, if you prefer, That Aren’t Going Away) and so we aren’t feeling like stipping down naked, rolling in the mud and doing jumping jacks. Or a lot of other things. Mere was really keyed up with the whole ‘Santa’s Coming!’ thing, complete with leaving me to do Santa duty in re eating the cookies and milk she left out for him.

Everyone did about 90% of their wrapping on Christmas Eve; I disappeared to the basement, and the rest were in different parts of the upstairs, working away on things. Mere handed off (mostly) things from around the house that she had re-wrapped, but the idea was there, and she did it in a cute way - and it was obvious that she wanted to do stuff for people, from the bottom of her heart, and that’s what you want to see. Around 2 pm was the ‘gift exchange’, and I came off better than I had for years; some nice clothes (nothing fancy, but I liked them, and there was obviously some thought put into what I would need and like), a couple of books I’d wanted (one was on Chinese environmental approaches or the lack of them under the PRC, another on Chinese characters that is quite good), a very nice MP3 player, a pair of slippers (greatly needed and considering my shoe size, hard to find) and other odds and ends that are escaping me now. Susan’s big items were a new big flash drive and a similar MP3 player, and a copy of TOBY TYLER. Mere gloried in her stuff, particularly her new Game Boy Advance, and you could barely get it out of her paws for the next couple of days.

We left about 4 pm for Susan’s aunt’s house, had dinner there and left my MIL behind to go on on Christmas morning to South Dakota. (When she lived in South Dakota, Connie would drive here on Christmas Day and go back on New Years’ Day; now, since she lives here, she does the reverse commute.) We got back and got Mere to bed, did the Santa stuff and watched a little of ALL MINE TO GIVE, a promising looking family movie from the year I was born. At 4:30 am, Mere woke up with a bloody nose, and once she got over the initial AAAAAGH and cleanup and settled down, she bolted for the tree and presents!!!! …and so, we did the Santa presents in the wee smalls, and I spent over an hour getting her back to sleep. She still hasn’t cracked her big Santa present, a ‘Star Station’, which is best described as a video karaoke thing. Susan says (and I agree) that Mere doesn’t feel like performing.

Christmas morning was spent cleaning and preparing for our friends Zack and Kathy to come over, for a Hannukah/Christmas celebration. Mere loves to play Dreidle, and has a fair amount of curiosity about the Jewish holiday, and Kathy is happy to oblige. Susan and Kathy wipped up a simple but nice meal that everyone loved, and Mere and Zack were busy with Mere’s Game Boy, and just generally hanging out. It was low key, because Susan and I and Mere were so under the weather, but nice. Mere’s Hannukah presents from Kathy included some kids books that Mere found fascinating, and a set of dreidels and a book on the holiday.

After Zack and Kathy left, we did our routine of Trying To Get The Kid To Settle Down Even Though She’s Tired So She Can Sleep, and Susan picked out a movie I had TiVoed called The Christmas Child. It knocked us all on our butts, mostly because the material was very near to our hearts (has to do with adoption, etc., and has Steven Curtis Chapman as a minister with an adopted kid named Grace, which is Mere’s middle name, and the kid looked Asian) and affected us all.

All in all, a nice Christmas.

Editorial cartoons of one sort or another.

Dick Cheney: Pyramids would be a statement….
Dick Cheney: Also, the Easter Bunny is real. Leprechauns, too.
Kid in Bed: Dad? Does Santa work from President Bush??
Achenblog: We talked about gay cowboys and closeted movie stars and sex-change operations — traditional Christmas topics, in other words — and the conversation eventually turned to impeachment.

And now for the more serious stuff: Richard Cohen from this morning’s WaPo:

Right after Sept. 11 the Bush administration announced that it had no use for the Geneva Conventions. It would apply them as it saw fit — and it did not see fit when it came to terrorists. These terrorists, after all, made war by no rules. Why should we abide by any? The answer, as many military officers said, is that we still could hold our enemies to a standard of conduct toward prisoners. If we did not adhere to it ourselves, there was no chance they would. The Bush administration brushed aside these objections. It established a vast Siberia that could be anywhere and where a suspect could be held forever on charges that were never brought.

So an administration that makes something of a reasonable case when it comes to tapping the international phone calls of American citizens has its standing and veracity considerably weakened by what went before. The White House cannot explain why it did not ask Congress for this authority because, it is now clear, it does not want to ask Congress for anything. It will not explain why it could not seek warrants from a judge because, really, it does not want to seek warrants from a judge. This is the Louis XIV school of government: In matters of national security, Bush must say to himself, he is the state.

Such a president cannot be trusted. In Bush’s case, the extra inch that would be given another president in wartime has to be measured out in increments of tenths. He is so suffused with his own sense of righteousness that he cannot imagine his laws being abused — not by him, certainly, and not by his chummy group of nicknamed nincompoops, either. He listens to Cheney, who still smarts from post-Watergate reforms that made the Gerald Ford presidency less imperial than Richard Nixon’s — and on purpose. Cheney was Ford’s chief of staff.

In courtroom trials, it does not matter what went before. The fact that the defendant had robbed does not necessarily mean that he has robbed again. But life is about rap sheets — reputations and permanent records and personnel files. Read George Bush’s and then ask yourself if it was exigency or ideology that prompted him to tap the international calls of American citizens without showing a court why. In his case, the record speaks for itself.

• The Canadian election is starting to heat up, with plans of parents spending savings on child care on popcorn and beer. Well, at least they aren’t suggesting pr0n.
• EJ Dionne, in the WaPo: The real patriots are not those who fall into line behind everything Bush says. They are the Republican and Democratic doubters who have pressured Bush into realizing that he has limited time in Iraq and an imperative to speak more realistically. In his speech yesterday, Bush actually admitted that “things did not always go as planned” in Iraq and that last January’s elections “were not without flaws.” From an administration that never admits mistakes, that’s progress.
• Or this line: Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert helpfully explained: “The Democratic Party sides with those who wish to surrender.” Gee, thanks, Denny, for raising the level of discourse.
• The Great Lakes Regional Collaboration comes up with a comprehensive environmental plan with state, local and federal agreement - which will be shelved due to lack of federal committment for the cash needed. But by golly, we have a plan, though.
• It’s time to Invest In America, but will we do it? Aaah, get out the beer and popcorn.
• So there’s a ton of leaks from the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice, saying that the staff attorneys are being sat on as a mass of liberals who like such outmoded ideas as one-man-one-vote, don’t like Republican gerrymandering or other innovative techniques designed to perpetuate a Permanent GOP Majority. So we then say: the political appointees will no longer listen to the staff and will handle the Civil Rights issues the way Dick Cheney likes. How Dare They Leak About This?
• Jake Weisberg writes a brilliant column on how manufacturing propaganda as news has a corrosive effect; read it all.

My best friend, Kurt Erichsen, and his SO John (Mere’s godfather) were here for a visit on Saturday and Sunday, sort of as a replacement for our annual Golden Lamb trip. Saturday was almost entirely spent in a run into the city to look at a couple of places that had seriously obscure art DVDs and whatnot, including a big sale on the stuff out of FACETS. The really serious hitch was that the weather was not cooperative, and a steady light snow came down, just enough to screw most of our driving in a fog of thick traffic. When I got back home, I was utterly exhausted.

Today, we hung out at the house more, and had a fancyish dinner at a British pub place in LaGrange called Chequers; OK food, but expensive, and the tab was *ouch*. The Christmas tree got up, thanks to the efforts of John, Mere and Susan, and we had a trial run of my new setup for scanning books into a database, which worked reasonably well. More about that later.

THEY are called echizen kurage and they sound like monsters from the trashier reaches of Japanese science fiction.

They are 6ft wide and weigh 450lb (200kg), with countless poisonous tentacles, they have drifted across the void to terrorise the people of Japan. Vast armadas of the slimy horrors have cut off the country’s food supply. As soon as one is killed more appear to take its place.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1910322,00.html

I heard from the nurse at the thyroid doc’s office that he will be calling me in regard to the results of the tests during the day tomorrow. She did sneak in that the results did *not* show malignancy, but nothing more than that. Well, whew. I’m delighted about that, and wonder what the rest is.

My *guess* is that they will want to do more tests, and look towards a surgery on the thyroid in the next couple of months to take out some of the stuff they did find over the left node as ‘dangerous over the long run.’ We’ll see.

RENMIN: The Communist Party has launched a campaign among political leaders and senior academics to modernize Chinese Marxism, seeking to reconcile increasingly obvious contradictions between the government’s founding ideology and its broad free-market reforms…Unease over this gap has become particularly apparent among university students, who often chafe at their required classes on Marxist theory. A prominent university’s party secretary recently told a visitor that his school had resolved the problem by simply teaching traditional Chinese philosophy during the time set aside for the study of Marxism…In any case, a senior diplomat suggested, most of the argument within the party arises in the context of factions competing for power and patronage, rather than genuine doctrinal differences.

According to the last set of messages I saw from my boss tonight, the right people have been faxed and acknowledged reciept of the fax, so anyone in Chicago has done everything they possibly could have; I spent most of the morning Friday thrashing with this in e-mail and phone calls. After that, off I went to Loyola to get my neck drilled; less traumatic than last time, but not anything resembling fun. I heard mutterings about what they were digging up, but I’m going to wait until I hear from the docs before I go into worry mode.

Right now, Susan has Lots Of Help working on Mere’s birthday cake for her kid-party this afternoon. Meredith is all wired up, and has no patience, and so I hear every so often “MEREDITH! WAIT!” and more stuff like it.

and Meredith Grace Ann Rittenhouse, aka Jiang Yu Cai:

Now We are Six (1927)
When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three
I was hardly me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five,
I was just alive.
But now I am Six,
I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be six now
for ever and ever.