Silflay Hraka

Today felt lazy, even though the evidence in retrospect seems to rule against that interpretation. How any day could seem lazy when it revolved around a toddler who was up at 7, took no nap to speak of and was still shrieking in ecstasy and running around at 9 at night? We must have tag-teamed the child fairly well today, as there were no “must grit teeth and keep parenting” moments that I can recall. It helped that there was a third adult here for most of the morning, someone new for Ngnat to force a tea party on while her parents levered open their wits with newspapers and coffee. I’m not sure where she got the idea that assorted hair bows, scrunchies and clips made an adequate replacement for scones and chocolate biscuits, but Uncle Kevin gamely fought through his hangover long enough to make polite conversation about extra lashings of sugar and cream in his entirely imaginary Earl Grey.

Wait, did I say hangover? Sorry, force of habit. Time was when we would have stayed up all night, accumulating a forest of beer bottles on the coffee table while we caroused until the wee hours, but that was a different Uncle Kevin. This Uncle Kevin fell asleep while sitting bolt upright on the sofa, after four beers, three hours before midnight. This was the same man who had complained less than an hour earlier that he always saw the end of a movie alone, as his wife inevitably fell asleep halfway through. Six minutes into Brotherhood of the Wolf and bam!, Mr. Sandman coshes him on the back of the head.

Having nothing better to do, I threw a blanket on him, went to bed and watched the rest of Trading Spaces with the wife, a woman who, not so long ago, would buy a pitcher just for herself five minutes before the 2:00 am last call at the karaoke bar. We were lights out and horizontal by 10:15.

I wouldn’t trade what I have now for then, but it would be nice to go back and visit occasionally.

Uncle Kevin is no uncle, as people who know my family will swear, unless one of my parents was far more active back in the sixties than anyone would otherwise suspect. We have an odd tradition of awarding friends of the family a kind of technical relative status. I had an Uncle Max, an Uncle Jim and an Aunt Honey who I saw far more in my childhood than I did some of my real relatives. Liked them a lot better too. The actual definition of family with us is pretty amorphous, and depending on the circumstances can stretch from immediate family to cover the in-laws of in-laws as well as good friends. It drives the accountant wife up a wall, since she can never tell whether she is to prepare herself for a quiet evening with a small circle of relatives, or for something approaching the size of a Catholic wedding party.

We’ve had a “family” beach trip the past two years, where the first thing out of my father’s mouth once we were settled in was “When’s Kevin coming?” This year, the “family” beach trip included a cousin, his new wife and their two friends, whom we had never met. I cooked them scrambled eggs and made sure they had enough beer. Dad regaled them with a story from his childhood where he cons a man into buying a bag of turds for a dime, and the wife’s head popped off and flew around the room, shrieking imprecations at the heavens.

I always figured that it was just another Southern thing, but the very mention of the practice causes visible shudders to travel up and down the wife’s spine, so possibly it’s just a leftover from Dad’s early cracker days in Mississippi, when it was safest just assume you were related to everyone and not pry too deeply into the actual bloodlines. He does have double first cousins, a fact of which he is inordinately proud, and will not hesitate to share with you should the subject come up, or even when it does not. Another genealogical factoid that we’re all pretty happy about is that he and the sainted wife are, according to Mom, the keeper of the ancestral records, 12th cousins. This of course makes Kehaar and I 13th cousins to my wife, a situation treasured by all involved with the singular exception of my wife.

She’s learned to deal with it, except for the times when Kehaar tells Ngnat to call him “Uncle Cousin.”

Organized Littering

I have registered my first 20 books to be released into the wild at BookCrossing. They seem to be having some sort of problem with getting images from Amazon, so if the page hangs for more than a second, hit the stop button on your browser and it will display.

Thanks to The Oceanguy for the idea, even if it did take me a month and a half to get around to it.

Scholarship Money

I was perusing OpenSecrets.org to see who were the major contributors to the North Carolina candidates for the U.S. Senate. It is all very interesting, but one thing caught my eye and I find it more than a little infuriating: the University of North Carolina donated $12,500 dollars to Erskine Bowles campaign. Since when do taxpayer-funded public universities go around doling out tax money to political candidates? I understand that one candidate may do more than another to further the interests of the university, but in this day and age of universities poor-mouthing themselves and asking for handouts for this or that project, it seems to me that the money can be better used to actually educate University of North Carolina students. I do not think that a tax-funded institution like the University of North Carolina should be diverting taxpayer money to fund any political candidacy and I think that if the taxpayers of North Carolina got wind of something like this, they would be rightly indignant. I know I am,and I’ll probably end up voting for Bowles. I can only imagine how Dole supporters might feel about this misuse of public funds.

And I can only hope that the $21,500 dollars from the State of North Carolina to the Bowles campaign are some kind of matching funds.

Update: Tony from Trojan Horseshoes noticed a disclaimer on the site that I did not:

HOW TO READ THIS CHART: This chart lists the top donors to each candidate so far in the current election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organization’s PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

So, I am indignant for naught. But I’ll leave the post anyway so people can check out OpenSecrets for themselves.

What the US President wants us to forget

I think that this deserves a good read from every American, whether they are pro-war or pro-peace.

The most interesting part to me was the role that Donald Rumsfeld played towards Iraq during the Reagan Administration. I also find interesting the oil industry connections of Bush and Cheney and other administration officials. Let’s face it, the first Gulf War was all about oil, and the second will not be any different. I find it more than a little disturbing that Bush and Cheney stand to reap huge personal benefits by putting hundreds of thousands of American troops at risk. I think the view that the looming war with Iraq is all about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism is a little naive. All one has to do is look at the influence the oil industry has had on the administration so far, as far as the development of Bush’s “energy policy”, the continuing effort to open up the Alaskan Natural Wilderness Reserve for oil drilling, and even as far as the war in Afghanistan. Bush had another reason for going into Afghanistan: the Afghan oil pipeline and natural gas reserves. At least with the oil-pipeline in the works, you won’t see the U.S. losing interest in Afghanistan any time soon, as some government critics fear. What does the oil pipeline mean? It means that big oil will have easy access to billions of people on the Asian Sub-Continent, which means big money. Think I’m full of shit? You should read Unocal Vice-President John J. Maresca’s statement to the U.S. House of Representatives regarding a “new silk road”. A sample:

In stark contrast to the other three markets (Europe, Russia, Ex-Soviet Asia), the Asia/Pacific region has a rapidly increasing demand for oil and an expected significant increase in population. Prior to the recent turbulence in the various Asian/Pacific economies, we anticipated that this region’s demand for oil would almost double by 2010. Although the short-term increase in demand will probably not meet these expectations, Unocal stands behind its long-term estimates.

Energy demand growth will remain strong for one key reason: the region’s population is expected to grow by 700 million people by 2010.

It is in everyone’s interests that there be adequate supplies for Asia’s increasing energy requirements. If Asia’s energy needs are not satisfied, they will simply put pressure on all world markets, driving prices upwards everywhere.

Anyway, I personally don’t think that all the oil in Iraq, and by all estimates there are trillions of gallons of it, is worth the lives of our American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and the reputation of the United States as a nation that responds to provocation, not a nation that strikes preemptively when the oil companies tell us it’s worth trillions of dollars to us. Of course, if we do (excuse me, I mean WHEN we do) invade Iraq, at least we’ll be able to neutralize Saudi power in the area and trump France, Russia, and China for control of Iraq’s oil.

I think the current administration is in the hip pocket of the oil industry, and maybe our whole nation is. It’s why I agree with this speaker more and more every day: “the bottom line is I don’t trust this president and his advisors”