So Now Can We Secure the Border?

Or is it still racist?

Gymnasts with implants

The Manolo on pole dancing:

Frankly, competitive pole dancing seems antiseptic, and mostly asexual, more similar to the the display of physical culture than the tawdry eroticism. So serious and martial, like the exercises done by the women of Sparta.

Miscellany

Martin Gardner, RIP.

The sex scandal behind Brideshead Revisited.

The undeserving poor.

One man's take on chastity: Gandhi played by his own rules.

Maybe This Guy Should Head the Treasury

Author predicts collapse of American and world economy due to debt and overspending...30 years ago! via Instapundit.com

What Holmes is Listening To

Miley.

While reading these stories:

White House puts on glamour for President of failed state.

While in economic news:

Dow crashes 376 points.

Jobless claims rise most in 3 months.

"And the Jay-Z song was on..."

It's a lost cause

Its, that is. Practically everyday I see well-educated bloggers use it's when they mean its. It's (ITS) also shown up in edited publications more and more.

Comment of the Week

Courtesy of me!

Mostly the Althouse commenters ignored my post, so I felt the need to narcissistically repost it.

'The gullible, the obtuse and the treacherous'

David Solway looks at self-hating, stupid and otherwise noxious Jews with high profiles and big mouths. A sampling:

• Jurist Richard Goldstone, who fathered the heinous UN report largely blaming Israel for its conduct during Operation Cast Lead — the same man who accepted a judicial appointment during the apartheid era in south Africa and who, according to reports, was responsible for sending 28 blacks to their death.
  
• Political careerist Martin Indyk, who is harshly critical of the beleaguered Jewish state he apparently once supported. Academic maven Neve Gordon, who denounces his home country, sides with the Palestinians, and offered comfort to Yassir Arafat in the Mukataa compound during the last Intifada.
  
• Visual artist Jan Egesborg circulating maps with Israel blanked out and featuring the phrase “Final Solution.” Journalist Uri Blau of the Haaretz newspaper in illegal possession of sensitive state documents.

Kelly McGillis

Is that you??

Is There No Room in the Democratic Party

for a moderate such as Arlen Specter? Such intraparty strife! According to the the Times, such strife only occurs with the R party.

You can't handle the truth

Americans: One injudicious word away from becoming a howling mob.

Weekend Steyn

The decay of England (and the West) continued....

Depressingly spot-on. Via Daniel Hannan's blog. (He's this guy.)

Weekly Steyn

On the Australian Anglican Church wishing there were fewer celebrating Mother's day.

Comments of the Week

Almost the entire first page of comments to this AP story on climate change.

Runner up award to the comments on this AP story on the crisis formerly known as the ozone hole.

People seem to be catching on to a cyclical pattern of environmental news reporting. Or is it a manmade problem?

'Red tape holds the nation together!'

Via

What Holmes Is Listening to

While reading this article on our A student betters. via Althouse.

After 75 years, I found my father's father

Of course, he's been dead for 34 of those years, but better late than never. I guess.

The question of Dad's dad has always held an allure for my mother, my sister and me, though not to Dad--James Sawyer deserted his wife and child when Dad was just a toddler and my father has always professed complete indifference to the mystery of his missing father.

We kids never knew our paternal grandmother either. AndI was curious about her, too. But as a child I hated to ask too many questions of my father. I remember having a bizarre notion that asking my father questions about his dead mother would remind him that his mother was dead. And occasionally my father would say something like "Rachel has hands just like my mother" or "Mama used to love" something or other and he sounded so sad.

But Dad's mother, née Mary Agnes Kilduff, also known as May, will have her own post. This one's about the elusive James Sawyer. Over the years, tantalizing details about this mystery man would emerge. We knew, or thought we knew, that he came from Gloucester, Massachusetts. That his family had been living there since before the Revolution. That he was a musician and that (perhaps) May had once hurled a hammer at his head when he made her straighten a picture for the umpteenth time.

Legend has it that my when my Dad and his best friend drove my mother's little brother from his home in Columbus, Ohio to college in Cambridge they made a detour in Gloucester. And I seem to recall, probably erroneously, that my Dad's friend told my mother that the place was lousy with Sawyers and that my Dad looked like a lot of people there. Or that a lot of people greeted my father as though they recognized him. Or that a lot of people looked at him funny.

Ah the glamor of mystery! Over the years, I'd google James Sawyer but to no avail. Then, a couple of weeks ago I responded to one of those 14-day free trials at Ancestry.com. At some point in my earlier googling I'd come across this:



A copy of the 1920 census that accounts for one 16-year-old May Kilduff, who lived with her mother Nellie (aka Grandma) in Brooklyn. I've gotta say it kind of thrilled me.

I've never been particularly interested in tracing my roots. I've heard tales of people who claim to have traced their roots back to Charlemagne to which I say, "What have you done for me lately?" My maternal grandfather claims his roots go back to Maimonides and my mother claims her grandmother on her mother's side was related to Admiral Nimitz. If indeed that proves to be case I'll let you know.

I've always thought that that sort of ancestor worship was kind of, well, un-American. But I am curious about the kind of life my father lived as a child. And what his mother was like. We only have a few pictures. And of course there's the mystery of the missing man.

Within a couple of hours I'd found May in the 1930s census. Now she's 26, goes by the name of Finley (husband #1), has two children, and still lives with her mother. May's life is, well, complicated. I'll get into that later. But she isn't living with James Sawyer in 1930, a year before my father's birth.

A search for a James Sawyer in Brooklyn turns up two candidates: A 33-year-old lodger who's listed as a laborer and hails from Massachusetts and a 27-year-old Massachusetts native, also a lodger, who works as a taxi driver.

(One of the coolest things about looking at these old documents is the little insights one gets into life in a not-so-bygone era. Who takes in lodgers these days? If you look closely at the 1920 census you'll see that my great grandmother, Nellie, had a lodger back then, too.)

I tell Mom, who tells me that James Sawyer worked as a taxi driver.

Then I find a 17-year-old Gloucester native named James Sawyer "living at sea" in the 1920 census. Could this be him?

To be continued ...

'A pale echo'

Of life in the USSR. Eugene Volokh on the Harvard Law School racism debacle.

Via, more good stuff here.

The Decay of England (cont.)

Election signs banned and improper doubleplusungood thoughts about homosexuality prosecuted.

Noonan Nails It

On immigration and a generally incompetent, but ever-enlarging, Federal government.

She is really insightful when she's no longer carrying water for Obama.