THE QUEEN: I don’t know them.

ME: You know. Smells Like Teen Spirit? Here, listen.

TQ: Hmmm….nope.

ME: You’re messing with me.

TQ: No, seriously, Mom. That doesn’t sound familiar at all.

ME : develops more gray hair

SHE WAS BORN IN PORTLAND IN THE 1990s FOR CRISSAKES WHAT IS UP WITH THIS I DON’T EVEN

Note to self for the future: teenagers eat a lot of food. There is no such thing as “I’m a little concerned that we’re going to have leftovers.”

The National Endowment for the Arts is supposed to promote the arts, of course, so one is unsurprised to find them arguing that people need to, you know, spend more time doing artsy things. Especially those damn philistine kids with their PSPs and their Intertubes.

What’s unfortunate is that their advocacy piece is being taken as objective proof that “Americans don’t read.”

It actually says no such thing. What the NEA is looking at, primarily, is the rate of reading a particular class of writing: novels, short stories, plays and poems. Not nonfiction books. Not magazines. Not blogs. (Manga or comic books? Who knows if the NEA knows these exists, or considers them to be “reading”?) It also doesn’t look at the quality of any of these categories of books–we have no idea of people are putting aside the latest Left Behind novel in favor of watching the History Channel, or not getting around to a new Rita Mae Brown anthropomorphic cat mystery because they’re busy reading Glenn Greenwald.

Their excuse for dividing the reading world up into literary and printed books vs. everything else is: “Because a large population survey such as Reading at Risk can’t distinguish too many subgenres or levels of quality and still keep the responses reliable and distinct.”

Right. Add “nonfiction” or “online materials” in there and you might as well be doing primitive sympathetic-magic rituals instead of statistical analysis.

Is there a literacy crisis in America? If there were, you couldn’t tell from this report, which might as well be subtitled Why The NEA Needs A Bigger Budget. Nothing wrong with helping the NEA, but couldn’t they achieve the same result without the Chicken Little act?

The SF Chron’s kid blog posted a couple of articles by a gentleman who, being the father of a one-year-old, is clearly an expert on parenting (no, really; you are a perfect parent before you have children and it’s downhill from there). Let’s set aside a discussion of the sexist implications of “wussification” for the moment; the article is one big, long whine about how Parents Today aren’t as stupid and careless as our parents were, and as a result of this most untoward concern for children not being maimed, killed, etc., Kids Today just aren’t having any fun at all and are coddled.

I’m not very good at nostalgia, so in addition to remembering the fun of bouncing around in a car with no seatbelts, I also remember friends who didn’t “do all right”. Kids who really did lose an eye, or a life, because somebody thought a stern warning and the threat of a whuppin’ was enough to keep the children out of the gun cabinet. There was a guy nicknamed “Shrapnel Face” because he was playing around with gunpowder and coffee cans–the doctors said his sunglasses were the only reason he still had eyes. I remember a friend of mine having to be towed around in a wagon while we played, because he’d been playing in the street and hit by a car–kind of tough to run around and play when you’ve got a shattered pelvis.

So if Hartlaub wants to live out his fantasies of being a manly, indulgent parent–and why not, he’s got a wife to dump all that “sensible and responsible” shit on–he can do it with his own kid, and I’ll expect that he won’t be flapping his lips when, say a parent buys guns for a kid who uses them unwisely. But he shouldn’t expect everyone to be dumb enough to think that the judgment of a child about what’s fun and appropriate ought to override the judgment of an adult.

Back in those days, when you wanted to write the President, you sat down and wrote a letter. On paper. And you mailed it with a stamp, not via e-mail or an online petition fercrissakes.

You also used your very best crayons for the job.

President Ford probably could have implemented my $2 into WIN for all the good it did the country, and for all I know he did. I was not appointed to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, but I did receive a thank-you letter and an autographed 8″x10″ glossy photo of the President.

It was very likely read by an intern and signed with an autopen. Even before e-mail, I doubt that Ford had time to personally read and respond to his correspondence, even amusing letters by grade-schoolers. I like to think that he might have, though. He was that kind of President.