Jessi returns!
With all well-earned thanks to Grandmama and Laurel, the Manisfam celebrates The Return Of Jessi!
“You’re a Slytherin, Michael Ventre. A Slytherin.”
Fire Joe Morgan, one of my favorite baseball sites, takes apart MSNBC hack Michael Ventre’s comparison of the 2007 Boston Red Sox, the American League’s best team so far this year, to Phil Mickelson, professional golfer. Please read.
Paris 1919
A cleany-written survey of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that non-historians can enjoy. This book is not a study of the treaty itself. Instead, Margaret Macmillan covers the peace conference in Paris by focusing on the interaction of the major actors, mostly Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau, as they try their best to craft an agreement they hope will shape a new order of democracy and peace.
War in the middle east, 1930s fascism, genocide in Europe, Africa, and the Balkans are all sad evidence that the peace makers’ vision of a peaceful, democratic world shaped by self-determination of nations is yet to come to pass, but this book reminds me that neither the treaty itself nor the peacemakers who drafted are entirely to blame. They did make colossal blunders, such as their clumsy structuring of mid-east national boundaries, but they were working in the political framework of the time and negotiated the best document they could.
There isn’t a lot of scholarly analysis in this book until the final “Conclusion” chapter, but Macmillan writes of Wilson, George, and Clemenceau:
If they could have done better, they certainly could have done much worse. They tried . . . to build a better order. They could not foresee the future and they certainly could not control it. That was up to their successors.
That sounds about right to me. Yes, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles contributed to the economic conditions that made violent nationalism possible in Europe and drew up borders that have kept the Middle East largely unstable, but the world’s current leaders and citizens are as much to blame for our condition.
Macmillan continues:
When war came in 1939, it was a result of twenty years of decisions taken or not taken, not of arrangements made in 1919.
The same is true for our predicament today.
Wilson’s damned elephants
As mentioned in a previous post, Wilson carries his damned family of plastic (or maybe resin–they’re really heavy!) elephants with him everywhere he goes. The bath tub, the crib, the zoo where he proudly presents them to the real elephants, the breakfast table, to the park, and so on.
For the longest time, Wilson had 4 elephants. There was “Dah Unngh”, “Ma Unngh”, “Aa Unngh”, and “Be Unggh”. For those of you that don’t speak Wilson’s languange, that’s Daddy Elephant, Mama Elephant, Abby Elephant, and Baby (or Wilson) Elephant. Since these photos were taken, though, we’ve added 2 more elephants to the family. One is a wooden 2-dimensional circus elephant that he just calls “Unngh” and the other is a smaller baby elephant that the Romero Family donated to the collection that Wilson also calls “Be Unggh”. Abby tells him that it isn’t okay to have 2 elephants with the same name. She keeps suggesting that he call it “Jack Paul Unggh”, but he’s having none of that yet.
The trouble with the damned elephants is that they are too heavy and too bulky for Wilson to actually carry around. We tried introducing him to several different bags, but as you can imagine, with all those legs and trunks and big ears, they are hard for a 2-year-old to get in and out of most bags. We finally settled on a bag from Godiva Chocolates. His first one got used so much that it was as soft as cotton before one of the strings finally gave out. Wilson’s Grandmama was looking out for him, though, and has gotten him several spares from Godiva, so he will not be without. The bags are not a perfect solution, though. With all the elephants in it, and we never move without the whole family, it is really too heavy for him to carry for any length of time. But being an independent sort of boy, he also doesn’t want our help in carrying the bag. Even when he is dropping the bag and spilling the elephants every 10 steps or so and crying in frustration.
In desperation, I spent a whole morning going down to Ikea to find Wilson a wagon-like cart for him to push his elephants in. It seemed a perfect solution. Clearly I hadn’t thought it through. The cart is good until Wilson decides that the cart must be carried for some reason. If he sees a curb, an escalator, a bump, or any obstacle ahead, he insists that the cart be carried over the obstacle. This wouldn’t be unreasonable, except that the boy has 20/20 vision and can see these obstacles hundreds of feet in advance and wants the cart lifted as soon as the obstacle is spotted. And most recently, he’s come to the conclusion that I should just carry his cart as soon as we get out of the car, as if I don’t have enough to tend to.
So I’m currently on strike as back-up elephant keeper and it is creating a lot of uproar around here. Wilson is overwhelmed by the burden of caring for these beasts and he really can’t understand why I won’t succomb to his cries for help. Sigh.
For the plastic animal lovers among you, we’ve posted a tasteful gallery of Wilson’s pachyderm parade.
Abby receives the Panther Pride award
Proud Miss Abby received a Panther Pride award from her grade school for, among other things, “Tackling every learning experience with enthusiasm. For being dependable, honest, talking, laughing, learning to work out things with words. Lego queen. That’s our Abby!”
That about sums up Abigail’s approach to everything, from breakfast to bath to baseball. All out, all the time. Big smiles, big tears, very noisy. Lots of moving parts. That is indeed our Abby!
