The frustration! My mother-in-law was trying to give me crap, but I didn't understand about what. I didn't work too hard at it. It took her five minutes to explain that I had left the heat on under the frying pan after cooking my lunch. It had made a terrible mess. The frying pan with blackened and the lid was scorched. It was a disaster without parallel. Finally, after five minutes of hard work, she made me understand what had happened. I thanked her politely for turning it off. I'm sure it was a vast anti-climax. I'm equally sure that it will not discourage her from giving me crap in the future.
She left the cast iron frying pan for me to clean, which took all of a minute with a scouring pad. It took another minute to do an adequate job of cleaning the lid. An adequate job was of course not adequate. It took her another three minutes of hard work amidst serious frowns to scrub it until it looked like new.
We used it this morning to make pancakes for the kids. Sunday, I made a full recipe and the kids ate it all. Monday, with the same recipe, the kids ate what they wanted, Oksana and I each got pancakes and there were some left over. You never know. This morning, I made a two thirds recipe. Grandma alternatively gave me crap for making too little for the kids and tried to push left over pancakes off on me. You can't win. But you can laugh.
I watched this extraordinarily interesting 2 1/2 hour interview by Bret Weinstein on the history of polio in the United States. The interviewee, Forrest Maready, is the author of The Moth in the Iron Lung on just that topic. I immediately gave myself the challenge of explaining it to Oksana, then putting it into a very condensed format to deliver as a Toastmasters speech. Maready's point is that the history of polio is not at all as myth would have it, a simple story with obvious heroes. It is complex, and fraught with human error. The title of my Toastmasters speech will be "That's Funny," the thought that sparked Maready's delving into it. Why did animals get sick in the first polio epidemic? Why did it affect only children? How could a stomach virus cause paralysis? How was it transmitted? How come the epidemic came in waves by decades? At least one inquiring mind, his, wanted to know.
Oksana's vaccination records are lost someplace in her hometown. Since my interest was which shots the Soviets generally administered, I did an Internet search on exactly that. Here's what I found about mandatory vaccination in the USSR and vaccines in Russia today.
From 1919 to 1980, every newborn citizen of the USSR was vaccinated against smallpox. In 1925, mass vaccination of children against tuberculosis was introduced. In 1958, the Preventive Vaccination schedule was introduced, which continues to exist in Russia to this day. In its original form, it consisted of vaccines against smallpox, tuberculosis, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio. Later it included vaccinations against tetanus and mumps. Over the past 30 years (viz, since Oksana's time), the schedule has been updated with a number of vaccinations: against hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae, influenza, and HIB infection.
I find that today in Russia there are eight mandatory vaccinations.
Shot Age Number
Hep B 6mos 3
TB 3-7 days 1
Pneumonia 2-15 mos 3
DPT 3-18 mos 3
Polio 3 mos – 14 years 6
Rubella 1 year – 6 years 2
Flu from 6 mos
They dropped smallpox – too dangerous.
Still, far fewer than the 78 individual jabs on the CDC schedule. I can conclude that Oksana got the smallpox, TB, DPT, and polio shots, more or less the same stuff I got.
Peachy Keenan has her finger on America's pulse. Here's an article she did a few years ago, before starting her own SubStack, on the early and excessive sexualization of American children. It certainly happened to mine. My daughters were put on birth control as they entered their teens in order to "prevent acne." The mother encouraged them to pursue belly dancing because it was "good exercise." I suspect she was trying to compensate through her children for her own rather sheltered childhood. At any rate, it didn't turn out well. Here's Peachey's article How American Parents Turn Their Daughters Out - Pimp My Preschooler. I want to assure you readers that it is not overdrawn. As a Montgomery County Maryland parent I saw the condoms on bananas, my daughter as president of the school's GLBT club, hookups sundry unproductive, destructive behaviors, and daughters that turned out to be both unmarriageable and uninterested in marriage.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is in the middle of reading Forrest Maready's next book, "Crooked," on the effect of the introduction of metals into pharmeceuticals in the two centuries since science discovered them and entered them into the periodic table, and mining engineers figured out how to squeeze them out of ores. The title comes from Maready's observation that the introduction of metals into the body, largely as adjuvants in vaccines, gives people crooked smiles. Not just crooked, but higher on the right than the left. More in men than women. This is the kind of hypothesis the average person can test very readily. I have only two photos of my grown son, Jack, but I think I see it. My ex-wife's cousin by marriage is all over Facebook. The effect appears pronounced in him. Looking at faces on the bus the last couple of days I do not notice it much here. Maybe because of many fewer mandatory vaccines? Who knows. In any case, the book is fascinating.
My daughter spent her school holidays in Kyiv, and then returned to Berlin with her grandmother. The next day, the three of them descended on my flat to clean my daughter's room. Her mother and grandmother scolded her for letting it get so messy while I laughed in the next room. They estimated that it would take three hours, but after five hours they were just about finished. Meanwhile, my daughter was yelling at her grandmother who was giving her a Soviet scolding over her failings as a child. I laughed some more, and then my daughter's mother came down the corridor with the vacuum heading for my bedroom. I stopped her there. No way she's cleaning my flat. Altogether it was an hilarious experience. I poked my nose in once or twice.
My only duties were to wash everything that my daughter owned. Her mother even started telling me where to fold and put the clothes when they were dried, but I stopped her once again. My duties end with washing and drying. I don't clean my daughter's room, I don't iron, I don't fold, I don't put away her clothes. The only thing I do in her room is find the dirty glasses and dishes which have vanished in there, and we get along great, my daughter and I. We don't quarrel. I don't care what her room looks like.
After my daughter came back from Kyiv, she went on a picnic with some Ukrainian kids and then brought a passel of them home with her to stay the night. I bought an extra mattress when the war started because I thought it would be handy and it has proven to be useful. I'm often cooking for the refugee kids from Ukraine, some of whom are orphans and some of whom are living here without parents. I have extra bedding and use the cushion on the sofa as an extra bed. This time we had six refugee kids. The most we've had are seven, and I cook pancakes for them, plus scrambled eggs, sausages, and avocado toast. All those years when I worked as a fry cook in various restaurants when I was going to college is now paying off. I still know how to crack an egg with one hand.
The news is filled with doom and gloom about the war. Ukraine is doing to lose, they all say. Well, I guess we're going to have to wait until the end to see the result. Ukraine has been written off several times by the pundits and phony generals who get interviewed by various media types. A friend sent me an interactive map of the Korean war and it was fascinating. I recommend this map. It shows the vagaries of war in visual perfection. Looks like they fought all the way to the Chinese border and then all the way back down to the bottom of the Korean peninsula before the invasion by Douglas MacArthur at Inchon which broke the North Korean forces and created two fronts which led to the stalemate. I expect NATO countries, but not NATO, to send troops to Ukraine so that it becomes an international war before they let Putin take all of Ukraine. Macron already stated it, and it appears that British troops are already on the ground in Ukraine. It may be a long way from over.
The Korean war in ten minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJx6M7SqkvI
Now, I wonder what these Ukrainian kids are going to do after the war. All of them are attending school here in Germany (the highest calling according to the Germans), but will they return? This is the question. As I said, some of them are orphans already, but they all love Ukraine. And what do Ukrainian kids do in Berlin. They have formed a book club and they read things like 1984, they meet in the parks for a picnic, and sometimes they go to a café and eat a meal. These are the Nazis of Ukraine, kids that are polite, reading good books, and spending time in the parks. They are a great danger and are a threat to civilization which is why Putin is destroying their homes. If you listen to some people, all Ukrainians are Nazis. The crazy part is that I lived in Ukraine for 9 years and I never once saw a Nazi or heard about them, except on YouTube. I meet wholesome kids from decent families who want to go home.
When I read Bret Weinstein on English Wikipedia, he is still labeled as a misinformation person. The Wiki text appears to be written by a Ghost Writer who was paid by someone.