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As has become our custom in recent years, the Family Robbo will be heading to my brother’s house in North Carolina for the holiday festivities, there to eat, drink, gossip, drink, argue, drink, watch football and drink, the feast hopefully being capped off with the arrangement for the gels to have a sleepover with their cousins while Mrs. Robbo and I sneak back to the hotel on our own for the night. (Lest you think we’re unfairly taking advantage, I should note that we reciprocate when Brother & Family come up for Easter.)
I will confess that although I am very fond of Thanksgiving as a holiday, I take no especial pleasure in the traditional menu. It’s not that I dislike turkey dinner (except, of course, for the green beans), but I certainly don’t put it in the same class of culinary delight as the Christmas roast or the Easter lamb. In fact, the part of the turkey dinner I’ve actually enjoyed most has always been the leftover sammiches and the turkey soup that the Mothe used to make.
Ah, well. It’s not a big point.
Anyhoo, in case I don’t sneak in another post before we head off, a bumper to all of you, my fellow port-swillers! Your thoughts and ideas and humor and kindness are definitely among those things for which I am truly thankful.
Mink Monica sends along this Onion piece that’s too good not to share:
NEW YORK—Inside the Montessori School of Dentistry, you won’t find any old-fashioned cotton swabs, or so-called periodontal charts, or even any amalgam fillings. That’s because at this alternative-learning institution, students are being encouraged to break away from medical tradition and discover their very own root canal procedures.
“At Montessori, we believe dentistry is more than just the medical practice of treating tooth and gum disorders,” school director Dr. Howard Bundt told reporters Tuesday. “It’s about fostering creativity. It’s about promoting self-expression and individuality. It’s about looking at a decayed and rotten nerve pulp and drawing your own unique conclusions.”
“In fact, here at Montessori, dentistry is whatever our students want it to be,” Bundt continued.
Founded in 1981, and tailored after the teaching methods first developed by Italian-born educator Maria Montessori, the three-year academy offers a fresh and innovative approach to learning seldom found at more conventional schools of dentistry.
Teachers—or “roving dental facilitators,” as they prefer to be called—can be difficult to spot: They often choose to stay out of the way of their inquisitive pupils, and only make gentle suggestions as to how an infected root chamber should be drained.
“When performing a root canal, there’s no such thing as right or wrong,” said Montessori educator Vanessa Perrin, who added that she doesn’t so much teach her students how to treat an inflamed nerve, as lead them to an open mouth and then stand back. “Sure, we could say to our students, ‘The enamel here has completely eroded and needs to be addressed immediately.’ But what’s more satisfying, what’s more dynamic, is to just let them slowly develop an ‘impression’ of why a patient might be screaming.”
Heh.
Regular port-swillers will of course know that Mrs. Robbo’s patron saint is St. Marie of the Blessed Educational Method. Mrs. Robbo claims that she never drops in here for a glass. I reckon that between this post and the gratuitous jab at “Twilight” (of which she is, alas, a fan) below, we’re going to test that assertion p.d.q.
Well, today is the sixth birthday of that crazy corner corral of the blogsphere known as the Llama Butchers.
I’d been planning a special surprise party for my fellow bloggers there – Mr. LMC, Gary the Ex-Donk and, of course. Steve-O (aka “El Jeffe Con La Little Debbie“). Unfortunately, due to a recent tendency of the Moo-Knew homeworld to burst its bandwidth breeches before the end of the month, we’re all closed out of the shop for the moment.
As you can see, the pièce de résistance was to be Melissa Theuriau singing us the traditional birthday salute. I may as well tell you that this pic is just a still taken from the rehearsal. What you can’t see from it is that the actual plan is for her to serenade us while bursting out of a large cake wearing a naughty French maid rig.
Pity my comrades will will miss that. Guess it’s just me and Meliss, then.
Oh, and what do you know? I see it’s actually time for the party to start.
Well….sorry fellahs. Gotta go. Love that cake, y’know.
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Oh, and Yip! Yip! Yip!
Recently on a whim (and what things don’t I do on a whim these days?) I purchased a copy of Eddie Rickenbacker’s Fighting The Flying Circus, his memoir of his service in WWI.
My copy arrived yesterday and I left it out on the kitchen counter. This morning, the eldest gel came down stairs, clapped eyes on it, and burst out in indignation, “Hey! He stole that name from Monty Python!”
I patiently explained the origin of the term to the gel, and I’m happy to say that Captain Rickenbacker has now been forgiven.
(BTW, I’ll let you know what I think of the book when I’ve read it.)
In the comments to my post below on the different assertions of G.K. Chesterton and Francis Parkman regarding Native American religious beliefs before the arrival of European Christians, regular port-swiller BNS writes:
[W]hile Parkman may be more an expert on Native American culture than Chesterton, I wonder how accepted this particular assertion of his is, or if it is disputed, and I also wonder how he reached that conclusion.
In my post, I had said that at the moment I was too lazy to look up Parkman’s assertions. Well, my friends, in an attempt to be a proper host (and a fair commentator), this evening I hunted up the quotes.
First off is Parkman’s assertion itself. It is to be found in the first chapter of his The Jesuits In North America, the second book of the first volume of his masterwork France and England in North America. I won’t quote the entire discussion of the various rites, rituals and superstitions, because it’s too much to type. Instead, I’ll simply give you Parkman’s concluding paragraph on the matter. (Warning – He is being his least Rousseauian. No Noble Savage for him! If this kind of non-p.c. language offends you, either skip it or brace yourself.):
To sum up the results of this examination, the primitive Indian was as savage in his religion as in his life. He was divided between fetish-worship and that next degree of religious development which consists of the worship of deities embodied in the human form. His conception of their attributes was such as might have been expected. His gods were no whit better than himself. Even when he borrows from Christianity the idea of a Supreme and Universal Spirit, his tendency is to reduce Him to a local habitation and a bodily shape; and this tendency disappears only in tribes that have been long in contact with civilized white men. The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage to One All-pervading and Omnipotent Spirit, is a dream of poets, rhetoricians, and sentimentalists.
As I say, pretty strong meat.
But what of Parkman’s sources? Well, he has something to say about that in the preface to the same volume:
The sources of information concerning the early Jesuits of New France are very copious. During a period of forty years, the Superior of the Mission sent, every summer, long and detailed reports, embodying or accompanied by the reports of his subordinates, to the Provincial of the Order at Paris, where they were annually published, in duodecimo volumes, forming the remarkable series known as the Jesuit Relations. Though the productions of men of scholastic training, they are simple and often crude in style, as might be expected of narratives hastily written in Indian lodges or rude mission-houses in the forest, amid annoyances and interruptions of all kinds. In respect to the value of their contents, they are exceedingly unequal. Modest records of marvellous adventures and sacrifices, and vivid pictures of forest-life, alternate with prolix and monotonous details of the conversion of individual savages, and the praiseworthy deportment of some exemplary neophyte. With regard to the condition and character of the primitive inhabitants of North America, it is impossibleto exaggerate their value as an authority. I should add, that the closest examination has left me no doubt that these missionaries wrote in perfect good faith, and that the Relations hold a high place as authentic and trustworthy historical documents.
“Ah!” you will say, ”Parkman is just relying on Jesuit bias! And we all know what that means!” Well, there are two responses to this. First, Parkman himself was a staunch Protestant. Throughout his work, he gives Rome a pretty fair treatment, but on the whole it is quite plain that he has no love for Her.
Second, if those insanely brave Jesuits at the sharp end of the Faith had discovered that their new flock already worshipped some Great Spirit that ruled over all, surely they would have trumpeted this finding? A barbarian people who practice genuine monotheism are already three quarters of the way to accepting Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular, and I find it hard to believe that such a phenomenon would not have made it into the Relations.
As to the broader question of the acceptance of Parkman’s and/or Chesterton’s positions, I confess that this beats the heck out of me. For all I know, there may well be dozens of books thoroughly debunking both positions! I only offered the comparison because it was triggered in my mind after reading GKC’s take (which, btw, contains no citations or references). They obviously have incompatible views on the subject of monotheism among North American peoples prior to European contact, and one of them, just as obviously, must be mistaken. I have not done research any farther to determine who was right, simply noted the difference because I find it interesting.
My fellow port-swillers, your responses to my post below blegging for T.S. Eliot reading material prompted me to remember something I had seen on the teevee long ago that I thought extremely funny.
Well, thanks to the magic of YouTube, I can bring that memory back to the here and now. Thus, I give you SCTV’s presentation of the NASA production of Eliot’s “Murder In The Cathedral”. Enjoy!
(Incidentally, for those of you curious, in thinking further on my own bleg below I visited the devil’s website and picked up copies of Knox’s The Belief of Catholics and The Hidden Stream: Mysteries of the Christian Faith. I reckon these are as good a starting point as any other.)
Friends and fellow port swillers, I’m away in the morning on biznay and will not be back until Halloween.
In the meantime, I’ve given instructions that the staff are to keep the decanters coming and to ensure there is no lack of Stilton or walnuts, so feel free to carry on amongst yourselves.
See you when I return.
Cheerio!
Flying back to Dee Cee last evening from a whirlwind work excursion out to the great Midwest, I found myself next to a fellah whose wife and two daughters (of the same age as my elder two) were sitting directly in front of us.
I didn’t talk to the man during the flight, being for the most part preoccupied with keeping myself from panicking (the ride in from Chicago featured a fairly choppy take off and landing), but I gathered that he and his family were coming to Your Nation’s Capital to do some sight-seeing. At one point, the gels started quizing the fellah on Dee Cee trivia, including the question of which is taller, the Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower. The fellah said that he thought the Eiffel was the larger, but his gels stated categorically that he was wrong, whereupon he shrugged and buried himself back in his papers and his glass of wine, much to my intense amusement.
After the plane touched down and I had crossed myself in relief, we were noodling along the taxiway when the gels started in on this matter again. The fellah stuck to his guns, going so far as to bet them a dollar he was right. This time I looked over, winked, and said for the benefit of his gels that I certainly wouldn’t take that bet, being pretty sure he was correct. The gels, apparently in awe of this Insider Information, damped down. The fellah and I then compared notes on the need to preserve at least the facade of omniscience in the face of assault by our young.
Well, I’m happy to say that we men in fact knew what we were talking about. While at 555 feet, 5 1/8 inches tall the Washington Monument is the world’s tallest obelisk, it is, in fact, pretty much dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower, which stands at 1,063 feet.
So the next time you find yourself in a bar bet, at least you’ll have that going for you.
I also got chatting with the mom as we prepared to deplane. She remarked how lucky I am to live in Dee Cee and have access to so many monuments, museums and the like. I get that quite a bit. The irony is that, having to slog downtown from the Virginny burbs day in and day out for work, the last thing I want to do in the evenings or on weekends is go back in, and I can only be persuaded to do so on very rare occassions, usually after much kicking and screaming on my part. The average high school kid from Kansas here for a week-long class trip has probably seen more of the touristy things than I have, despite the fact that I’ve lived in the area for 17 years. (Mrs. Robbo on the other hand, being both a teacher by profession and entirely too energetic, has dragged the gels all over the District and most of the outlying burbs as well. I believe she’s actually starting to run out of ideas for new trips.)
Anyway, I hope that fellah and his family (his daughters were extremely well behaved, by the way) have a nice time here this weekend. Alas, it’s pouring rain and is forecast to keep on, but as the mom pointed out, they were planning to be in museums all day so it didn’t matter that much.
Just in case you’re interested, I’ve finally got round to doing a bit of port-swiller guest list upkeep.
First, I’ve sent a couple more dormant blogs to the “Under The Table” category, there to slumber in repose. In the event any of their proprietors rise back to the surface, I shall of course switch them back to their original spots.
Second, I had been feeling bad about the fact that, due to WordPress’s alphabetical arrangement of categories, all my lady-friend bloggers were far down the list. A quick bit of inspiration now has enabled me to place them first, which, to my old-fashioned way of thinking, is the way things ought to be.
Third, I’ve added a couple of new voices to the throng, Dr. Kendall Harmon and Christopher Johnson. They’ve both long been part of my daily reading and I finally got sick of having to linky through other blogs to get to them.
So there you are.
Incidentally, I am always on the lookout for fresh material, so if there are any blogs my fellow port-swillers think I ought to be reading, feel free to raise your glass to them so that I might check them out.
Well I’m not sure the original didn’t capture the right spirit after all:
The world of computing has altered the meaning and use of many words and letters. One person’s innocent acronym, out of context, could be a censor’s (or editor’s) nightmare.
To remove doubt and snickers, a group of lobbyists for the state tourism industry has quietly traded Wisconsin Tourism Federation, WTF, for Tourism Federation of Wisconsin, or TFW.
Suggestions by blog-writers (most influentially the Language Log) of “the inherent ambiguity of WTF,” persuaded the 30-year-old group to change its name.
The change now indelibly links WTF to TWF, even for those who didn’t care in the first place. A third possibility, FTW, or “for the win,” has relevance among the same set as a sometimes sarcastic endorsement of an object or activity. It also could mean “feed the wombat,” which surely is offensive to someone, somewhere.
Wisconsin: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I dunno. As I say, it kinda seems to fit.
Note to our Badger State readers: This post is a joke…a joke! By way of full disclosure, I’ve never actually set foot on Wisconsin soil meself. My only gunnegshions with the place are my next-door neighbor, who annually asks if it would be okay if his dad bow-hunted the deer in the woods behind the port-swiller residence (I always consent on the condition that I get some of the venison), and the fact that whenever I turn on a Packers game, I am confronted by images of many thousands of fans with polystyrene “cheeses” on their heads.
As I say – this motto is wrong?
(A glass of wine with the Interested Participant, by way of the Sandcrawler.)
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