It’s so nice to know that one is a good citizen. Here on the Mississippi we don’t get the extreme cold that folks get just a couple hundred miles north of here. Still, we keep our thermostats at 68° in the daytime and 55° at night downstairs. Upstairs, where we sleep, we turn off the heat altogether at night, since we have two heating and air conditioning units, one for each floor of the house.
Today the outside temperature is hovering in the low thirties, up from a low of 16° early this morning. That’s pretty normal for St. Louis in January, though we have a low of 2° forecast for later in the week. We’ve also had very little snow this winter. At the gym I hear guys talking about how folks here don’t know how to drive in winter weather, just the sort of stuff I used to hear in Texas.
In November Missouri voters approved a ballot initiative requiring “investor-owned electric utilities to generate or purchase electricity from renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, biomass and hydropower with the renewable energy sources equaling at least 2% of retail sales by 2011 increasing incrementally to at least 15% by 2021.” But we’re still going to be primarily dependent on coal for the foreseeable future. It’s too bad.
or a governor who, some think, is a lunatic, etc. Blago must have a speech writer who likes poetry. It’s Tennyson this time, channeling Bobby Kennedy, I suspect, and not Dante’s Ulysses.
It’s old news now. Governor Rod Blagojevich has been impeached by a vote of 114 to 1 in the Illinois House. Blago has compared himself to Sillitoe’s long distance runner, in remarks I suspect he didn’t write, and is slated to hold a news confrerence at 2 p. m. today.
Rep. Milt Patterson (D-Chicago) was the lone vote against impeaching the governor. Patterson, from Chicago’s Southwest Side, said after the roll call that he didn’t feel it was his job to vote to impeach the governor.
No spiel promised: A caller from the democratic congressional hoo-ha, just now, promised “no spiel,” then cozied up with a couple of comments designed to make me feel part of the in-group, I guess, and wound up by suggesting that I contribute $209 to the cause of keeping the congress Democratic. Myomy! I’d have been more inclined not to hang up if the leaders of my party, Pelosi, Reed, Feinstein, etc., would rein in their egos and get to work.
Rick Warren: Beating a horse that perhaps ought to be dead, I intend to listen very carefully to Rick Warren’s prayer on inauguration day. I don’t like Warren, don’t like religion hucksters generally–from Joyce Meyer to Deepak Chopra. And I think my guy could have chosen any number of better people to deliver the invocation before he, himself, delivers the most important speech of his career thusfar. Nor do I think the choice is clarified by the claim that we have to listen to folks with whom we disagree. But what the hell–this is America, God love us:
in every language even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
No child left: Two interesting pieces in today’s Washington Post (here and here) tell an ironic tale about education in the land of the free. The Shrub of legacy-seeking touts his putative achievements in the realm of education reform whilst a political pressure group lobbies a DC area school system for lower grading standards, complaining that “students [are] at a disadvantage when they seek college admission or scholarships.” I’m remembering a Czech graduate student who worked for me back in the last century. She told me one day that she was grateful to have come to the United States for graduate school because education in her country consisted of “dictionary learning” only; whereas she found herself surrounded by intellectual stimulation and creativity at our large, public, provincial, American university. That’s what we stand to lose by the pursuit of education as measurement and measuring up, what Jill Ker Conway found at Harvard in the ’50s and details in her book, True North (1994). My guy got a very good education that also included Harvard. His education secretary-in-waiting notwithstanding, I very much hope he doesn’t sign on to the Nicklebee ideology.
All we like sheep: As part of my holiday reading binge, which is by no means done yet, I read last week a wonderful little book entitled Three Bags Full (2005), characterized by author Leonie Swann as “A Sheep Detective Story.” It reminded me that The Good Shepherd remains a powerful a myth of leadership, and rightly so. A classical evocation of the myth (designed to do honor to a secular prince and not to God as is sometimes thought) occurs in Bach’s hunt cantata, #208. Everyone knows the tune, but it isn’t every day one gets to hear it performed by authentic sheep. Read through the comment thread attached to this lovely performance of “Schafe können sicher weiden.”
