Mor Mune

Bill is learning about the distinction between wants and needs at school, and on one sheet had to fill in the blank on the following sentence: "My mom and dad want _____." His insertion: "mor mune." Phonetically to a kindergartner that is equivalent to "more money," but the mortified Wife of Hatcher tried to explain to his teacher that "munes" are like modern day indulgences that save you time in purgatory, and that you win them by doing selfless deeds. Meanwhile, I took Billy aside and explained to him the error of his ways - it is not more money for its own sake that we want - it is the things that we can buy with more money that matter. And even more than the things we buy, it is the things we buy that our neighbors can't afford that really matter. He's only a kid - he'll learn.

Meanwhile Joe has established himself as a kindergarten chick magnet. I wish I could say that makes him a chip off of the old block, but most readers of the blog know me personally and would get too good a laugh from that one. We went to a Valentine's dance at his school, and he literally had three girls fighting over him. When we left and remarked to him how much the ladies dig him, he laughed and said "it's like I'm famous for the girls." Another day at the park the Wife of Hatcher met the mother of a kid Bill and Joe know from summer camp, whose son is also in kindergarten but in a separate class, and when the women figured out the Wife of Hatcher was Joe's mom, she said she heard from another mother of a girl in Joe's class that all the girls love Joey. He's a cute kid, but it goes to show that girls are superficial because his most prevelant talent to date is making fart noises with his armpit.

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Barry! Shocker! He took steroids?!?! I reproduced a debate between me and Professor Vic on this very topic in the pages of Ideas Hatched, and must now say, as I often do, that I feel like I've locked down that debate victory pretty good and clean. I'd like to see the pitchers collude and just intentionally walk him until he retires. At the very least, he shouldn't get into the Hall. Joe jackson made a couple bucks a day and took money for throwing the Series in 1918, and he's been excluded from the Hall as one of the game's best players for damaging the integrity of a game that at the time barely provided a living. Now you got Bonds, who probably made enough to retire on in his first three years in the league, damaging the integrity of the game far more severely in my view. Not to mention the fact that he's an ass with a chip the size of a continent on his shoulder. Not to mention the fact that he thinks he's perceived as an ass for racist reasons (which may augment that perception among some, but which by no means is a necessary quality to view him as such), which makes him even more of an ass.

It reminds me of that new Kobe Nike commercial, in black and white, with him saying all these reasons to hate him, and ending by saying hate the fact that people love me for the same reasons you hate me. The problem with that commercial is no one hates him for the reasons he says in the commercial - they hate him because he is an ass who (at a minimum) cheated on the mother of his newborn baby. Amazingly enough, if he had mentioned that in the list, the last line of the commerical would have been no less true, because that whole incident provided him street cred among certain people.

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Supreme Court 8-0 on Yale Law School's attempt to bar the ROTC from recruiting because of its don't ask/don't tell policy toward gays. Here is something to ponder: how is that the professors at what some consider the top law school in the country couldn't see that they'd lose even Ginsburg's vote on this one? The Roberts majority opinion basically said, not only could Congress withold federal aid from the school if the school refused to allow ROTC recruitment (which was the question at hand), but also even if Yale gave up the federal aid and tried to stand on its principles, Congress could ram the ROTC right down their throat. Beautiful. The Yale professors had some high-minded statement of their principles in this case - bully for them - but it will be interesting to see, now that there is some money at stake in standing by their principles, how quickly they'll duck from them.