Just some links tonight. Jonah was ejected from school today with pink eye. No chance to write much today.
Why the young are departing from Iowa, and the state’s attempts to keep them home.
Elizabeth writes about efforts to roll back the Family and Medical Leave Act.
Russell writes about his perfect vacation. Mine involves more traveling than sitting, getting lost in an old city, stumbling upon a secret restaurant that cooks fish just right, and lots of large foreign currency.
David urges us to blog more cute kid stories without shame. OK. Here’s mine:
PopPop: I hear that you like knights, Jonah.
Jonah: Yes. There are these catapults that are like long sticks and you pull them back and they throw rocks at castles. And there are trebachets that knock down castles, too. Battering rams, too. They knock down the doors of castles.
PopPop: Why do you think that they built castles long ago?
Jonah: So that the knights could knock them down with the battering rams and catapults.
Apt. 11d 
Jonah has impeccable logic and a wonderfully original analysis. I’d have to agree with his take on the whole castle-building paradigm.
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Jonah does indeed have a firm graspo on the ideology of the knights. Love the story, thanks for sharing.
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Ideology of knights? Think about it — you’ve got a fingerling Foucault on your hands, Laura! Why do we have wars? So that the military-industrial complex can supply them. Institutions seek only their own immortality.
I too say “Make with the cute stories.” Without any kids of my own, I have to leach off of everyone else’s. One of my favorite parts of Bitch Ph.D.’s blog is the transcription of curious dialogues with Pseudonymous Kid.
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“Mine involves more traveling than sitting, getting lost in an old city, stumbling upon a secret restaurant that cooks fish just right, and lots of large foreign currency.”
Of course, the operative word there is lots.
I stand by everything I wrote, but I’ll allow there are times when traveling is a lot more fun and needful than sitting. A friend wrote to tell me that Venice, for example, is an impossible to place to “settle into”; your only option is to whip through, see the museums and canals, and get out. Could be, could be. Still, if you never go anywhere with the option of sticking around and sitting a while available, when would you ever find those secret retaurants with the perfect fish? The locals are the only ones who know about them, and unless they’ve been hired to do so (in which case their information is suspect), they’re not going to be handing out flyers to folks coming off the tour bus. And for that matter, if you have to get back on the bus to Rome at 4:45pm (in line by 4:30!), you’re not going to have time to wander around and get lost in the old city. Better more often than not, I think, to be able to sit a while and forget about catching the train.
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