How different other countries are, right? I'm not sure what to say about this -- although no fan of religion in general, I don't have a problem with others wearing religious ornaments.

The right of Muslim women to cover themselves is fiercely debated in France, which has a large Muslim minority but also a staunchly secular constitution.

In 2004, the French parliament passed legislation banning Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in state schools, prompting widespread Muslim protests. The law also banned other conspicuous religious symbols including Sikh turbans, large Christian crucifixes and Jewish skull caps.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/06/23/france.burkas/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Facebook

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I really had not used Facebook very much (although I've had a login for over a year). But lately, I'm finding myself get sort of sucked in...if you have friends that use it a lot, it sort of draws you in! It's really not a bad way to keep up with old friends that you don't see for years at a time.

Fairy Tales

On a different topic, I like fairy tales. I am always interested in the morals that they teach, because their primary purpose is to teach children about the dangers of the world and the values of the culture that they are growing up in.

The other day, I was talking to O about Little Red Riding Hood and dug out my Contes de Perrault from undergrad.

The French version of Le Petit Chaperon Rouge is a bit different from our English version. In the French version, the wolf says that his big teeth are for eating her...and then he ate her. Period. The End. There is no woodsman to come kill the wolf or to chop open the wolf's stomach and restore Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. She's just eaten, lol!

I was telling O that the moral of the story was that a little girl shouldn't be talking to just any old strange wolf she meets. I mean, wearing a red cape and all, like she's a prostitute, lol!

It's a moral about the dangers of trusting strangers until you know them well enough to see through their disguises. I don't think he had ever thought about fairy tales this way.

The moral note at the end of the French version speaks specifically to young girls and how the sweet wolves are often the most dangerous!

Spending some time on my own today -- left O home in bed.

Sitting at Panera for breakfast -- some lady just had me paged because she had parked all cock-eyed in her space and then couldn't get her hippo hips through the opening to get into her car -- I had to move out of the space, so she could get in! Rolling my eyes.

Think I might hit the VA Museum of Fine Arts for a while -- to see how the construction is going.

Otherwise, I think I'll spend some time with O this afternoon and evening. And I still have some outdoor decorations to get inside.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

(Later) Museum Update

The museum addition is still under construction, but more galleries are open than the last time I was there. The Renoirs are back up, and a Van Gogh and couple of others that I immediately recognized.

What I want to know is -- with the limited space in the museum right now, why, oh why do they display all those horse and dog pictures (the sporting pictures)? I mean, I really don't like those pictures, so why do they display so many?

Here are a couple of pictures from my tour --

Now that my allergies are quieting down, I got to do some yard work tonight! I usually find yard work relaxing and enjoyable.

Once every year or so, I have to go out and tame the Mulberry away from my house. It tends to grow in the direction of the house, but I don't like vegetation to get too close, so I cut limbs down with my pole saw.

It's amazing how much more open and airy my back door and deck feel and look without the Mulberry canopy drooping down.

Cutting the limbs also involves getting on top of the car port and while there, I found a dead bird. Since I hate getting up dead animals and since this once is far enough gone that it will be nasty to get up, I'm pretending I didn't see it. It's like a menagerie out there -- rabbits, birds, frogs, squirrels...

The Mulberry is too old to make many berries, but there are always a few I think way up in the canopy. I can always tell when they come in because the bird poop turns dark colored, lol!

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On a different note, I found this article interesting (can't remember where I saw it). It's a report of a tribe in South America that has never had contact with the modern world. Look at the warriors turning their arrows towards the plane/helicopter!

Dramatic images of an isolated Brazilian tribe believed never to have had contact with the outside world were published by officials Friday to draw attention to threats posed to their way of life.



http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jthSvL5g0ouAeFFsVx_fMxWmCrQw

I've just begun reading a book called The Fourth Turning.

The basic premise of the book is that anglo human culture occurs in four periods, or turnings. The four turnings cycle over and over about every 100 years or so. The book uses the names of the seasons for the turnings and suggests that we are entering "Winter," or the "crisis." Winter would be the final turning in this cycle before Spring arrives.

The author refers to himself as a historian, but I take note that usually historians are not in the business of forecasting the future.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting book so far.

Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly 80 to 100 years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:

• The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
  
  
• The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
  
  
• The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
  
  
• The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

The book was copyrighted in 1997 -- so it's about 11 years old now. It was written during what the book would call the Unraveling.

The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes -- and a resolute new consensus about what to do. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

As an aside, there was a quote (called an epigraph I think?) at the beginning of the book from Ecclesiastes. The book used the King James version, but I've used a more modern language version below.

What made me laugh was that I immediately recognized the quote as basically the refrain from that Sci Fi show that I watch -- Battlestar Galactica, lol!

Compare:
Ecclesiastes 3:15 (NIV) -- Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before....

To:
Battlestar Galactica -- All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

I found "Stop us before we hire again." particularly amusing --

To borrow a phrase, it's getting ugly out there. And U.S.-born Hispanics see it as plain as day. Here are 10 things they find distasteful about this debate:

• The hypocrisy. We have two signs on the U.S.-Mexican border: "Keep Out" and "Help Wanted."

• The racism. With lightning speed, the debate went from anti-illegal immigrant to anti-immigrant to anti-Mexican.

• The opportunism. Too many politicians are trying too hard to portray themselves as tough on illegal immigration.

• The simple solutions. "Build A Wall." "Deport All Illegals." A quick rule of thumb: If it fits on a bumper sticker, it's not a workable policy.

• The naiveté. People ask why Mexico won't help stop illegal immigration. Hint: Last year, Mexicans in the United States sent home $25 billion.

• The profiling. Dark skin and Spanish surnames shouldn't be proxies for undocumented status. Been to Arizona lately?

• The meanness. Nazi-produced Internet video games let players shoot illegal immigrants crossing the border. Fun stuff.

• The amnesia. Americans think grandpa was welcomed with open arms and that he plunged into the melting pot. Whatever.

• The buck-passing. Americans love to blame Mexico for their choices, yelling across the border: "Stop us before we hire again."

• The double standard. The same folks who have zero tolerance for illegal immigrants easily tolerate those who hire them.

Some of this is painfully familiar, recalling earlier versions of this debate as it played out a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hispanics are the new Germans, the new Irish, the new Italians. But it's also ugly. It was then. It is now.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/28/navarrette/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

I have no idea what I was searching for the other day, but I stumbled onto some sites regarding the lesser gods in the Greek/Roman pantheon. One caught my attention: Priapos (Greek) or Priapus (Latin). Evidently, he was the god of the vegetable garden, winemaking, bees, etc.

In our classical studies, we always learn about the big gods -- Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Aphrodite (Venus), etc., but we don't hear too much about the large number of other gods and goddesses.

Priapos had some very identifiable characteristics. In the picture below, he is weighing his huge penis against a bounty of vegetables.

I think the Greeks and Romans were a bit more easygoing about their sexuality than we are.

PRIAPOS was the rustic god of the bounty of the vegetable garden. He was also honoured as the protector of sheep, goats, bees, the vine and of all garden produce.

Priapos was depicted as a dwarfish man with a huge penis, which symbolised garden fertility.



http://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/Priapos.html

This is from another site --


http://www.pantheon.org/areas/gallery/mythology/europe/roman/priapus.html

Interesting article that a friend sent me. Evidently, Chinese office culture is very different from American culuture. For example, it's okay in China to discuss salary at work!

What I found funny was that the direct translation of a common Chinese greeting confuses Americans -- "Have you eaten?" evidently means more along the lines of "How are you?"

Also, culturally, it is okay to tell someone they are getting fat!

- I was riding the elevator a few weeks ago with a Chinese colleague here in the Journal's Asian headquarters. I smiled and said, "Hi." She responded, "You've gained weight."

I might have been appalled, but at least three other Chinese co-workers also have told me I'm fat. I probably should cut back on the pork dumplings. In China, such an intimate observation from a colleague isn't necessarily an insult. It's probably just friendliness.


....Of course, there's plenty about American office culture that confuses Chinese employees who join U.S. companies out here. They're baffled by "brown-bag lunch" conferences, during which junior staffers rudely chomp while somebody senior is giving a talk. It's rude because it mixes a social event with an official one.

"Chinese law firms would not have this kind of lunch," says Qian Wei, 26, who works at an American law firm in Beijing. "Maybe we would go outside to a really good restaurant to drink and chat for a while. But in the U.S., people pay much more attention to efficiency."

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117130288782606066-lMyQjAxMDE3NzIxMDMyMDAyWj.html

Here are a couple of articles -- the one talks about government-sponsored cribs so that Indians can abandon unwanted girl babies. The second talks about divorce rates in the US and other countries being affected by girl or boy babies.

The Indian government is planning to set up a network of cradles around the country where parents can leave unwanted baby girls.


....It is the latest initiative to try to wipe out the practice of female foeticide and female infanticide.

A girl child is often viewed as inferior to a boy. A bride's dowry can also cripple a family financially.

Research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls.

Research published last year estimating that the number of female abortions was as high as 500,000 a year was disputed by the Indian Medical Association.


....In 1994, India banned the use of technology to determine the sex of unborn children and the termination of pregnancies on the basis of gender.

However, campaigners say many clinics still offer a seemingly legitimate facade for a multi-billion pound racket and that gender determination is a highly profitable business.

Cradles plan for unwanted girls

In the United States, the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: The parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys. In Mexico and Colombia the gap is wider; in Kenya it's wider still. In Vietnam, it's huge: Parents of a girl are 25 percent more likely to divorce than parents of a boy.


....divorced women with girls are substantially less likely to remarry than divorced women with boys, suggesting that daughters are a liability in the market for a husband. Not only do daughters lower the probability of remarriage; they also lower the probability that a second marriage, if it does occur, will succeed.

Next, parents of girls are quite a bit more likely to try for another child than parents of boys, which suggests that there are more parents hoping for sons than for daughters.

Once again, the effect is strong in the United States but even stronger elsewhere.

Oh, No: It's a Girl!

I wonder why this is?

• Is it because men can do more work and provide better for parents in old age?
• Is it because girls can have babies, thus adding a layer of liability to the family (related to possible cultural/religious shame and/or related to the economic needs of having to raise the unwanted baby)?
• Is it because men die earlier than women and therefore won't be an economic drain on the family for as long in old age?
• Is it because men are emotionally/physically wired to "spread the family genes," thereby ensuring the survival of the family?

All of those speculations sound interesting...and they might be correct -- but whatever the reason, it seems that we all have some sort of cultural memory (or even a genetic memory) being handed down somehow here -- the effect of the memory is being reduced, but has not disappeared, in places like the US where women can make their own money.