Not my kinda music, but sheesh, what a stunning smile. The cheekbones, the velvet complexion... Just enchanting.

And Tulsi looks good, too! Nice teeth!

(Only watch it once, else the tune will lodge, listlessly, in your immortal soul. You are forewarned.)

There's a spot going north out of Kansas City that plays "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."

Hoover Damn was dedicated today in 1935. Have you ever heard of the "high scalers"? I had not.

Perhaps the most famous feat any of the high scalers ever performed was a daring midair rescue. Burl R. Rutledge, a Bureau of Reclamation engineer, fell from the canyon rim. Twenty-five feet below, high scaler Oliver Cowan heard Rutledge slip. Without a moment's hesitation, he swung himself out and seized Rutledge's leg. A few seconds later, high scaler Arnold Parks swung over and pinned Rutledge's body to the canyon wall. The scalers held Rutledge until a line was dropped and secured around him and the shaken engineer was pulled, unharmed, to safety.

https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/hscaler.html

You can watch this soccer clip a hundred times and still not care about the sport.

Get woke, go broke: woman's magazine edition.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/11/womens-magazines-are-more-progressive-than-ever-and-theyre-all-closing-down

This old lady has bigger balls than the little shits yellings at her:

https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1178500448552210432

See all the places you've lived.

"To those young boys and their parents, we sincerely apologize for the pain and anxiety these allegations have caused," the grandparents, who are also Allen's legal guardians, said in a statement.

It's one of those things where it seems like people are desperate to be angry about something.

They will not be denied their fulfillment; reality will not be permitted to intrude.

Say what you want, the apology is robust--

https://kdvr.com/2019/09/30/school-virginia-girl-who-claimed-white-classmates-cut-her-dreadlocks-admits-she-made-up-story/

I'd say it's more a case of a 12-year-old being desperate for unearned attention and being willing to lie about it.

(It wouldn't exactly look right for everyone to assume she lied. But yes, adults, in particular, should wait before making nasty phone calls or protesting in the streets. I certainly would have waited to see what happened, had I lived in the neighborhood.)

More on it - I wonder why SHE isn't the one apologizing, just yet:

https://www.essence.com/news/amari-allen-false-allegations-immanuel-christian-school-dreadlocks/

And I also wonder why her name is being released, since she's 12! That doesn't seem right. The media don't even do that when a child that age is accused of murder. Why should this be different, since this blemish on her integrity will now be available for everyone to see?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Colorado Governor Jared "No News is Good News" Polis!

Hi Lenona, more later tonight. But we should note that her name was made public for the 'accusations' part of the story, not the 'retractions' part. People were happy to put this child's name out there when it served their social justice enthusiasms.

I think you and I agree that it's more than an 11-year-old girl should have to deal with in any case. No matter how grievous this mistake and it has very little to do with the admirable grown woman she might yet become.

Kids play with matches, especially when Dad's not watching.

"My brother was left a single father after a car accident - and this is why you never have kids to make a spouse happy."

Excerpt:

...Every time I see him, he is complaining about how much he hates looking after them and lamenting that he has had to pass up career opportunities, how annoying it is that he has to race home up pick them up from daycare instead of seeing friends, how he is ready to move on but the only people willing to date him now are single mothers and "I don't want to deal with more kids" and "most of them are not in the same boat, they are just super trashy", and "what I really wanted was my wife and no kids. Now what I have is no wife and 2 kids" and he has confessed that he loves them but would never have agreed to have them if he knew he would be left on his own with them and "stuck" raising them. He had them for her, she is gone, but he can't take them back to the store now she isn't here...

https://old.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/d09mwa/my_brother_was_left_a_single_father_after_a_car/

One commentator said:

"That’s really sad. If anyone chooses to be a parent, you must always be prepared to be a single parent."

Being CF, I never thought about that - but yes, that is something EVERYONE should consider before having children - or RISKING having them!

The thread also mentions the possibility of boarding schools when they're older, if he can't be any more "loving" than he is now.

Which makes me wonder - ARE there still boarding schools in the US for middle-schoolers - or kids even younger than that? I've heard of them, but not in real life! If so, I have to wonder why such young kids get sent there, since it's likely very hard on them!

Specifically, there's a famous, still-in-print 1960 novel about an 8-year-old girl sent to boarding school - and for the first day or two, she can't stop crying. Oddly, she's the ONLY new kid who acts this way! Even the matron has no real sympathy.

Pot Bill Tokes the Line on Public Safety

https://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WA19I39&f=WU19I08

Bill de Blasio's New York.

Two via Paul———

For the record, Monroe was already gone.

Boom.

Pet, this is tripe:

Agonized parents like Jeffrey Veatch's whose son died snorting heroin, only after marijuana experimentation led him there.

Besides, it's a sentence fragment. When people fuck up arguments with such mistakes, we rightly wonder if they're distracted by the fear of their errors being exposed. (As were this fellow's.)

> Being CF, I never

Que es CF?

> the possibility of boarding schools

I don't think kids are sent to boarding schools as an expression of love, except in the most backhanded sense: Hey kid, don't complain... It's not like we left you at the side of the freeway...! I think in the vast majority of cases, kids are sent to boarding schools to get them out from underfoot.


> I'd say it's more a case of
> a 12-year-old being desperate
> for unearned attention

I wouldn't even go that far. She might have been desperate for attention, but children deserve loving attention and shouldn't need to "earn" it.

It's a safe bet that this girl's parents weren't killed in warfare or industrial accidents. By contemporary statistical probability, their absence from her life was conscious and willful, and her anger, however misplaced, is quite probably righteous: She's a beautiful kid, and someone special ditched her.

> It wouldn't exactly look
> right for everyone to assume
> she lied.

Consider this: People's assumptions are generally unseen anyway. Waiting before commenting seems like the best behavior.

Y'know.

YIKES!!!

Ah, CF = Child Free.

(The only way to live, if you ask me....)

"That’s really sad. If anyone chooses to be a parent, you must always be prepared to be a single parent."

Very true Lenona. Even before splitting up became the majority you still had the risk of one spouse dying.

As for boarding schools, yes they do still exist. And even in the US as well. I have a cousin they sent to one to try and get him away from drug issues.

I know they exist for TEENS; I went to one. I was wondering just how many are left in the US for kids younger than that. Especially if they're under ten! Again, I never hear of them in real life - and the private Immanuel Christian School doesn't seem to be a boarding school, from what little I saw of its website.

Btw, in the novel, a lot of the students seem to have divorced parents (I'm assuming there weren't THAT many widows and widowers with small children in 1960, even though almost 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea), and a lot of the students live for the day when they can go to day school again. I still wonder, though - wouldn't it have been cheaper just to hire a nanny?

Anyway, I did a quick search just now, and one of the first sites said:

"Most boarding schools only offer day school for younger children and don’t allow boarding until 6th, 7th, 8th, or 9th grade depending on the school."

(Keep in mind that these days, for some reason, 6th-graders are typically already 12 when they start.)

As for how many children lived in single parent homes over time, here is a somewhat deceptive chart from Mother Jones that answers just that question.

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/blog_two_parent_homes_1970_2017.gif?w=1200&h=618&crop=1

So roughly 10-15% in 1970 (you have to factor in percentage of race). The deceptive part of the chart is that while there may be two adults in the home in the later years the father is likely to not be related to the children (~60%).

On the Korean war, at roughly 180 million citizens in 1960s USA losing 40k in a war did not significantly affect those numbers. Other factors cause caused that 10% of kids in single parent homes.

I will agree that while boarding schools for under grade 6 may exist there probably aren't many of them in the US.

As for why there are many 12 year olds in the 6th grade, football. The younger a child is the greater the difference a single year makes in physical development. Areas where high impact sports are favored tend to start school later so the male children have an edge in sports. Interestingly I've not noted a similar trend for academics even though you see the same benefits mentally as you do physically.

As to what was written in some novel I cannot comment. Fiction is fiction. You cannot extrapolate reality from it. At best you can pick out the social views of the author.

Given that the author - Ursula Nordstrom - was a highly respected publisher and editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Harper & Row for over 30 years, I doubt she would have invented the idea of a boarding school for 8-year-olds. It would only have made her look laughable, if they hardly existed.

You are welcome to your fantasies Lenona. You really think Treasure Island was real? Pirates that say 'Arr' with parrots on their shoulders and peg legs? Pirate maps where X marks the spot?

Let me know when you come back to reality. Basing your views of the world on fictional novels is not sane.

Apples and oranges, Ben. No one should be surprised to learn that ESCAPIST adventure fiction, per se, plays fast and loose with facts, even when it isn't fantasy. (Real pirates seldom or never used a plank.) Realistic, everyday fiction is supposed to be a lot more believable, even if it doesn't completely qualify as "interpretive fiction."

From Mark Twain:

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't."

A good example of that:

Nowadays, almost no juvenile novelist would dare to have a fictional 5-year-old walk to school alone - except to demonstrate that the character is now in danger or that the parents are neglectful. However, in 1968, a world-famous writer did just that, even though she is and was known for her very logical writing. Why? Because that was a perfectly REALISTIC portrait of the times, in Portland, Oregon! So when young, skeptical readers today are told that that really was the case back then, they might say "wow, historic truth really IS stranger than modern fiction!"

In other words, yes, certain novels ARE considered good barometers of the times. Especially those written by the most critically acclaimed writers. (As opposed to those who are merely popular.)