"successful defined by them, not society or necessarily their parents"


i like this. :-)

amen brother. i have a son who wants to create jewelry and a daughter who wants to join up with nasa at some point. my prayer is that they be good people, healthy and productive...in the vocation of their choosing.

Hey, I have one of those bumper stickers, too! My daughter is in the same grade and same school as Ian. Now, having both a son and daughter definately gives you a different perspective. News flash! Boys and girls really are different! We've had almost 30 years of propaganda now from extreme leftists that men and women are the same. Well, thank goodness that's wrong. I couldn't live with someone like me. Having been laid off and playing "Mr. Mom" for a while, I will admit that I am not a good nurterer. Get a bee sting, I say get over it.

I'm with you on the sports thing, too. Oxford is a highly athletics focused community. I've sat in bleachers with parents whose kids are doing baseball and hockey at the same time. They're never home. Never discovering anything new. Unless they get signed by the Wings, they'll be lost. Kids need to be kids. Look for cloud shapes. Get up close and personal with an ant hill (black ones).

Success is not found in money, it's doing what you love and feeling confident in who you are, regardless of what society says.

Apart from any gender differences there is a huge bias, in a large segment of society, against any sort of intelligence. Why this is, I can't say. But ignorance is seen as admirable. Things are supposed to get done, but if you think about what you're doing you're a wimp. Of course, many things, to be done right, require the application of intelligence, whether a segment of the population likes it or not. And people don't, for instance, want a moron for a heart surgeon. But in many areas -- business for one -- the bias against intelligence wins out. Well, a prime example is politics. Woe to any politician if he suggests he might try to contemplate and think things through. Hell, he's not a real man. Not fit to lead. Of course, we are seeing the sad results of this right now. Oh, but, all our problems are due to terrorists, and arabs and imigrants and gays. They having nothing to do with the fact the country's being run by a cretin who doesn't have the intellectual capacity to form a coherent sentence let alone solve complex problems.

The reason I'm on this rant is I just read this interesting article: Why Bush's Stupidity is a Threat.

Well, Eric, I'm sure we could have a healthy, extremely biased discussion on politics. I wasn't actually think Bush, although as I've mentioned before I'm reading "The One Percent Doctrine," at the moment and some of the things it says about Bush are disturbing. "The One Percent Doctrine" by the way, is occasionally called "The Cheney Doctrine," and it is essentially that if there is any possibility of a terrorism attack in any way, shape or form, if there is a 1% possibility of the attack, the U.S. has to act regardless of probability or facts supporting that statement.

One of the stories that I found most disturbing was after 9/11, there was a mini-summit at Bush's ranch at Crawford, where Prince Bandahar came to visit. Prior to the visit the Saudi leader had sent Bush a detailed, but brief paper on how Saudi and the U.S. should deal with the Palestinians and Israel, the U.S. staff prepped for it, and how odd the entire meeting was, and it was only later that both the Saudis and everybody present discovered that Bush had never even received the paper, it had gone directly to Cheney, which explained why Bush didn't act like he even knew what the meeting was about.

Frightening.

Just wondering:

Mark Terry

What a co-inky-dink! Rick Riordan is the featured speaker at this September's Colorado Gold Conference. I will be sure to sit in on his talks while I'm there.

As for honor roll: I was one of those beat-up honor roll students, mainly because I didn't (at that time) have the brawn to fight back. But I sure as hell made good use of my intelligence to put a stop to the daily/weekly/monthly beatings. My motto? If ya can't beat the crap out of them, outsmart them.

Christian,
I interviewed Rick for a profile when "Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief" came out and he seems like a great guy. Check out his website and hey, read his books. A lot to learn there, too.

I liked the one that said:

SOME DAY MY HONOR ROLL STUDENT WILL BE YOUR KID'S BOSS.