read the printed word!

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Do you really want to know what I'm thinking?

No, you don't. It could get messy. Lots of UFO's in there (unfinished objects), which could explain the UFO's scattered about the house. But sometimes stuff just spills out ...

Like how fortunate we are to live in a country where homeschooling is legal. "School phobia" is pretty normal here, but in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe), you can get arrested, thrown in jail, or even worse. Take the current case of Melissa Busekros, a 17-year-old girl who was forcibly removed from her parent's custody by more than 15 police officers and then placed in the child psychiatry unit of the Nuremburg clinic. The account can be read at http://www.hslda.org/elink.asp?id=3731 .

And here in IL, where we don't even have to submit to standardized testing, we don't have to have our curriculums approved by anybody, we dont' even have to stick to our own curriculums, we just have to dedicate ourselves, as parents, to giving our children the best education we can, and we take it for granted. No, this year, on Homeschool Legislative Day, (May 2nd, I think) I hope to get down to Springfield and let all our busy legislators know how much I appreciate them keeping their nose OUT of our homeschool, the Super-H Academy.

I miss Molly Ivins. I only discovered her columns in the last couple of years, probably because my neck of the woods doesn't have any independent-minded newspapers that would print anything as brash and common sense and funny as her stuff. But we can hope, and pretty much count on, that great state of Texas producing another original, funny writer to illuminate the mess that's always going on in politics. (read the Texas Observer, way better than New Yorker!)Because Texas is a really really big state (and their politics is really really messy!) But let's take her advice and never, never elect another president from Texas.

And yes, Anna Nicole Smith will be missed also. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I was really hoping she would just settle down and be a mom for awhile. She was our generation's Marilyn Monroe, so her time was bound to be short. May she rest in peace.

In between reading the news online (which is skewed toward "Entertainment News", and I don't get how Entertainment can be News, just gossip, really) and forgetting to watch Idol this week (it's been a rough week) someone suggested that I read Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran to get a perspective on what's really going on Over There. Of course I forget who made the suggestion, but I'm passing it on. Even though it's making me angry, and sometimes just sick about the whole thing. I'm only 50 pages in because I just have to put it down and go look for something to make me smile.

This makes me smile. http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=81956

Careful, there's lots more where that came from.

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