Happy Fourth of July. Zoriana and Marianna are in kindergarten and Eddie is off for a long bike ride and then a birthday party. His new computer arrived yesterday. He methodically went through all the rigamarole to get all of the Windows stuff working. Microsoft tried twice to stuff Windows 11 down his throat. I did some research and perhaps – Mr. Gates is an evil man, but he is clever - found a way to block it. Eddie then installed Viber, Telegram, Chrome and Corel Draw.
I like the way he works. It will not be long before he is showing me how to do these things. In some ways he already is. I had forgotten to pay for the Internet. They don’t invoice you, just shut it off if you forget to pay. Eddie avidly watches the war news every morning, but could not today.
First thing he did, which I could not have done, was to arrange Internet access for my computer via his mother’s smartphone. It almost worked – the devices were talking to each other, but some permission was missing. When that failed, I made the low-tech suggestion that he could bicycle ten minutes to a kiosk and pay cash. He was back in a flash and watching the news.
Eddie is reading history, steadily if not rapidly on these summer days. Today we discussed the golden age of Greece. Why did the drawing in the book show an arched roof, when it was the Romans who invented it? What did the Greeks use to hold stone together? Mortar? Can we be sure when his book confidently tells us that Athenian citizens had to work no more than six hours a day because they had slaves?
Oksana left it up to Eddie and me to choose a present for Artem. No sweat. I told Eddie where in the hardware market he could find a good magnet. For $30 he got a beauty. Kind of thing any boy will love.
My favorite commentator on Russia is Edward Slavsquat. He reads everything and points you to his sources. The more their opinions diverge, the more there is to be learned. I gave you this link to his take on the span of opinions in America about Prigozhin’s revolt. Today he offers the same analysis of opinion in Russia. He observes that there is a fair amount of freedom of expression in Russia, with many different points of view. He asks an obvious question. Why does it seem like American commentators are discussing totally different events? Why don’t they have any historical perspective?
I twitted some of the folks who love to smear me as anti-Semitic because we see certain issues differently. Here is a wonderful commentary by one Jewish lady about another who fought a long rearguard battle against the way American society became so sexualized over the past few decades. They may disagree with us, but disagreement and anti-Semitism are not the same thing. The article goes into the Disney and Hunter Biden perversions. Things that makes me happy to live right here, Russian rockets and all.
Oksana has five days’ work as a real-time interpreter for some international conference. I gather the subjects are more psychological than musical. At any rate, her mom and I have been taking care of the kids. Saturday we went to Toastmasters as usual, and I took them to the zoo again Sunday.
Animals get boring. Eddie brought some long-nosed tweezers and pulled coins out of the cracks in the statuary around a pond. Zoriana took off her shoes and went after coins in the pond. I sat at a discreet distance and pretended not to know them. It kept them busy for an hour and netted something under $2.00.
We dispelled a myth about goats. I had brought some bananas to munch on. Afterwards we found separate receptacles for paper, plastic and metal trash, but nothing for just plain garbage like banana peels. I had a brainstorm. We’ll feed them to the goats in the petting zoo. It beats paying $3.00 for a small bag of carrots. Nope. Five goats sniffed them and turned them down. They want the expensive stuff.
That’s the slow summer news from Lake WeBeGone. We have the kind of quiet I like. Putin is either out of rockets or he is sending them elsewhere for the moment. The strong man has recovered from this and that and is back on his bicycles, exercise and real. Eddie is logging lots of kilometers, and we get to the beach with some regularity.
"Why does it seem like American commentators are discussing totally different events? Why don’t they have any historical perspective?"
Easy, the American educational system doesn't teach them any history, and they lack the curiosity to look up and learn it on their own. I knew this one kid who managed to get a degree in American literature without reading a single piece of American literature - he just read criticism and deconstruction and so forth - and he never had the interest to actually read any of the original works. By way of contrast, by the time I'd finished the same university, I'd read the entirety of Twain's, Hemingway's, Faulkner's, and quite a few others' works - just for fun, on my own. By the way, my degree was in chemistry, minors in biochemistry and computer science, and it wasn't unusual for chemistry majors to be far more literate and well read than History or English majors, for some reason
“When that failed, I made the low-tech suggestion that he could bicycle ten minutes to a kiosk and pay cash. He was back in a flash and watching the news.”
This story is a great sales pitch for moving to Ukraine... for me anyway! I was just telling my 5yr old this morning about paying bills prior to the internet... now it’s nearly impossible to get service restored even if you have the old fashioned backups available like manual pay stations or counters.