The Debatable Land

Probable Hiatus

Another mini-break: I'm heading north to visit my sister. I've said it before, but it deserves saying again that she's the person to contact if you need or even just feel like commissioning a painting. As a rather eminent Fund Manager said to me the other day, "Art may well be a safer investment than anything in my portfolio." And you can look at paintings too...

Kids These Days...

Turbulent times in the Dreher household:

Ramesh Ponnuru, seeing parents in his neighborhood encouraging their kids to be Obamatons, rightly says he doesn't get people who delight in politicizing their children. Completely agree. For some reason, though, my two boys -- ages nine and four -- are crazy for Barack Obama, and have been for a long time. They're put out with their mom and dad for not being for Obama. It has nothing to do with policy, of course; they just think he's the coolest thing. It's actually kind of cute, and as young as they are, I'd rather encourage them to be excited about the political process rather than engage them in tit-for-tat over who's the better candidate. (Though Matthew did ask me once what the difference between Democrats and Republicans was, and I told him, kind of flippantly, that Democrats believe that the government should give you whatever you want; "I'm a Democrat, then," he said).

Comedy assignment: someone should find households where the parents are devoted Obama volunteers but the kids are rock-solid Republicans. I nominate Mike Crowley or Dave Weigel to write this.

Photo of the Day

There would have been more - and better - blogging in these parts recently if I hadn't been helping to look after my niece, Florence, lately. She was, alas, suffering from abandonment issues as her mother was in London. Even the pastoral delights of the Borderland offered but a temporary reprieve. Still, here she is on her way to feed the two Jacob sheep (Rachel and Leah, obviously) yesterday:
All of which is a way of getting round to reminding y'all that you should check out the wee beast's mother's website. If you felt like commissioning a painting then you'd a) be smart, b) be rewarded with a fine picture and c) feel good about yourself. More details at Claudia's own website.

PS: Child-caring tip for similarly hapless fellows: The Wizard of Oz transforms cranky tots into goggle-eyed paragons of quiet behaviour. I plan to start Firenze Florence on a diet of Blandings Castle soon, however. She will love the Empress of Blandings.

Kith and Kin: Global Edition

Ever wondered how common your surname may be? Ever wondered where folk who share your name live? Well, now you can find out!

Unsurprisingly, Massies tend to be found in the UK and the dominions. In fact Massie is now a more common name in Canada (46 of us per million names), the USA (41) than the UK (38). Australia (26 per million) and New Zealand (15) come next. In the USA, you're most likely to find us in Virginia and West Virginia; in Canada its Quebec and Alberta. I'm also intrigued by the wee cluster of Massies around Biarritz in south-western France. By contrast, everyone with my mother's maiden name seems to have moved to Taranaki and Waikato in New Zealand, leaving few folks behind in Scotland.

Who knows how accurate any of this is? According to the World Names Profiler, Massies are most commonly called Linda, Susan, Janet, Peter and Leonard. No-one in my family has any of those names...

Anyway, diverting and mildly interesting.

The Cheney School of Parenting

Harlan Coben takes to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to recommend parents install spyware on their kids' computers.

Make no mistake: If you put spyware on your computer, you have the ability to log every keystroke your child makes and thus a good portion of his or her private world. That’s what spyware is — at least the parental monitoring kind. You don’t have to be an expert to put it on your computer. You just download the software from a vendor and you will receive reports — weekly, daily, whatever — showing you everything your child is doing on the machine.

Scary. But a good idea. Most parents won’t even consider it.

Maybe it’s the word: spyware. It brings up associations of Dick Cheney sitting in a dark room, rubbing his hands together and reading your most private thoughts. But this isn’t the government we are talking about — this is your family. It’s a mistake to confuse the two. Loving parents are doing the surveillance here, not faceless bureaucrats. And most parents already monitor their children, watching over their home environment, their school.

Today’s overprotective parents fight their kids’ battles on the playground, berate coaches about playing time and fill out college applications — yet when it comes to chatting with pedophiles or watching beheadings or gambling away their entire life savings, then...then their children deserve independence?

Alternatively, the chance that your children are conversing with paedophiles is vanishingly small. Ditto gambling away their (or your for that matter) "life savings". Which might lead one to think that the problem actually elsewhere. Clue, its the "over-protective" bit. Still, what's a bit of ludicrous scaremongering among friends?

Now, granted, I might well think rather differently if I had kids myself. But I can't help but suspect that most teenagers discovering that their parents are spying on them will indeed view their parents as "Dick Cheney sitting in a dark room, rubbing his hands together and reading your most private thoughts".  That being so, I'd have thought it would tend to erode trust between teenagers and their parents, rather than, as Coben seems to believe, build it.

[Hat-tip: Ruth Franklin, who also observes that on the very same page Caitlin Flanagan argues that far from consorting with paedophiles, American teenagers are too timid to even want to learn how to drive*...]

*Standard disclaimer: I don't drive either. But that's a public safety issue.

By way of an explanation for a likely hiatus...

Less than two months in and it's already time for that ominous announcement: blogging is likely to be fairly infrequent these next ten days. This will not dishearten many folk, but for those who care, it's because I'm heading back to the old country for my little sister's wedding on Friday. This promises to be a jolly, even joyous, occasion marred only, I fear, by my idiocy in permitting myself to be persuaded to attempt some American style BBQ.

Specifically, pulled pork and spare ribs in an approximation of the North Carolina style (I'm under strict instructions that tomatoes are not permitted within even sniffing distance of any sauce). This will almost certainly end terribly given that I have only the barest idea of what it is that I'm supposed to be doing and remain unsure as to what sort of equipment may be available for this epic endeavour.

Still, in light of the previous post, I know that these will be shoulders and ribs from happy pigs, raised the way nature intended them to be reared. Exotic, grass-fed, Maori pigs to boot, bred by my cousin Jamie at my aunt's house near Hawick in the Scottish Borders.