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Defining Down Normal and the Separation of Needs

I was just watching a CBS Morning News story about a couple that gave birth to a Down Syndrome child. The reporter was thrilled to tell us the couple’s next baby was “completely normal.” That kind of crass inconsideration in the media is the sort of cruel framing of a person by label that then seeps into all of society and permeates a popular cultural mindset against those who are thought to be outside the range of “Normal.”

Has “Average” become the new “Normal” — where the middling height, midline intelligence and the ordinary outlook are christened as “acceptable and necessary” in order to fit in to “Normal” society?

Labeling people in order keep them out of some vague and undefined idea of Normal is a dangerous and hurtful game that ostracizes those among us who most need our considered care and who deserve our unconditional love and acceptance.

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Helicopter Parents and Militia Mommies

A good friend of mine in Nebraska — who shall remain nameless unless he steps forward here — sent me a great email yesterday full of fascinating thoughts and feelings as well as the following riff on unsavory and selfish parents:

I have personally witnessed and heard stories about minivan moms. These are the women — who have one, maybe two kids — but don’t work regular jobs, and take their kids to school every day. They band together in packs, always drinking their morning coffee in the drop off lanes at school.

On the surface, this of course is a “Leave it to Beaver” scenario. But I have discovered that many are prejudiced against those of us that have jobs, and drop our kids off and go to work. If we are in a hurry, they bitch and honk at you like you ran a red light or cut them off on the interstate. They travel in packs, socialize at the school, and help out at the school like it matters to their son’s or
daughter’s education if they are there or not.

What I have read, later on in life, these parents, usually women but sometimes men, become “helicopter parents.”  Right now in the Lincoln paper, there’s another article how they follow their kids to college and continually intervene in the guidance of their children who need to start thinking and figuring life out on their own.

In trying to be protective and nurturing, these people don’t do justice to their own offspring and get a bad name for themselves. Like an alcoholic or
drug user, they deny a problem exists. Some of these parents I have run across at the elementary level are down right nasty to deal with.

Have you heard of the “Helicopter Parents” phenomenon before?

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Weighing Humor Against Moral Values

Is funny always funny? Or does the sense of what’s funny change with the cultural ebb-and-flow over time of what certain people find funny? In a recent thread of comments here, one regular commenter made a “joke” about work where the new management team were “Nazis” and the workers were “Jews.”

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When Boys Cry

On Sunday, when Tiger Woods won the British Open for the second time in a row and the third time overall, he celebrated his win by sobbing on his caddy’s shoulder. That was Tiger’s first win after the death of his father Earl in May and, as Tiger told the world later, he was crying because he missed his father so much.

When Boys Cry

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Top Ten Reasons I Hate My MacBook Pro

Yesterday we discussed the Top Ten Reasons I Love my MacBook Pro and today, to be fair, we look at the darker side of the MacBook Pro in the definitive Top Ten List of Hates:

1. Heat: The 17-inch MacBook I have runs hot. Because the case is made of metal the heat goes directly from inside the machine to the case and outside right to your hands. I don’t mind the heat so much but, compared to my other Windows laptops made of plastic, I wonder if this burning MacBook metal is a better or worse sensation or if my wondering is merely being sensational.

2. Whine: It seems many MacBook Pros have an annoying high-pitched whine that Apple cannot seem to fix or even make it clear if they think the problem exists or not. I don’t mind the whine so much — many blame it on the new Intel chip in the MacBook Pros and Intel blames Apple and Apple says nothing — because I always have iTunes playing, the TV is on, the radio is turned up and my Vornado fans are blowing full blast. My poor cat, however, refuses to sit on my lap now. The whine hurts his ears and in a quiet room it hurts mine, too. I can’t imagine using this MacBook Pro in a library where quiet is the mandate of the day: I’d be tossed out on my dual-core.

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Gay in the Womb

Reuters is reporting today a study claiming male sexual orientation is determined in the womb before birth. This “sexual orientation-maternal immune response” theory suggests a mother’s reaction to her male fetus is see as a “foreign body” in her body and her immune system goes into subconscious overdrive to purge the male within her. 

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An Apple Through the Windows: My MacBooks Review

Last week in my article, MacBook Questions from a Windows Heathen, I asked some questions about the new MacBook line of laptops from Apple computing. I have been using Windows computers since the rise of Windows 3.11.

My previous experience with Apple has been limited to the first generation Newton which I loved so much that Apple used a quote of mine in a press conference but without attributing it to me or asking my permission. I had posted on a CompuServe forum explaining why the Newton was “touching the future today.”

I believed in that technology then and the Apple Newton set the stage and started the trend for personalized, portable computing now. I have also used a first generation iPod and I have used iTunes and QuickTime.

I don’t know much about Apple computers so if there are some things in this review you do not understand or that are wrong, please let me know. After using the MacBook for a couple of days, my plan was to make a permanent move away from Windows and become a MacBoy today and forever. I will let you know my decision about moving from Windows to Mac at the conclusion of this article.

One of the great things about the new Intel-powered MacBooks is you can dual boot into Windows and Mac OS X on the same machine so you, in theory anyway, do not have to make a choice of Operating System preference.
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Baby Blogging: Signs the Blogosphere is Imploding

If there is such as thing as the “Blogosphere” I discovered over the weekend it is imploding with the weight of bad intentions gone wrong. We have discussed the perils and predilections of Mommy Blogging in the past — but Baby Blogging — the worst possible aftereffect of The Mommy Bloggers, takes the entire idea of precious children on the internet, into a whole new sad level of self-importance. I read one blog “written” by a one-year-old baby using words like “dimorphic” and “ball sack” and “fistula.”

We also learned what was digested that day, how it came out in the end, and how many times Daddy was punched in the groin by baby’s precocious fist. I’m making it sound much more entertaining and funnier than it was because there were five entries per day for that kind of babbling diarrhea.

What is the point of Mommy writing a blog as if her Baby had written it?

The idea can’t be humor. It must be some sort of prospecting for genius in their offspring:

“My baby was blogging at nine months, what’s your excuse for an illiterate 11-month old?”

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The Truth in Eli’s Blue Tattoos

David Irving, a British historian, will be in prison for the next three years after claiming for decades the Holocaust did not happen. The Austrian sentencing judge called Irving a “falsifier of history” who had academically challenged the Holocaust research of other scholars. One researcher, Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University, fought back against Irving and won but she feels Irving’s imprisonment will only make him a Free Speech martyr.

When the Western mindset of freedom and Free Speech meets anti-Muslim cartoonists and Holocaust deniers like Irving, there is a strange and dangerous conflation of the radical worst of us becoming memes for a movement. The best evidence for fighting the David Irvings and others who press lies over ugly truths is in the specificity of the body and the revelation of embedded truth that erupts to the surface when crushed into the flesh. When I was a teenager, I worked at a television station as an on-camera movie reviewer.

There was a man who worked in the film department named Eli. Eli was the only person who could take a piece of ruined raw film, fix it, and have it on the air for the evening news in five minutes. Eli was old school. He could fix anything mechanical. The new videotape revolution happening around him held no interest. He was pure celluloid and chemicals and darkrooms. Eli was a “Jew in Nebraska” and that was extremely rare in the 1980’s. He moved to Nebraska after World War II after surviving Auschwitz and surviving Auschwitz was even rarer than a Jew in Nebraska.

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No Safe Haven for Nixzmary

Nixzmary Brown is dead. Her stepfather accused her of eating his yogurt and her alleged punishment was her life in his hands.

Nixzmary Brown

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