Where Have You Gone, Dan Quayle??

As if there weren't enough crazies celebrities running around having children, we can now add 16 year old Jamie Lynn Spears to the mix.

My personal favorite part of the press release is that she goes so far as to say that kids should not be having sex. WHA?!?! How about saying "I wish we had been [intelligent enough to be] using birth control"? No one should be getting pregnant who doesn't want to be pregnant. There are lots of options to prevent pregnancy.

And she is supposed to be a Nickelodeon ROLE MODEL??? And where are the Walt Disneys of the world, who convinced Annette Funicello preserve her Mouseketeer modesty by not wearing a bikini in movies, to save these young people from themselves? HELP!

Someone should be throwing condoms in with their paychecks.

(And in the meantime, my friends who are in a happy, stable relationship and cannot wait to become parents, which they will be AWESOME at, fight the fertility battle on a monthly basis. The world isn't fair.)

Personally, I can't believe some Republican candidate hasn't grabbed this issue of "family values" and made a run for the border with it. (This is so much better than "Murphy Brown".) (I would feel a lot better about this if her sister wasn't such a disaster in the parenting department. I understand that publication of Lynn Spears' parenting book has been postponed indefinitely. SHOCKER THAT!)

As Keanu Reeves' character says in Parenthood: "You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car - hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they'll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father."

Sharing at the Holidays

I went down the hall in search of chocolate, and a colleague regifted me some Ferrero Rocher hazelnut candies, for which she doesn't care.

I, on the other hand, have no problem with them. (She is really spoiling me.) Mmm, tasty.

Good grief!! No wonder my bottom is the size of Cleveland.

A Concordance to Shakespeare

Something happened to me today that made me think of the wonderful Shakespeare classes that I took with one of my favorite college professors. The student who works in my office (the Protégé) came in today to give us her schedule for the rest of term and stayed on to talk with me about a class that she is currently finishing called “Science and Shakespeare,” and she has taken on a very ambitious final paper topic (I have been warning her that her topic is too broad.)

She was stumped with finding enough citations/primary sources to support her argument, and I asked her if she had looked in the Concordance to Shakespeare. She was unfamiliar with the book, and I got all excited, telling her about what an excellent reference tool it was, thinking in my head of the wonderful volume in the college library.

While I was telling her about it, I went to “google” where she might find a copy of it. Little did I consider that, coughfifteencough years later, the whole thing is now on-line. It was one of those humbling moments where you realize that no matter how far you come in embracing technology, you are still going to have moments where you think of a large, leather bound volume rather than a website.

Still, the Protégé was extremely pleased and went off to research more about “merchants” and “money” and figure out some correlations to the Elizabethan and Jacobian economies (quite broad, don’t you agree? She hadn’t even considered the implications of the plague until I mentioned it to her!)

Artsy Fartsy

This weekend, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to check out the new exhibit about Napoleon and the Empire Style. I went with my aunts, who didn't know very much about Napoleon. Little did they know that the beginning of the 19th Century in England and France is MY TIME PERIOD! So yeah, between me and the audio guide, they learned a lot about Napoleon on Saturday, perhaps more than they ever wanted to know. I went around hunting for bee imagery because I am a nerd. I was glad that the museum actually mentioned some of the important things to know about Napoleon in the exhibit, providing a context for the style in the furniture and clothes and decorations.

We got to the museum early, so we took some time to check out other exhibits. In a special exhibit called "Shy Boy, She Devil, and Isis: The Art of Conceptual Craft. Selections from the Wornick Collection", there was a Chihuly glass seaform. That made me so happy, I took a photo with my cellphone.

They had two original Chihulys (very small) in the gift shop at the MFA. I called Sister K about it. If we bought one of those for our parents for Christmas, we would be set on gifts FOR LIFE.

Can you tell that I haven't even thought about shopping yet?

There really IS a Santa Claus!

And his name is Mayor Menino!!

'08 property taxes drop in Hub
Lower home values, changes in law add up

Residential property taxes in Boston are going down for the first time in five years, thanks to the city's red-hot commercial real estate market, declining home values, and a little legislative maneuvering by Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

God bless us, every one!

In absentia

I am just nearly over the cold I caught when I was on vacation... three weeks ago. At least now I sound like myself, even if I still have a stubborn cough to contend with.

I can't believe we are on the last page of the calendar for the year. Where has the year gone? I am going to miss writing "2007" on things. I like numbers with "7"s in them.

I have a couple of purchases I would like to make in the new year. One is a new iPod, with at least 30G of memory. Picking and choosing what does and does not go on my 4G Nano is just not working for me any more. The other thing I need to get is a new computer for home. My current one is 5 years old and is not working the way it used to anymore. I need a fresh start for all my tunes in 2008. Hopefully, I will get some money at Christmas and can put it towards these purchases. (Otherwise, I will be using my overtime from the last month!)

I spent $250 at the grocery store on Saturday morning. I realized as I was making my way down the aisles of my lovely Shaw's (that Harvard tried to tear down) that I hadn't been to the supermarket since October and had been living off of take out and office dinners. Well, now I have lots of food to eat; probably more than is good for me, but now I won't have to go shopping again until new years.

I hope that this snow melts before the commute home; it is rather sloppy out there today. Pretty, but sloppy.