Apt. 11D

Getting Into Kindergarten In NYC

When I first started blogging, I wrote a few posts about the insanity of getting Jonah into one of the gifted schools in NYC. About that time, we decided that moving to the suburbs was better than dealing with that nonsense.

The public schools in NYC have several excellent gifted schools. They are free, public schools. The middle class in NYC have figured out how to rig the system to get their kids into those schools. Some of those kids are genuinely smart. But many parents hire tutors to help their kids get through the rough entrance tests.

Those tests are rough. We did one of the tests with Jonah, who did fine. His spacial ability was high enough to pull up his scores on verbal skills. But the process was horrible. He hated being put in a room with a stranger and being asked questions. I couldn't put him through any more hurdles.

Amy P sent me a link to a documentary on the craziness.

Global Warming Hoopla

There's a HUGE discussion going on in the blogosphere about the global warming data. My dad keeps sending me links on it.

I couldn't care less. If people that I respect say that that there isn't global warming, then okay. For the record, I need more evidence that than commentary from Powerline and Little Green Footballs.

Academic Blogging

Check out this conference panel on academic blogging. The panelists explain that your blog may not get you tenure, but it does count as service and it helps to promote your research. It also enables you to get published by mainstream publications and gain a larger audience for your ideas.

Food Stamps

The New York Times has a great article on the increased numbers of people on food stamps. You must check out their interactive map to see the numbers of recipients in your county. Some stats from the article:

• 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children are on Food Stamps
• 36 million Americans receive benefits
• In some counties, half of all children receive benefits.
• Only 2/3rd of those who are eligible have applied for the benefits. 15 to 16 million more could be getting services.
• Now nearly 12 percent of Americans receive aid — 28 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Latinos and 8 percent of whites. Benefits average about $130 a month for each person in the household, but vary with shelter and child care costs.
• Almost 90 percent of beneficiaries nationwide live below the poverty line (about $22,000 a year for a family of four).

The article focused on the rising numbers on Food Stamps due to the recession. Blue collar workers, especially those tied to the auto industry, have been forced to apply for services.

The article also talked about the politics of Food Stamps. I think they overstated the left-right divide on this issue. The right has been more accepting about food vouchers than other welfare services, because the dollar amount isn't huge, and nobody really wants poor people to starve in the streets. There have been debates about how to prevent people from gaming the system and finding a way to trade in the food vouchers for crack, but this program hasn't been as controversial as other welfare programs.

My dad runs a food pantry, and he's overwhelmed by the need for food out there. He works nearly full time stuffing brown bags with ketchup and peanut butter. Our local food pantry is always begging for rice and beans. There has to be a better way.

I would like to see more food classes offered on squeezing the most out of your food voucher and cooking nutritious meals. There needs to be more places that offer prepared meals to the poor.

And, of course, we need to get to the root of the problem. We need massive job retraining for those in the hardest hit areas.

Weekend Journal

Making things.

On Wednesday, Steve,who was home with a vacation day, went into town for bagels and nova, and to the ever classy Bottle King for a bottle of champagne for the mimosas. I baked a nice ham and mushroom quiche. My friend, Melissa, and her family stopped in for a visit on her drive up from DC to her dad's place in Rockland County. We chatted and ate, and we parked the kids in front of the TV. Very fun.

The cooking continued on Thursday morning, of course. A pumpkin pie and two sweet potato pies. The first sweet potato pie flipped over when I burned my hand on the edge of the oven. It became a massive sweet potato snow ball. After a small temper tantrum, Steve helped me make another one. My brother, Chris, made stuffing with sausage, and mom might have made the best turkey ever. Not always a fan of the turkey, but this one was good.

Friday afternoon, Jonah had a couple of friends over for a playdate. We invited the boys' parents over at 5 for appetizers and a glass of wine. This event didn't really involve proper cooking. A cocktail party is really about arranging small, yummy things on nice plates, and I'm better at arranging than cooking. I'm a fan of Cher in Mermaids, the mother who only serves finger foods. I'm very good with a toothpick. The one hour cocktail party went much later than expected. The guests staggered out at around 10:30.

Steve and I had to move slowly on Saturday morning. We made Jonah clean up the destruction left by the boys after the six hour playdate. After the clean up, we stretched out on the basement floor and played with Lego and erector sets. There was also lots of drawing by Ian.

Ian has become obsessed with drawing. He spends hours every day drawing pictures of Spongebob and friends, the characters from the Captain Underpants books, and the Wimpy Kid kids. I have stacks of his drawings. He draws on the edges of his homework sheets. It's slightly spooky, but it's also pretty cool. If you spend three or four hours a day doing something, you get very good at it. Three months ago, he was making stick figures. Now, he does a perfectly proportional body. He constructs his own mazes and word searches.

That night, we went to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's Wes Anderson best work since The Royal Tenenbaums. I'm a huge fan of Anderson. I like his moody, smart-assed characters. I like the way he arranges the interiors of his scenes. I how he titles the various acts of his stories. I found The Darjeeling Limited unwatchable, and was losing interest in him. He brought me back with this movie. Anderson wrote, directed and produced the movie. He wrote a few of the songs. He did some crazy stuff with puppets. This guy and his buddies are unbelievably creative. My kids loved the movie, too, so it worked on their level as well. 

This morning, we took the kids to church. Ian used the pew as a desk and drew the entire time. Jonah joined in. Jonah should be paying attention in church and not drawing, but we let it go. After church, we drove in the city to go to the Met. The drive into the city wasn't pleasant. Jonah was pouting about having to go to an art museum and about getting math problems passed to him in the backseat of the car.

Previous experiences with art museums have not been positive. There was the phase when they would race from room to room or scream loudly to hear their echo. After that, came the swooning on the benches in the center of the room. But Steve and I like going to art museums, so they have to suck it up every once in a while and just deal. Jonah was anticipating being tortured, so he was a pain in the ass on the drive into the city.

Surprisingly, everyone did great in the museum. We did the Greek and Roman statues and the Temple of Dendur. Mummies and statues are always great for kids.

Feeling brave after those first successes, we went to the American Stories exhibit, a collection of paintings of ordinary life in America -- Victorian era girls playing a ring toss and boys dancing on a raft going down the Mississippi. It was just perfect for little boys. I heard Ian mumble to himself, "I need to draw."

As a reward for good behavior, we went down to the museum and got both boys some drawing pads and pencils. They both drew all the way home. Instead of asking to play computer games when we got home, they kept drawing at the dinner table. I got out of my drawing pads and special pencils and joined them. I made a simple pasta sauce for everybody, and we watched Pawn Stars on the History Channel.

We made a lot of stuff over this long weekend. We made food, took pictures, drew pictures of Spongebob, constructed airplanes out of erector sets. We may not be at Wes Anderson levels of creativity, but we sure did have a lot of fun.

Some pictures: 

Steve grills Jonah on his knowledge of Roman mythology, and then pontificates for a while.

After you go to a museum, it very important to play in the excellent playground in Central Park.

       

Spreadin' Love

After two days of entertaining, I'm enjoying a little quiet in front of the computer. If I get motivated, I might quickly run out to buy a new pair of running shoes, but shopping on Black Friday is for rookies. There will be much better sales in a couple of weeks.

Some links to warm up:

David Brooks writes about Springsteen. I blog about him over the summer. And Ray Davies is on tour again (via CT.) It's geezers on parade!

I understand that The Road is amazing, but I don't think I have the stomach for it.

I made this pumpkin pie yesterday, and it was a big hit. Now I'm surfing around for the best program for organizing all my recipes. Half of the recipes are in a binder in the kitchen, and half are saved on Zotero on my computer. I want the whole mess scanned in. I want some way of tagging the entries. I need a way to add notes, because I like to tinker with recipes.

Farm Life

As I drove along Route 17 doing errands this afternoon, I came across two very different views of life on the farm. None of those views were visible outside the car window. Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey is mall heaven -- Nordstrom's, Macy's, Saks, Century 21, Target, 500 different GAP stores. Sure, the old timers still talk about the celery farms that used to cover Paramus before the highway and the malls, but that was ages ago.

I ran into Barnes and Noble to see if I could unload some old textbooks and stopped to check out a nice display of new cookbooks. Cookbooks have morphed from books with recipes for cooking stuff into lifestyle books. You buy them because you like the person who makes the food, not because you really want to cook any of their food.

Prominent on display was The Pioneer Woman cookbook. I've been reading about her book tour on her blog, so I was curious to see what the book was like. There were some very serviceable recipes for meatloaf and stuffed potato skins, but the book was mostly awesome pictures of her family and stories about how she met her husband. 

Her story is compelling. She rejects city life and builds a life on a farm with a dreamy man who wears chaps and not in an ironic way. After flipping through the pages for a few minutes, I was ready to homeschool and make meatloaf. No, really. I've been antsy to move further North for a while now. 

The nerdy clerk Barnes and Noble took one sniff at my outdated textbooks and refused to take them. Later, I did a drive-by at the town library. I left them outside the door in some shopping bags and ran away.

Next on the chore list was some shopping for the Thanksgiving pies. On the way to the supermarket, I listened to Patrick Carr on NPR discuss his new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America. It's a new sociology book about the emptying out of the farms. The young people are leaving in droves and in many towns, Carr said, it's just 70 year olds driving around 90 year olds. The plight of entire states like North Dakota and Montana was a big topic in my State and Local class. NPR doesn't have up the audio yet, but here's a video of him giving a talk elsewhere.

So, these very different stories have me very confused. I'm going to deal with this confusion by doing some intense shoe therapy at Nordstrom's this weekend.

Food Matters

After deadening my soul by watching a debate about Sarah Palin on BloggingHeads, I moved onto to a discussion about food politics with Ezra Klein and Mark Bittman. They touch on several important topics, including school lunches. Our school serves mozzarella sticks as a main course for lunch. Argh!

I love their rant about crisper drawers.

Miss-Information

I feel slightly ill after watching this interview of people lining up to get a Palin autograph. The video is most disturbing, because of the level of misinformation about politics. One guy thought the president was going to impose martial law in a year or two.

When asked what they liked about Palin, her supporters pointed to values, such as freedom, fairness, realness, rather than to specific policies. To be fair, I'm sure that some people voted for Obama because they thought he was cool, rather than because of specific issues. However, Palin seems to have exploited this apolitical tendency in America by refusing to talk policy.

UPDATE: Really amazing debate about this book by Althouse and Goldberg on BloggingHeads. They fight! Ooooh. Both agree that Palin's beauty propelled her popularity.

I'm liking the spin-off discussions about American political culture and all that really interesting, rather than the discussions that are solely about Palin.

Spreadin' Love

An interview with Belle de Jour about her life as an escort.

Three very different videos of the Sarah Palin road show. One commonality? Huge crowds.