I only read the first couple of pages of it, but, yes. Jane, The Good Soldier Švejk underway. Don't skip the introduction with Hašek's bio! Eliana, I get the special characters by holding down the key on my iPad and choosing from the mini-menu. Don't worry, I won't be crossing the tropics with Henry Miller either; but it was Jane who brought it up. Corrupting the morals of the youth of Athens again.

Love your trip photos and account, Jane, and The Miracle Game sounds like it needs to be added to my TBR list. Finished my 52nd book for the year. John Henry Faulk is only a local celebrity now, in part because of what was done to him in the McCarthy era. He was once a well-known radio personality on CBS, very much like Garrison Keillor; an educated and cultured good ol' boy from South Austin (even when I was a kid, South Austin was where folks kept chickens and cinder-block-propped pickups in their yards, and sofas on their front porches) who brought his "professional Texan" persona successfully to New York radio. His book tells how his career was ruined, and how Americans stood by and put up with blacklisting. Because the fight against Communism made it necessary. Because who wants to risk being associated with Communists, or their sympathizers, or someone who once had lunch with a sympathizer, or someone whose friend once had lunch...? And because it's the right of private citizens to object when a corporation employs one of those people. And because it's their right to organize boycotts to pressure corporate sponsors to stop doing business with those who employ pro-Communists. We think of the McCarthy era, and we think of the HUAC hearings, and government persecution. But Faulk wanted to make it clear that most of the damage to people's lives was done by private vigilanteism, which for a long time was not seen as wrong but as good and necessary in order to destroy the evil of Communism. From the trial transcript: --------- GOODSON: I will only say then ... that the net result was that Clark Swanson regrettably felt that he had now to accede to the pressure, and we would have to drop Abe Burrows, and I came to Burrows and I told him the full facts and he agreed that in the light of the pressure which was being threatened that I agreed with Swanson, who had been very decent up to this point, could not stand up under it. NIZER: And did Mr. Burrows still state that he was innocent of any Communist affiliations? GOODSON: Yes he did. NIZER: Was the pressure ... did it involve the taking off of the goods of the Swanson products? ... GOODSON: A sponsor is in business to sell his goods. He has no interest in being involved in causes. He does not want controversy. --J. H. Faulk, Fear on Trial ---------------- Many of the names here will be familiar to those of us over forty. Remember game shows ending with "a Mark Goodson/ Bill Todman production"? That's producer Mark Goodson testifying, above. Tony Randall appears as a witness, testifying how he avoided union meetings and in his own words "crawled under a rock" to keep from being noticed. Ed Murrow, Myrna Loy, J. Frank Dobie all make appearances. In an epilogue added a decade later, Faulk talks about discovering that the FBI had an extensive file on him and had been actively cooperating with the defendants. The last words of the book: -------------- An agency of government ... that engages in the secret collection and storage of political information on American citizens has more in common with totalitarian police states than it does with the United States Government. --Epilogue (1976)

Just this morning an Amber alert was issued in a neighboring city for a toddler named Twinkle Twinky Twilight (found unharmed).

So that'll be Henry Miller for you this week, then? :D Seriously, sounds delightful! Any photos for us?

Can't wait to hear about Jane's adventures! Finished Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, one of the best books I've ever read. Well underway on John Henry Faulk's Fear on Trial, the author's account of being hounded and blacklisted from his job at CBS by self-appointed anti-Communist watchdogs in the McCarthy era. Next will be The Good Soldier Å vejk, I hope in the next few days.

There was an actual child poisoned by Halloween candy. What made it an urban legend was everyone being two degrees of separation from candy-poisoning.

Several of the names mentioned on this thread are urban legends. See Laura Wattenberg's blog, or Snopes. Our city and county are popular first name choices, but one worries about eventual confusion on passports.

Except in my part of the country, where most Catholic women wore mantillas to Mass. Btw full mantillas, or shorter veils, are making quite the comeback among younger women at the Spanish Masses. And hats on women at a Spanish Mass are frowned upon (ask me how I know ... or maybe don't ...).

Where is the outrage over Christmas anything during Advent?

I read the libretto to Verdi's Aïda (by Antonio Ghislanzoni, but who's ever heard of him?). Took Wee Girl to the dress rehearsal, which I usually avoid because of the wretched opera manners of the homeschool groups who go (and it wasn't any better this time), and will take the other girls to a proper performance this week. (There were posters for some Neil Caiman or Daiman person who will apparently be performing soon, and Great Girl was interested but the tickets were incredibly expensive and I suspect he can't even sing a decent tenor anyway.) Here's the Triumphal March which isn't of course in the libretto at all and which is the only part of Aïda everyone recognizes. There were no horses in the production we saw. Also finished J. H. Cardinal Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and let me say "essay" is a pretty elastic term as it clocks in at just short of 500 pages. Lots of food for thought, though pretty much niche reading these days. Still reading Wings of the Dove, from which I've allowed myself to be distracted; and started John Faulk's Fear on Trial, about which more later, as I get through more of it. Really good so far.

This. I like it and use it for the same reasons (I have the Oxford one with the Deuterocanons). My church is saddled with the horrific NAB, or for the Trads, the clunky Douay. The KJV is beautiful, memorizable, and an integral part of English literary tradition.

I recently removed a rather bad grease stain (black bicycle grease) from white silk just by soaking for a while in a solution of dishwashing liquid and water, then rubbing verrrrry gently with a clean cloth.

Hurrah! Are you reading it in English? If you find any aspects of Pamela annoying, there was a parody sequel written by Henry Fielding, called "Shamela," that you might enjoy. I've been so horribly slow lately that I'm going to count the libretto to Aïda, the dress rehearsal of which I took Wee Girl to last night. She read her children's version of it ahead of time, frowned, and said, "I don't think this ends very well." Uh, no, entombed alive, not so good. Dh got a copy of Die Brücke from the university library (in English--thanks Loesje!) but it has been displaced from the top of my TBR pile by some Texas history, J. H. Faulk's Fear on Trial, which I'd been meaning to get to. Faulk was a popular radio/tv personality in the '50s who objected to a private organization that had taken it upon itself to ferret out Communists, and his challenge earned him an accusation of "subversive activity" and for a while destroyed his career. Our central public library is now named for Faulk.

I didn't remember that! But it wasn't uncommon for the Gospels to be translated into vernacular languages, either as glosses on the Latin or as freestanding translations. In England, Bede translated them as glosses in the eighth century, and there are Anglo-Saxon Gospels from about 1000 A.D. Translations seem to have been more common where the language wasn't Latinate. (Now whether it was actually St. Bartholomew translating for the Indians, is of course another sort of question.)

Voltaire made a pretty big deal of it in Candide, but that's about the only reference to it I ever recall reading.

So late checking in. These last 72 hours I have been costumed, apple-bobbed, partied, rosaried, chanted, and requiemed to the point of collapse. No new completed reading to report, though I need to read the libretto to Aida before Thursday.

I didn't think that was the case in Texas. My understanding is that, prior to high school, a student transferring in from anywhere goes automatically into their grade by age. From 9th grade, though, they have to test in or provide credits that the ISD recognizes, or else start at 9th grade. I know international students in the Texas ISD where I grew up did it that way.* Now I wouldn't be surprised that homeschoolers wouldn't have credits automatically transfer, and therefore would have to take placement tests, as our "private schools" are unaccredited under the law. I admit I never looked into it, as it didn't affect our family. *One boy in my year, who transferred from an Indian school, was nearly forced to go back to 9th grade, as he was "from a third-world country" and so couldn't possibly be up to the level of a Texas high school. His parents raised cain and he was allowed his school credits. He graduated Valedictorian.

Here's the thread:http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/525125-texas-court-radically-changing-homeschool-law/ A few points (not made to you, Jenny, as I know you know all this). There's no homeschooling statute in Texas, only case law: the Leeper case decided by the Texas Supreme Court. Leeper was decided in a context where the Texas Education Agency had decided the compulsory education law didn't allow homeschooling, and homeschoolers were being prosecuted for truancy. The Supreme Court found that, at the time (1920's) that the compulsory attendance law was passed, there were many children being educated at home, and that they had been considered to be attending private schools so long as they were being taught the "3 R's" and good citizenship. These children had always been considered exempt under the compulsory schooling law. So the Court found that the status quo was that homeschooling was exempt, and that it couldn't now be considered not exempt. The absence of science has nothing to do with anti-science attitudes in Texas; it's just what a good-enough education was a hundred years ago. Since the SC declined to create a homeschooling law, it didn't add subject requirements. Anyway, the problem is that no agency was defined in Leeper as having the authority to determine that the education in a homeschool is "bona fide." But in defaulting to the ISD as the appropriate authority, the El Paso appellate court (in my view) eviscerates Leeper. It was the ISDs in the '80s and '90s that had decided homeschooling wasn't a real education in the first place. To read Leeper as making those same ISDs the arbiters of who gets to qualify as a real homeschooler is to take the Supreme Court victory away from the homeschoolers and hand it to the TEA. ETA: Yes, this is a very unappealing family. But the SC isn't deciding whether they are crackpots, or if they were giving their kids a real education, or passing judgment on any of the juicy allegations. They're deciding whether my ISD gets to go over my curriculum and decide whether my kids are getting a "bona fide" education, or whether instead the ISD should be getting the funding for my special-needs child's education.

Uh-huh. http://gawker.com/5546467/teen-werewolves-roam-the-shopping-malls-of-san-antonio Not to mention the guy who shot Bigfoot just outside the city limits.

Yes but are you sufficiently Weird?

885,000. About 50,000 less when the students go home.

Aaaa! You're not in administration at Big State U. are you? It was nothing personal.... :D

We were fine, but the idiotic* administration at Big State U. declared that classes weren't cancelled, because "while conditions are wet and at times windy, there is no serious weather threat at this time." Meanwhile the campus PD was closing down parts of east campus where the creek was flooding. One of Great Girl's friends posted the university's announcement on Facebook under a photo of cataracts pouring down the steps from the main building onto the Mall. So dh had to go in today on his bike--the buses weren't running reliably--despite the flooded roads. To teach classes nobody showed up for. *I use such a strong word only because at the sight of a few snowflakes they shut down the entire university. Tornado rotation sighted at the southeast end of town? Stop whining and come to class.

I'm so sorry. Safe travels. ETA: Ah, and Rose. Yes, curl up and rest.

More tomorrow they say.