Way to screw it up for everyone else.

Is your child a pain in the ass?  Every once in a blue moon does that scary, quiet little voice way down deep inside just wish you could send the little brat packing?  Well, that’s exactly what a woman from Tennessee decided to do.  Torry Ann Hansen found that her darling adopted child from Russia was more than she bargained for, so she flew with him to Washington, then put him on a plane back to Russia with a magic markers, candy and a typewritten note saying “After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.”.

She put her adopted seven-year old son…

on a plane…alone…

to Russia.

Hansen told reporters that the boy was violent and abusive and threatened to burn down their house, so I guess she felt justified in sending a SEVEN YEAR OLD to a foreign country by his lonesome with a few markers and a note.  She is soooo not a candidate for the Mom of the Year award.  I sincerely hope that a child endangerment investigation is conducted by US officials against this woman.  Again, this big badass child is SEVEN years old, and while I’ve seen the previews for the evil Satan-children movies that come in and out of fashion…oh…right, that’s Hollywood.  No child is so bad that you send him away with a note that says “Return to Sender”.  It’s got to be illegal in one of the two countries involved…come on!

And now Russia, who has not been pleased with the outcomes of American adoption of Russian children (14 Russian children adopted by Americans have died of abuse since 1996 – WTF, mate?!), has decided that this is the last straw: they are proposing to suspend American adoption of Russian children until stricter adoption standards can be arranged by the two countries.

Way to screw it up for everyone else.
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Dragons, Wrestling, Italian and iPad

All my friends are still talking about this damn “How to Train Your Dragon” movie, and it’s still holding strong at 98% on rottentomatoes.com.  Alright, I admit it…my curiosity is peaked.  And it’s still playing at the IMAX… 

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Another thing that has aroused my interest is a new play that just opened at Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis called The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety.  It’s all about professional wrestling!  Well, and slightly heavier stuff like the concept of race in America.  From the press release:

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity examines America’s ideals and fears through a comic and provocative look at geopolitics and professional wrestling.  Told from the perspective of an unlikely underdog, Macedonio Guerra, a Puerto Rican wrestler who has made a career as a “professional loser”, Chad Deity tells the tale of an African-American champion pitted against a trash-talking Indian athlete from the streets.  Racial politics and wrestling make odd bedfellows everywhere but on Mixed Blood’s stage; political correctness and conventional expectations are thrown out of the ring in this theatrical event.

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I bought a grammer workbook for Italian last night at the bookstore (McGraw-Hill Easy Italian Step-by-Step).  I wonder if anyone really thinks that they’re going to get along in a foreign country with “Language X for Travelers” books.  I mean, how much patience would you have for someone if they approached you on the street, gripping a book, mumbling to themselves, pointing frantically at the pages and speaking something that sounds somewhat like heavily-accented English?  I think a lot of us would find somewhere else to be pretty quickly.  Seriously, take a few minutes to learn the subject pronouns (I, you, he, she, we, you (plural), they) and how to conjugate the big three verbs (to be, to have, to do/to go), and you’re in a much better position to get your point across.

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The Hubby and I have a Mac Date tonight.  We’re going to take my desktop Mac to the Genius Bar in an attempt to identify why I can’t upload my CD language programs.  We’re also going in order to pet the cute new iPads.  I think I’m out of the woods with my desire to have an iPad – an iPhone will be plenty for me, and for the price I think I’d have to go with a PC laptop before an iPad.  For those of you still struggling with the decision To Buy or Not To Buy, The Maniachi’s blog has provided this easy-to-follow flow chart:

Dragons, Wrestling, Italian and iPad

Giving you the biz.

Random Updates and My Latest Amusements:

I picked up the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  It’s all orchestral (symphonic?), and it makes the BEST study/paperwork music, because there are no words to listen to or hypnotizing beats in the background.  Geeky and productive!

On Sunday we had yummy Buca di Beppo Italian Easter Dinner with The Hubby’s family.  Fried calamari, stuffed mushrooms, breaded mozzerella, caesar salad, stuffed shells, ravioli, chicken saltimbocca.  Mmmm…

The Hubby bought rollerblades!  He has always been hesitant to try in-line skates.  He is scared to break something (he’s an old man, you know), and he’s 6’3″, so he already has a long way to fall without adding another 4-6″.  The first time we went out he was so cute and funny, wobbling around like a newborn calf!

If you have access to facebook, check out the cutest video of me and my friend Elizabeth messing with her daughter, Edie.

The bookstore is having a sale and I was able to pick up some inexpensive Italian language materials so that I can learn a few nicities for my potential trip to Italy this summer.  Molto buono!  Divertimento!  The only sucky thing is that something is wrong with my Mac – it won’t let me install my old Spanish-language Rosetta Stone CD or my brand-spankin’ new Italian Berlitz CD.  I haven’t tried to install anything else by CD…   Bummer, I think a trip to the Genius Bar is going to be unavoidable this time.  Ciò è triste.

Giving you the biz.

Crystal Cave

On Saturday Ashley and I went to Crystal Cave in Spring Valley, WI.  One of the more amusing parts of the day was how excited Ashley was to visit Wisconsin. 

She hasn’t traveled out of state much, and she was wrapped up in this idea that Wisconsin as another state; different, nay foreign! – when compared to Minnesota.  It blew her mind when we went outside of the Twin Cities radio station range.  I tried to explain radio waves and how proximity to radio towers affects the stations we could pick up, but I think she still believes that WI runs on an entirely different set of physical rules than MN.  Mix the “missing” radio stations with the fact that we were in the middle of rural WI and she was convinced that we were in the boonies and no one in Wisconsin knows what Nike hightops are or who Ludacris is (I’ve linked the last one there for those of you who don’t have kids, Little Sisters, or MTV). 

On to Crystal Cave.  Crystal Cave is AMAZING. 

I have to let you let that sink in, because words cannot capture the AMAZINGNESS of Crystal Caves.

The only other cave I’ve been to in recent memory is Colossal Cave near Tuscon, AZ.  Colossal Cave was very neat.  It has a constant temperature around 7o°F, and is in the middle of beautiful Saguaro-filled desert.  There are plenty of lizards, bugs and other creatures to watch outside of the cave.  We didn’t see any bats on our tour, but the cave is known to host bats.  Colossal cave is “dry” or “dormant”, which means the cave isn’t growing formations – no new stalactites or stalagmites.

Crystal Cave is very, very different from Colossal Cave.

Crystal Cave maintains a temperature of about 48°F.  It is very moist and is a “living” cave.  We trekked down about 7 stories into the Earth, and the lower we went, the more formations we saw.  The past and current owners of Crystal Cave have taken good care of the cave’s natural formations, and our tour guide kept emphasizing that touching any living formation could stop the formation’s growth for 1,000 years – even the little kids walked with their hands in the pockets!  The stalactites in the picture below were some of the smaller formations we saw on our tour. 
 


We saw pockets of different minerals, bacon formations (wavy, sloping stalactites that look like…well, you know), flow growth (moisture flows slowly down a flat surface, adding layers over time), and BATS!  We saw tons of bats!  These little, brown, furry, mouse-sized bats were hooked on to many of the “ceilings” we passed, and we even had to duck to avoid a bat that was sleeping on one of the lower ceilings.  Tour Guide Dude did an awesome job spreading the word about White Nose Syndrome, and let us know how we could contribute to the fund researching WND at the gift shop or online. 

After the cave tour, we went outside and Ashley panned for “treasure” – you buy a bag of sand with polished stones for $5 at the gift shop, and the kids wash away the sand at this nifty water channel outside.

We finished up our day with lunch at Barker’s in Hudson, WI.  Ashley wanted to have lunch on the east side of the St. Croix River so she could tell everyone back home that we ate authentic Wisconsin food.  But in the end we decided not to get cheese curds.

Crystal Cave

Rockin' with Roy Zimmerman

The Hubby and I were wondering what to do on Friday night.  We thought about going to see How to Train Your Dragon at the MN Zoo IMAX because 1) It was playing at an IMAX in 3D, so…duh, and 2) It has garnered an amazing 98% at Rotten Tomatoes and whodathunk that?

But then I read on Pharyngula about Roy Zimmerman playing – of all freaking places – Cannon Falls High School Auditorium.  Cannon Falls is a little town between Rochester and St. Paul, MN.  It has a population of about 4000 people, and is a typical Minnesota town in that it consists mostly of churches, liquor stores and banks.  You can read about all of the cool places Roy Zimmerman has played, and all of the cool people he’s played alongside at his cool website.  And then you’ll see that Roy Zimmerman playing…Cannon Falls…was just too good to miss.

Roy Zimmerman is a political satirist – his tagline is “Funny Songs about Ignorance, War and Greed.  He’s a big ol’ liberal, hippy, socialist.  Based on his songs that we heard on Friday, I’d say his songs fall in three categories:

*Songs that make fun of Right Wing Politics and the Religious Right
*Songs that make fun of Liberals
*Songs that remind us that we are all one and stuck on this planet together, so let’s play nice, dammit.

You can find a LOT of Roy Zimmerman songs on YouTube (or on his CDs for sale on his website).  Here are two of my favorites:

It was a very intimate show – there were only about 100 people in the entire audience.  We unexpectedly ran into a couple of friends from the Twin Cities, and the four of us sat together in the second row.  PZ Myers showed up and was asked to draw the winning raffle ticket.  We went to the after-show get-together at the Mill Street Cafe and had the chance to meet some very cool freethinkers, including PZ Myers and some awesome people from the Waseca, WI FreeThinkers group.  Very cool, very unexpected evening.  Cannon Falls – who knew?

Rockin' with Roy Zimmerman

Rockin’ with Roy Zimmerman

The Hubby and I were wondering what to do on Friday night.  We thought about going to see How to Train Your Dragon at the MN Zoo IMAX because 1) It was playing at an IMAX in 3D, so…duh, and 2) It has garnered an amazing 98% at Rotten Tomatoes and whodathunk that?

But then I read on Pharyngula about Roy Zimmerman playing – of all freaking places – Cannon Falls High School Auditorium.  Cannon Falls is a little town between Rochester and St. Paul, MN.  It has a population of about 4000 people, and is a typical Minnesota town in that it consists mostly of churches, liquor stores and banks.  You can read about all of the cool places Roy Zimmerman has played, and all of the cool people he’s played alongside at his cool website.  And then you’ll see that Roy Zimmerman playing…Cannon Falls…was just too good to miss.

Roy Zimmerman is a political satirist – his tagline is “Funny Songs about Ignorance, War and Greed.  He’s a big ol’ liberal, hippy, socialist.  Based on his songs that we heard on Friday, I’d say his songs fall in three categories:

*Songs that make fun of Right Wing Politics and the Religious Right
*Songs that make fun of Liberals
*Songs that remind us that we are all one and stuck on this planet together, so let’s play nice, dammit.

You can find a LOT of Roy Zimmerman songs on YouTube (or on his CDs for sale on his website).  Here are two of my favorites:

It was a very intimate show – there were only about 100 people in the entire audience.  We unexpectedly ran into a couple of friends from the Twin Cities, and the four of us sat together in the second row.  PZ Myers showed up and was asked to draw the winning raffle ticket.  We went to the after-show get-together at the Mill Street Cafe and had the chance to meet some very cool freethinkers, including PZ Myers and some awesome people from the Waseca, WI FreeThinkers group.  Very cool, very unexpected evening.  Cannon Falls – who knew?

Rockin’ with Roy Zimmerman

Socialism?!

The writer of the blog Toward a Moral Life did an interesting piece on a poll about Americans’ views and, in part, the Tea Party political movement.  Here are some results from those who identified as supporters of the Tea Party (copied from Toward a Moral Life and the piece linked above):

  • 44% identify themselves as “born-again”, compared with 33% of all respondents.
  • More than 90% say the U.S. is moving toward socialism and away from capitalism.
  • Almost half say the government should do something about executive bonuses.
  • 36% say expanding Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor) amount to socialism.
  • 65% say Social Security is socialist, but 47% want to keep it under government control or aren’t sure about privatization.
  • 80%+ say expansion of the government’s role in the economy is a high threat.
  • 70% want a federal government that fosters job creation.

Tea Partiers have a concept – the less government the better – but they still want government or other oversight bodies to make sure they’re safe and have access to…stuff.

I’m very optimistic – I believe that people want to love and support their neighbors and they *think* they want to support their fellow human beings.  If we see a guy bleeding on the side of the road, we want to help him.  We’ll go out of our way to help him!  Need money?  Need a ride?  Need food?  I can do that!

But when people are asked to “blindly” support the weak, poor, sick, etc., they are reluctant to do so.  If they don’t have immediate, measurable evidence that their sacrifice is being appreciated, they’re less likely to help. If we can’t see that extra taxes are providing food, education or medicine to unfortunate people who can’t help themselves, we don’t want to help. 

With welfare, universal health care, education, police, and other “socialist” endeavors, we’re ultimately agreeing (or being forced – whichever you believe) to let go of the power to play god.  We don’t get to *choose* who we help…we don’t get to decide if individuals are *worthy* enough to get our help.  We don’t get to hold back our assistance to those who don’t share our beliefs or values…and this really irks some of us. 

Really, “socialism” seems to be a way to scale up our altruistic efforts at local, national and global levels.  Individual efforts may be wasteful and help only a few, while (socialist) taxes have the potential to help provide more efficient vehicles for support for more people.  But it requires trust in our fellow man…or at least in the regulatory bodies that keep an eye on our fellow man.  Crap.  I certainly don’t trust all of my fellow man.  But maybe I can trust oversight committees?  But who’s watching them???  Who’s watching the Watchmen? 

I think that liberals and socialists have more trust in our fellow men, while conservatives and Tea Party supports have less trust.  Hmmm…is this the basic difference between our two groups?

Socialism?!

iPeed App for iPod

The Pregnancy Test App  is one of my favorite April Fool’s Jokes of 2010 so far:

From Red Tricycle:

After downloading the application, you simply aim your urine stream at the bullseye in the center of the screen. A complex algorithm analyzes the level of HCG (pregnancy hormone) in your urine. Sensitivity is > 12.5 mIU/mL, comparable to most tests available at the supermarket. If the test is positive, an image of a cooing baby appears (above, right). If the test is negative, an image of a martini appears.

When the user attempts to download the iPeed App, he or she is directed to a webpage, in which users are admonished to “Seriously folks, please don’t pee on your iPhone.”

iPeed App for iPod

New cartoon and God Pamphlet!

Biology nerdiness and political humor beautifully melded to produce witty sarcasm – well played, sir! (Seen in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by Sack)

Also, I have a new God Pamphlet!  It’s been a while since I’ve seen one, so this was kind of exciting.   This one wasn’t found at the bookstore, but was given to my friend’s daughter Tuesday by Jehovah’s Witnesses when she made the mistake of opening the door to the kindly-looking men in suits standing on the doorstep.

New cartoon and God Pamphlet!