onoway

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/could-we-please-not-redeem-sarah-palin-she-is-unrepentant-nightmare-snl

May be a reaction to the world simply getting too big, too fast, too complicated and it's an (unconscious?) effort to bring things back under control? They perhaps haven't come to grips with the news that once this information is out there, it's not going to go away and trying to bottle it up makes them look like King Canute ordering the sea to stop rising. If he had been a little smarter he would have timed it better and impressed everyone no end.(Except, of course, people who knew about tides, but they could be discounted as a rabble rousing minority). That's sort of the difference between the smart and the not so smart politicians (and corporations)...the smart ones use information cleverly and convince people that their fantasy is real, the not so smart ones look like fools. Perhaps the exceptionalism they claim to have ought to include the insight to know which fights to engage in and which to let be, but that's not exactly been a strength in the past.

that would be baaad

The idea was for school age kids. Certainly the gift basket term was mine as they were supposed to be baskets to be raffled off to be used either by the winner or as gift baskets if the winners themselves weren't into whatever it was that was in it, sorry if that was misleading. It's a fundraiser thing. The seeds were to be part of the basket for the kids. People are not going to buy books, they figure they can get them for free from the library and many people here are struggling a little. My angle was to get something useful and interesting, with a little sheet about how to make a sunflower fort with living plants to foster the idea that there are interesting things to be learned out there. The gender thing never came into it until this last meeting. Of course there are gender differences, and there's nothing at all "wrong" with traditional roles except if they are restrictive, or lead to restrictive and narrow minded attitudes and incompetencies which are unnecessary and silly. Unfortunately they often do. It used to be common in this area that women did not drive, some never learned even how to open a bank account or write a check. When their husbands died, they were easy prey for anyone who got in there, and some were taken advantage of.It would have saved me hundreds of dollars had anyone ever told me that a draft stopped in June, is not necessarilly a draft stopped in January. With the divorce rate what it is, women had best learn how to use a hammer and men to use a stove, as just one example. Although most of the famous chefs have been men, I've known some men who literally had no confidence in trying to learn to cook even a fried egg. This is silly. It's not appropriate, imo, for a library or a school to foster the sense that there are areas which are not perfectly accessible for either gender.

This library group that I was getting the seed for absolutely floored me tonight. The idea had been that there would be a gift basket for the kids and one for the adults, that they would be selling tickets on. Tonight one of the board members announced that it was just too hard to find things that were non gendered so we had to have one for boys, with things like toy tractors and balls and one for girls with things like - I dunno - makeup kits and toy vacuum cleaners or something. I thought this sort of thinking went out at least 20 years ago, although after I was refused the chance to take shop in school and had to learn how to embroider aprons instead. Carpentry would have been MUCH more useful. When I ..somewhat tentatively,I am a very new member, protested, I was met with hostility by the mother who was proposing this (she has two daughters) who said something like although she herself didn't care, some people didn't appreciate such modern notions. When I suggested that was true but perhaps as a library, we ought not to be fostering archaic ones, they decided not to do a kids basket at all, but one for women with bubble bath and ornamental stuff to go in gardens, and golf stuff and fishing rods for the men. It just all seems so silly and a little depressing. I had to laugh quietly to myself because yesterday I learned that there is a huge fan club of adult men who are ardent fans of "my little pony". I've been here ten years and the place still astonishes me with how much it's still in a time warp from the 1950s. Hopefully it's not representative of what's going on out there in the wider world.

If we only wait long enough, science will catch up with itself. Sometimes. http://www.biznews.com/green/2015/02/04/scientists-seeking-save-world-find-best-technology-trees/

Of course there is no comparison between this situation and the horrific things that have been done with that excuse, any more than there is an equal comparison between a 12 year old boy who frequently enjoys pulling wings off live flies and someone who kills and dismembers people. The point I was semi seriously trying to make, though, is that there is a continuum, imo. Adults either take responsibility for whatever they do, on one end of the continuum, or it's always "someone else's " fault when things turn out badly on the other. It seems to me that we have gone way way too far in the direction of it's always "someone or something else's" responsibility. Such things as holding a cocktail waitress responsible for a driver who gets drunk and in an accident is to my mind outrageous. I believe that an adult takes responsibility for his or her own actions, and that means dealing with the consequences of those actions, whether it's giving the finger to someone who just swiped that parking space you've been waiting for or waterboarding people in Guantanamo Bay. Or going ahead with a farcical mismatch of teenage sports teams which can have no positive result for anyone beyond perhaps, the coach...and as it turned out not for him either. When society allows the shifting of responsibility for an event from the person who "did" whatever, to some outside force for small things," she shoplifts because her toilet training was too severe " and then bigger things, "he beats up homeless people because he comes from a poor background" , nobody should be surprised when kids grow up to have little concept of responsibility or consequences. They aren't taught as kids, they have no way to deal with situations which conflict with what they think to be ethical or right when confronted with them as adults, except to do as they are pressured to do and hope. Still, if not holding an adult responsible for what they do, then when - if ever- DO you hold someone accountable?

Maybe they do things differently in your neck of the woods, and possibly it's different for basketball leagues (I am only familiar with softball, which I used to umpire) but are you suggesting that this game was suddenly sprung on the coaches? Certainly any leagues with which I have been associated the schedule of who you play and when (including exhibition games) is known long long before the games, which is when things should have been sorted out. Not at the last minute, on the field, with the coach whining about what he did to try to remedy the situation.

And here I was under the impression "I was only following orders" had been ruled an invalid excuse. :)

You are expecting a child to understand and hold - comfortably- an adult's standards. Losing is indeed a fact of life, and kids are better off for learning that it isn't the end of the world. But there is losing and losing. For an adult to deliberately put a child into a situation where he or she isn't only certain to lose, but have her or his nose rubbed in the fact that nothing they can do will have the slightest effect IS irresponsible. It is certainly the opposite of empowering, it is fostering a sense of helplessness, and it will lead to kids not trusting adults to help them look after their best interests. I spent some years working with children between the ages of 9 and 14 who had many many problems, to the point they could not function in "normal" society, were placed in a residential situation because they were out of control at home, banned from schools etc. It was abundantly clear how many of them were there because they had no support system anywhere and had been forced to function at adult levels long before they were emotionally or socially and sometimes intellectually mature enough to do so. They had developed all sorts of strategies to deal with their sense of inadequacy, one or two through suicide attempts, most of the others with other sorts of ..usually hostile..techniques. It's a bit sobering to learn that a 12 year old child who had been emotionally abused for years by warring parents who both "loved him" and told him so repeatedly, had managed to turn him into the one (professionally diagnosed)psychopath I've ever (knowingly) met. Placing blame is not especially helpful EXCEPT if it helps prevent another child being forced to try to work out on his or her own how to deal with what they experience as a hostile world. Many many kids not in care live in what they feel is a hostile world but to a lesser degree, or they found more "acceptable" ways to cope. It decidedly isn't a credit to the adults in their lives. Far too many kids have no meaningful support system anymore.Years ago a child's suicide was unthinkable, unheard of; now it seems relatively common. How many kids have been killed by other kids in the last ten years, usually before they killed themselves? At least 30 years ago researchers reported that kids were no longer identifying school as a place they felt safe. (and that was before mass murders and lockdowns happened, and regular rehearsals as to what to do if a person with a gun arrived in their classroom.) Yet they are sent there every day anyway, by the adults in their lives, and left to cope as best they can. We expect a lot from kids these days. You keep referring to how YOU feel in situations which YOU choose to be in, this is not the case for these kids. If they were honestly and without pressure of any kind given the option of playing or not, and knew what the result was likely to be, and volunteered to participate, then I have no issues with it. The fact that the coach was suspended makes it abundantly clear this was not the case. If someone you trusted threw you into a cage with a lion but hauled you out before you got mauled too badly, then told you not to feel bad, they were proud of you for putting up a good fight, but you just had to learn that life is brutal sometimes, I doubt you would feel much better about it - or them. Words don't come anywhere near trumping what is felt. A responsible adult is supposed to teach a child strategies how to overcome obstacles,or help them find ways to circumvent or get help to deal with obstacles they cannot manage, not deliberately put insurmountable obstacles in their way, deliberately set up failure.It's unfair, unjust and a betrayal of trust, just power tripping. Failure will happen without it being forced, just in the natural course of living. Parents and teachers and people in positions of trust are supposed to be support for the child when that happens, not the instigators of failure. You forget, perhaps, just how vulnerable a child is, in spite of what often looks like bravado and insouciance. That's only one side of the story...the team that won is also being taught that society holds some fairly ugly values. Since most kids have an innate sense of fair play unless it's distorted by their environment, it wasn't a healthy situation for them either. There's little self respect or sense of accomplishment for a healthy ego to be beating up on someone known to be much weaker. They were put in an impossible situation of either doing just that or deliberately playing badly, which is highly unfair and unreasonable to expect them to do. The adults also failed them. One coach seems to have been a bit dim st best and the other one looking for some cheap glory. But whoever set this up is at least as much to blame, it was thoughtless and irresponsible of all the adults involved.

well, I wanted to get some feedback as I had a player the other day object violently to them, saying that they reminded players of their agreements and were therefore an illegal memory aid. It all seemed like clutching at straws to me, so wanted to know if I was out of sync for allowing them. They certainly save time when one pair is playing a system unfamiliar to the other pair such as precision. Good to know I'm not in error (or alone!) here. Thanks

If you are competing and your opps can casually disregard your best efforts as virtually meaningless no matter how hard you try, it is going to be experienced by most people as humiliating, nobody likes to be made to feel inept, incompetent,powerless, insignificant. If a person CHOOSES to put themselves in such a situation as a learning experience, that's a totally different situation, these kids play when and who they are told to. Telling a child not to feel humiliated in this situation is the same as telling a child that they should not be upset about being beat up or bullied - denying reality. There have to be other options and it is irresponsible of the coaches not to look for them, a total lack of respect for the players of either team to have this match go forward as a real competition instead of the farce it obviously was.For sure, it's a good thing to tell the kids that you respect them for doing their best, but it's a rare person, especially a child, to whom that is other than very cold comfort. The point is, the KIDS did NOT make the bed, the irresponsible adults in their lives did, and then made the kids lie in it.

There is a difference between people who are trying to make their mark in the world and those who are out just for fun and exercise, and whoever put the two together ought to be slapped silly. It would NOT be fun for anyone, not even the kibs, to put a casual lower intermediate player in a JEC match and few casual intermediates would have the (insert appropriate word here) to want to do it, aside from wanting the notoriety value. We have a standing policy now not to show the barometer in team matches as some of the early ones were so lopsided you could SEE the desire to just go away and maybe even give up bridge growing with each passing hand. That is maybe 15% the case when they don't know how badly they are getting stomped, AND it doesn't seem to have nearly the same long term negative effect as watching the score get worse and worse..like having a root canal without anaesthetic...you know there is an end to the pain but you just want it to be over. These are KIDS and unless both teams are intending to try to get into professional sports, in which case a reality check might be in order, whoever organized this match is irresponsible. This is a sports event comparable to bullying and should never have taken place. IMO the idea of teaching kids that winning fairly is not enough, you should humiliate your opps if you can, is the antithesis of the sort of attitude the world needs these days. IF the coaches had no say in the event other than to refuse to play or not, then they ought to have met and arranged some sort of alternative..perhaps matching players and having each player from the strong team coach a weaker player in technique - some sort of mentoring thing, maybe,...something so it could be a productive and fun thing for both without compromising the strong team. There are surely other ways to handle it. Even after the first quarter, when it must have been obvious what a sham it was. Shame on the organizers and on the coaches.

Second part of this.. how do you justify your decision to the players who don't agree with your choice?

I've been looking at this for days and I still haven't the faintest beginnings of a clue what that means, where or how I am supposed to do whatever it is. Is there something wrong about using the words all vulnerable?

double post

[hv=pc=n&s=sj2ha8dq74cjt8642&w=s753hkt93dj65c973&n=sakqt984hqj742dca&e=s6h65dakt9832ckq5]399|300| Imps, all vulnerable, South dealer, passed to North. How to proceed? [/hv]A couple of questions came up. I haven't put our bidding in because I wanted an unbiased reaction.:)If people object I will come back and put it in.

If you care what you put into your body, it might be wise to develop an interest... it isn't remotely the same sort of choice now as it was even 30 years ago. No frankenfoods then..they are everywhere now and going to get much worse. Stuff designed (using the word advisedly) to look pretty, ship long distances well, and often with poisonous chemical residues deliberately embedded in the food...nothing whatever about nutrition and little about taste beyond sugar. Just sayin'

I actually have two sets to get, one for a child and one for an adult. The child's packets were set fairly easilly..tall edible seeded sunflowers, Cascade snap peas to climb up and fill in the base of the sunflowers and marigolds to plant all around all around..also has edible flowers. Going to include a sheet on how to plant with an option of how to make a "teepee" with the sunflowers. Aside from giving the kid a hideaway, this also has the advantage of helping the sunflowers cope with the wind without falling over, as some of the tall ones tend to do. If the kid is living in an apartment, the sunflowers would be a problem but the other two would still be possible to grow even on a balcony... The adult set..isn't going to fit together so nicely but.. Paul Robeson tomatoes, a package of assorted coloured carrots (great idea, thank you Mikeh) and cracoviensis lettuce..it's a form of celtuce, something that few people around here have ever heard of. (it will also come with a bit of guidance as to what it is and how to eat it). I'd thought of flowers but hard to know what colours and textures people like. Veggies, at least they can eat them. I doubt there is anyone in the world (who likes tomatoes) who wouldn't love the tomatoes, whatever they thought of the other two! Thanks to everyone who replied! Off to order!

I've been asked to provide THREE packets of seed for a basket being made up as a fundraiser. Since I tend to buy enough seed to plant a small country I am having huge problems trying to decide on only three seed packets. Obviously nobody knows where it will end up ...might be a 100 acres or might be only a balcony available - so have sort of dismissed things that take up a huge amount of room or need to be trellised so that sort of leaves out corn, winter squash, most indeterminate tomatoes or 10 foot high peas, beans etc. Sort of settled on a compact indeterminate tomato -Paul Robeson- as it is both uncommon and uncommonly good, but what else? I'd like to get seed that is somewhat unique but not so much that it'll get tossed. Doesn't have to be a veggie..we are a short season (90 day frost free) area, in case that's useful to know. So...what do people like to grow, what's the default plant/variety that your garden can't be without?

The thing I find confusing is that supposedly people went to see what she was doing and it was pretty much only after she died that all this stuff came out. There were often photo ops of MT with various people and some of them were supposedly after taking a tour of some of her hospices....why didn't anyone say anything at the time? Supposedly security people check out these places before any of the hotshot bigwigs wander through on their publicity tours..again, how come nobody ever said anything about handicapped kids tied to beds and people screaming in pain with no relief? All the people who went to her, why did they go to her or take their family members there? It's not that I am an advocate for her, like most people I accepted what information was put out there, but it always makes me wonder where all these people were when she was still alive. Perhaps then something positive could have been done about the situation rather than only after the fact when really all that can be done is diminish the faith that somewhere somebody is a good person doing good things.

In the last week, twice when someone sent me an invitation for BBO to take me to a table, when I accepted, both times I was told that BBO had an issue and had to close. I thought it might be my old computer but when I apologised yesterday for vanishing instead of arriving at the table, the host told me that he too had been having the same problem. So thought maybe someone should know....

Does anyone make these anymore? At least, the "This year I am going to improve myself" sort?

I've had to try to train people on how to manage tourneys and team matches on the web version, so I've had to become familiar with it, although it remains far far far from my choice. This for a number of reasons, most of which come down to that for those of us not computer people, and that includes a surprising number of us, the web version is vastly more complicated and non intuitive to negotiate than the web version. Of course people who are forced onto the web version mostly learn to cope, and certainly there are some things such as voice which are probably very useful, and not available on download. The sub system for tourneys is one which is a mixed blessing, but it can haul a tourney out of difficulties so that's one for the web version. Also, to be fair, some people who have switched have told me they prefer the web version...but they all tend to be people who are much more comfortable whizzing about the net world than I am and I am more comfortable, it seems, than many BBO members, astonishing and a little scary as that is. Reasons why you never hear complaints are that most of those of us who prefer the download are well aware that a) there was a very good reason to develop the web version b) it won't make any difference anyway and c) we are afraid that if we annoy people by complaining that will hurry the process of having the download version become unavailable entirely. For me personally, that would probably mean the end of being involved with BBO, although I am undoubtedly in the minority. Nevertheless, since this is being brought up... When it comes down to it, the fact that I daily get appeals about how to get to the club tables is suggestive that it isn't very intuitive. (Maureen in BIL says she gets the same thing and she has people dedicated to explaining to newbies how to do what they want to do.) BBO now has a button on the screen to a huge long screen about HOW to use the web version, in itself perhaps an acknowledgement that it's complicated. The fact that a whole lot of people don't even know it's there, may indicate that it's cluttered. At the end of the day, though, BBO is a wonderful resource and I am grateful for the hours of pleasure (and pain!) I've had here. The details of programming are entirely beyond me. In spite of my desperate clutching at the download..including paying the same for freely acknowledged inferior GIBs and hanging onto a 15 year old computer just so I don't lose the download version...I am in awe of people who can put a program such as either the download or the web version together. Perhaps it's a matter of not being able to do what you want to do and have it work as intuitively as the download version does, or perhaps it's a matter of things seemingly obvious and simple to those doing the programming which are anything but to those of us who don't have the same sort of mindset.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it and a gleeful holiday for those who don't.