Science demands that we reintroduce lead into gasoline for a twenty-year period.
I really think the answer is no. It seems to be part of human psychology that as risk goes down, risk tolerance goes down with it. And that makes some sense of your friend's reaction, too: when it's really dangerous, the danger becomes part of the background; when dangerous things are anomalous, we spend a lot of mental energy on them.
If 2 were right, everybody would be unaccountably afraid of rickets.
People actually do take a lot of unnecessary vitamins.
I just remember to eat the liver of a polar bear every so often.
Anyway, there are people whose actual job description is to convince other people that young black men routinely knock out random people as part of a game.
That's true, and important, but it doesn't explain how freaked out people are about child abductions.
Maybe 15% of the local news is stories of a guy in a van who talked to children.
I blame 24 hour news and the internet for nearly everything.
I did happen to watch a local news broadcast a couple of weeks ago for the first time in ages, and my God what a strange, disjointed scary world that reflects.
Child abductions combine a whole bunch of fears (including fear of sexual assault, pedophilia) and so it's not surprising they are high on the "freak out" list. That's not new (remember the Lindbergh baby?) but modern communications media amp it up.
Calm policing down some, let our kids play outside, and worry about other problems?
I think the letting the kids play outside is just a norm that has shifted and that it won't shift back merely because the reasons for initial change have gone away.
The calming of the policing strikes me as different issue, one that should be more responsive to changing conditions if there wasn't a concerted effort to convince everybody that things were getting worse.
Local news seems to me to be more about "This house burned down. And someone shot someone else in an argument. Why should you care? We don't know. Also, this church is doing its annual food-based fundraiser. And now the weather."
It's more Fox News and CNN that paints a picture of a terrifying hellscape. In the Fox News world this is the fault of roving gangs of inner-city thugs and Obama, whereas on CNN there is no particular cause or cure for the random chaos that has engulfed us.
As near as I can tell, the weather report on the local news is mostly about painting a picture of a terrifying hellscape. "Snow is coming. Will it kill your dog?"
what a strange, disjointed scary world that reflects -> "This house burned down. And someone shot someone else in an argument. Why should you care? We don't know. Also, this church is doing its annual food-based fundraiser. And now the weather."
But yes, the Fox/CNN mindfucks add to the zeitgeist.
Part of my ineffectual campaign to get Fox off of TVs at my workplace was not just the hate speech/politics, but exactly this. My suggestions if they felt the need for some real-time "world awareness" feed (and there are actual reasons for there to be) were either BBC World News or CNN International.
My wife and I tried to be the change by giving our kids the freedom of the city in their early teens, just the point LB's interlocutor is remembering and fearing. It may be coincidence, but the confidence and self-reliance of both seemed to jump and flourish in just those years. At the very least, we showed faith in their development and their capacity to take on the new without our attention or supervision.
So it occurs to me that this woman is not only harming society, but hampering her own children's development in important ways. In a big city public trans is a literal ticket to the wider world, a source of pleasure and excitement for teenagers. Our friends were often amazed and apprehensive, although we were hardly the only ones, in those days. I think the numbers, just judging from ridership, of UMC white kids on the train at commuting time, often to selective public schools, has since grown considerably.
Now both my kids were shoved a bit, my son had to face some situations down, and my daughter was exposed to "squirters" within a couple of years—something I've never seen in 40 years of riding the CTA, and probably won't until I'm a lot older and frailer than I am now. But the total experience has always been a huge positive, and a great convenience for us to boot.
18 I have a technical solution for that: http://cornfieldelectronics.com/tvbgone/tvbg.home.php
19, 20: Mine does, but then it is a newsroom. And they're not visible from our part of the office.
19, 20: In some common areas, yes. And there are far-flung operations where quick knowledge of significant weather events or anything else potentially or actually disruptive is a plus. (But car chases in Florida or repeated images of Black Panther Party members near a polling place in Philadelphia are not.)
I meant to be questioning that they air Fox, not just that you have TVs.
But anyway, I think all the answers to the OP are in the first 20 comments. Heightened vigilance because the danger isn't as ubiquitous, plus media and folk-media stoking particular fears of pedophiles and abductions.
remember the Lindbergh baby?
Of course not! Why? What have you heard?
24: So, why don't they put the weather channel on? They have some good shows now.
Weather Channel is in fact one of the channels on some of the TVs.
27 - I'm reminded of the anecdote about Ruth Wilder Lane excising one of her mother's stories about some variety of child-botherer, because of Wilder Lane's belief (and ideological commitment to the stance) that things like that didn't happen back then.
So it occurs to me that this woman is not only harming society, but hampering her own children's development in important ways. In a big city public trans is a literal ticket to the wider world, a source of pleasure and excitement for teenagers. Our friends were often amazed and apprehensive, although we were hardly the only ones, in those days.
Absolutely. When I was 14, taking a BUS into a city of 45,000 people from a small town, on a bus route that stopped running at 6:30 PM, seemed like I was going off on an adventure into a new and open landscape of possibility.
Back to crime (never too busy for that!), the media is bad, but there's a feedback loop there, too. People are really freaked out by crime, and that's a big reason they put it on TV: people want to hear about it.
18. I used have access (at a previous job) to the complete AP news feed, which was really awesome but it tended to pull me in to the point of obsession. (This was before the internet got huge and did the same.)
Consequently, being somewhat obsessive, I would love a "world awareness" radio or TV station that was like that. (Disclaimer: not the BBC World Service on the radio, which is way too much into long-form stuff, and not NPR, which is the BBC with the serial numbers imperfectly effaced with weak acid, plus totebag-guilting.)
32: gossip, things that go viral on FB, fake-facts that "everybody knows" and so people stew on them and use them authoritatively on the local mothers board I'm on, etc.
There's a problem, though, that if your kid is the only one that walks to school, if anything does go wrong, the kid is by himself without anyone else to help, and now you're That Bad Mom who let your kid be unsupervised which depending on your demographics could have bad consequences.
(to be clear, I'm thinking more of "falls down and gets hurt" not "tempted by stranger in a van.")
The media explains most of the rise in fears, sure, but the underlying anxiety is caused by living constantly surrounded by people we don't know.
Oh, certainly. I'm almost done with this issue, because my kids are aging into the bracket where letting them run free is conventional for everyone.
But I'm back in the archives bitching about how I didn't feel safe letting my (seven or eight?) year old kids go to the park that was literally not even across any streets from our building, for fear that an adult would rescue them. And there weren't enough random same-age kids outside unsupervised to play with, and so on. You can push back a little at this kind of norm, but it's hard to be unaffected by it.
I favor kids taking the bus and crime is definitely not worse than it was in 1972. But this definitely doesn't mean that street crime is not a problem or couldn't or wouldn't get very substantially worse without good policing. The problem with stop and frisk as implemented by the NYPD. was not (or not just) that it was "aggressive" but that it was deeply ineffective, because the arrest yields from the stop and frisks were very very low. The one exception was for white people who were stopped and frisked, who did have a pretty high yield. But, of course, that's because the white people were actually being stopped on the basis of reasonable suspicion, which is both what the constitution requires and common sense would suggest.
"'Broken windows' si, "'Zero tolerance no'" is a good mantra. Lots of cops on the street with broad discretion to do quality of life crimes, no mandates to make bullshit arrests for no reason just to run up stats, and especially no mandate to do consistently pointless stops a la 2000s NYPD stop and frisk.
(Newt did have a "disturbing dude following him home from school" incident in maybe fifth grade, but his route home took him past a whole bunch of small businesses we patronize, so he stopped into the butcher shop and Bobby the butcher stepped outside to talk to the guy, which resolved the situation. Tactics like that can be available or not, depending on your specific circumstances, of course.)
Maybe lead exposure has a calming effect.
The problem with stop and frisk as implemented by the NYPD. was not (or not just) that it was "aggressive" but that it was deeply ineffective
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Kevin Drum knows the answer to that.
I don't know, but I'm not super interested in engaging with you.
you're That Bad Mom who let your kid be unsupervised which depending on your demographics could have bad consequences
for fear that an adult would rescue them...You can push back a little at this kind of norm, but it's hard to be unaffected by it
This kind of social control, however unconscious many of its agents may be, makes me sick.
There was already plenty of this in the suburb I went to HS in back in the 60s. My great good fortune was that when it came to parental norms and social expectations, my loving parents were living in another country and century. That I was the only kid who..., a very common situation throughout my schooling, was something about which they had no idea nor much notion there was something they might be expected to do about it.
44: He's right, but at the moment I am working a part time gig and hate typing on a phone.
It's wrong to say that the problem with stop and frisk was ineffectiveness.
I don't think that's a fair reading of 41.
Right. It was also ineffective, but an ineffective police tactic might be otherwise harmless. The problem with it was that it was harassing tens of thousands of innocent people and aside from the direct harm that did, also screwing up police relations with the community.
I didn't say (and don't think) that ineffctiveness was the *only* problem with stop and frisk. The same things that made it offensive and unconstitutional (racially based stops without reasonable suspicion) also made it ineffective. But let's not stop Josh from being self-righteous over a topic he knows little about because he's having fun.
Also agree with 51. And, good community relations is also part of effective policing. They're not separate things.
Dude, what I'm getting self-righteous about is your rhetoric and (as I mentioned before) you condescending to the rest of us. I know full well I don't have a fully-informed opinion on how policing should be done; I also know that right now really isn't the best time to make arguments that sound an awful lot like "well, the problem wasn't the racism so much as the fact that the racism was *ineffective*".
Like I say, not super interested in engaging. I don't mean to be (and don't think I am being condescending), and I'm not into whatever kind of weird boundary monitoring you think you're doing. There's a lot of interest in law and police tactics right now so let's talk about those things.
I guess I'll never have any details on what happened with grand jury investigating Eric Garner's homicide, so I'm going to assume I'm still right about a necessary, but probably not sufficient, part of the solution being the appointment of an outside prosecutor when dealing with prosecutions of law enforcement.
Yeah, I'm happy to continue banging on 'adult rescue' as the more serious risk. Both because it's more prevalent, and because one might hope that it's susceptible to social norming, while the expectations/conduct of genuinely mentally ill people can't be reached in the same way.
We need to have a society where people think shit through, rather than acting precipitously, whether it's to shoot a kid with a toy gun, or call the cops when some mom pops into the convenience store for a couple of minutes.
It is rather nice to be coasting into the zone when other kids are finally allowed to join our kid on public transit after several years of being the "negligent" parents. As far as I could tell he was never the only unaccompanied 10 year old on muni, but he was perhaps only one of a few who didn't have parents working several jobs or shift work. The only problem he's had thus far was being briefly stranded when the vintage case that his accordion came in basically fell apart as he changed buses. Awkward! But he had just enough battery left on his phone to call his father to the rescue - and he hadn't "forgot" the damn thing for once. We bought a new case, end. Nowhere near as dramatic as the butcher (in bloody apron? so awesome) stepping out for a "word" with the following dude.
57:
I agree, and it's the thread that ties together calls about toy guns, what Cala and LB are right to be concerned about when their kids play or navigate as they must, or even the moms on Heebies groups, or the lawn police in Di's neighborhood.
Thing is, these people think of themselves as doing good, as giving a damn, as acting against the danger and impersonality of modern life. The idea that the impulse is harmful is not only dissonant, but fails to address, denies really the isolation that panics them.
Just so long as that society continues to have buildings downtown willing to pay me to sit in their lobby and keep hobos and blacky out of the building.
the butcher (in bloody apron? so awesome)
As the story was related to us by Bobby later on, casually holding a cleaver.
It turns out I know a kid who was stabbed on public transit here a few years ago - a mentally ill guy attacked him when he was riding the bus I think. And he's a completely normal, social lovely kid. He basically never stopped riding the bus by himself because his mom works several different jobs on shifts so how else would he get around?
59.2: Sure, but a lot of it is some kind of sympathetic magic. If parents spend enough time worrying about Stranger Danger, they don't have to think about the people close to the child and family who are statistically way, way, way more likely to actually molest children. Being preoccupied with terror lets you feel like you're doing something and letting go of that vigilance could let danger in, even though that doesn't particularly make sense. Being a good parent is now about a lot of that magic and meta stuff because just what you actually do isn't enough.
63: in the UK, the national stranger-danger campaign was literally fronted by a predatory paedophile, and you can't tell me he didn't do that intentionally...
Newt handled that exactly right. I bet you were proud.
The people who call the police when they see a parent run into a convenience store, and a child restrained and not in distress, aren't worried about strangers. They want to punish the parent for doing it wrong.
911 operators should tell them to mind their own fucking business. Once they establish that there isn't an emergency of any kind (other than that if the police don't come right away, the parent might emerge from the store, and get away with it.)
911 operators should tell them to mind their own fucking business issue them citations for making non-emergency calls to 911.
39. "surrounded by people you don't know."
How is that different from how cities were in the 30s and 40s, when (anecdotally at least) kids were given the freedom of the city and their parents thought it was fine?
67.
Is right. Is it possibly just the modern incarnation of small-town busybodies and scolds?
66: I was pleased with him. He's a sensible child. (and of course, he could have done pretty much the same thing in a store run by strangers -- pretty much any business is going to be protection from a weirdo hassling a child.)
I think idp got it right in 57.2, it's reinforcing rather than reducing their isolation. Whilst supporting their self righteousness. Sort of lose-lose.
How is that different from how cities were in the 30s and 40s, when (anecdotally at least) kids were given the freedom of the city and their parents thought it was fine?
There is one significant relevant different. Kids in the cities in the 30s and 40s went out to play with packs of other kids from the neighborhood. (I did the same thing myself as a kid, although that wasn't the 30s or the 40s.) There's a lot less that can go wrong with a pack of kids, and if something does go wrong someone can get help. A kid off by him- or herself is a lot more vulnerable, not only to things like evil predatory strangers but also to just general accidents, getting lost, etc. This is true whether you're in the city or the jungle. It's also true of adults, of course, although adults are better generally somewhat equipped to navigate the world alone than kids are. And if you send your kids out today, there probably won't be a pack of kids they know out there with them.
pretty much any business is going to be protection from a weirdo hassling a child
Maybe not any business.
911 operators should tell them to mind their own fucking business
I'm curious how much of this already goes on, perhaps politely, so that the change we want would be a matter of degree more than kind. Against it would be an expectation that they want to cover themselves, in case it does turn into something and the 911 call shows their indifference, and possibly liability.
gswift probably has an idea, as might BG and other call center/first responder types.
70: I had to go into a 24-hour CVS to get a prescription filled. There was someone at one end near the regular check-out and a pharmacist. In the waiting area near the pharmacy there 3 sort of weird-looking guys just sitting there and talking.
I felt safer outside (it was October) than in the store.
72 gets it right. I see lots of youngish kids in my neighborhood out on their own, but they are pretty much all packs of black or latino kids moving together, never single kids alone. I never see packs of white kids playing on the street anywhere in this super expensive, largely segregated city (except in my friend's gated community in Orange County, where the kids totally do wander from their front door out to play without asking, but then play within the huge bounds of the gated community). I'd totally consider letting my kid (well, maybe when she was 8 or 9) go to the local park to play for a few hours if I knew that she was with a gigantic pack of other kids with maybe some older siblings with access to some nearby adult figure, but it'd be really different letting her wander off to the park on her own.
72:
When word of pre-teen travel adventures got back to me, I was fine with it if a group had done it, not just one of mine.
On walking to school, I remembered this morning that when I started kindergarten in '57, a group of neighbor kids led by an older, but still elementary-aged girl stopped by for me. We walked along Hwy 31, no sidewalks, until turning onto Alta Vista, probably a mile in all.
How that was arranged I don't know, but when the Calabat is older there isn't anything better to do than offer it, if no one else is.
911 operators should tell them to mind their own fucking business
I feel like "mind your own fucking business" was the default position in the US when it came to other people telling you about your kids until about 20 years ago, and then something changed. This could be totally wrong. I'm still sort of affirmatively shocked in an etiquette sense when I see strangers talking to other parents about something they're doing with their kid, it just seems rude.
At age 8 I walked 20 minutes to school, and everybody did. At 9, I took the train in to private school. The private school initially wanted me to take the bus, but that was more dangerous, because you had to cross a highway to get to the morning bus stop.
Yeah, we actively organized a group of kids to walk each other to and from school. By fifth grade, we weren't enforcing them walking home together, but generally it felt different mostly having three kids together rather than just Newt alone.
78: The nice thing about my area is that a lot of kids walk to school, and we're half a block from one of the elementary schools. (Though some parents drive their kids because "there are no sidewalks." Yes, but there are also no cars, because it's a residential neighborhood, or wouldn't be, if you guys wouldn't be driving your kids three blocks to school.) So that's not so much of an issue, but unsupervised playtime in the parks would be, I think.
Nia will probably start walking with neighbors next year (3rd grade, 0.6 miles mostly through our neighborhood) although actually there's a special bus between the two schools for younger kids (Preschool-2 and 3-5) to let siblings who are dropped off together or walk younger siblings to school get taken to their own school rather than have to walk, and we might do that. Their current school is 1.1 miles and we sometimes walk it together but right now I don't trust them to do it safely themselves. It would mean walking past strip clubs and halfway houses, but it's the few blocks that are pretty much empty that worry me most. Many kids do walk to their school, but typically with an adult.
Though now that I say that, there was some sort of grant to improve sidewalks that's going to mean a lot of trees get planted but possibly other things about walking would get easier too. It wouldn't change Mara and Nia, though, and that's the biggest factor right now. (Am I being hypocritical when I think other parents are being overprotective and that my reasons for thinking my kids are easy targets for certain things are reasonable? Hmm.)
I would also worry about empty houses. There was a horrible crime not far from me that happened on a street where most the houses were abandoned.
Yeah, I'm all gungho about this stuff, but I had large, stolid, confident children walking through a lively neighborhood where they actually knew a lot of people. If you've got concrete concerns about your individual child or route, that's different.
I'll cop to being an overprotective father, but in a general sort of way, I'll still argue that the increase in adult paranoia about kids' well-being has been a good thing.
Skimming this report (which is a pdf), you can see how child mortality has decreased over the years, and there's a good pie chart to show how accidents for 5- to 14-year-olds have decreased since 1970. Seatbelts probably account for a lot of that, but I'm too lazy to check.
So I think there's a decent case that we ought not say that parental paranoia has increased despite increased safety, but that increased safety is (at least to some extent) a result of parental paranoia.
There is a family across the street that drives the kids about 4-5 short blocks to/from school. No shortage of sidewalks, folks! And we live in one of SF's dullest neighborhoods. There are several families on our block with kids of a similar age to ours but who are virtually never seen outside . They exist in a bubble defined by house/apartment with attached garage, car, private school, private recreational facility.
Yeah. I'm not being defensive, just my kids need some things that other kids don't and I'm okay with that. They're allowed to walk to neighbors' houses and home from aftercare a few blocks away and that sort of thing, but they need some time safely navigating that before they do much more on their own and that's fine. I would let them go to the park together except that the last time I was there I had to yell at a bunch of 12-year-olds (white, so maybe they were actually 20 and it works in reverse) to stop smoking pot under the climbing structure while there were kids playing there and that seems like a Mom Job.
And since we're talking about this, it is so heartbreaking but also awesome to hear the things they can manage and have managed. One of them has her own plan for a "dangerous person in the school" drills because she's convinced she knows which relative of hers with that sort of history it would be (another reason I worry about her walking unaccompanied) and finds it soothing to have her extra personal plan. I can barely imagine being a tiny person and able to handle it, which really impresses me in them.
88: That surprises me. One of the things I like about Beacon Hill (which was not as expensive in the 80's as it is now) and, to some extent, Georgetown, is that people do still talk to eachother on the street. In Georgetown you can have a tab at the local convenience store.
When we lived on Beacon Hill in a row house, we knew our neighbors, because everybody walked. Even in Brookline, people didn't engage as much.
87: Yeah in the 60's a lot more people drove drunk without seat belts, and a lot of them died. That was a good norm to change.
Perhaps everyone shuns us because of the atrocious color the landlord painted the building ...
79: I think there's two related norms here. My (probably wrong) impression is that it used to be that other adults were allowed to yell at other people's kids for misbehaving if the parents weren't around, but that now the norm is that you can't talk to another person's kid you're only allowed to go through the parent. That is, instead of interacting with other people's kids as people, you have to interact with the parent-kid relationship as a unit by talking to the parent about their parenting (which results in ridiculous rudeness).
Hmmm, 94 does seem right. You can't scold a child anymore, so people scold the parents.
There are different kinds of safety. Thorn's magic thinking hypothesis focuses shall we say, intentional torts while my kind of safety focuses on trespass on the case.
So while I'm the poster boy for underprotective father, a neighbor who is now employed overseeing car seat instruction at local hospitals says I was the only person he knew when our kids were young who was dong it right, as he now knows.
I'm alert to hazards but not to demons.
94 is class-based, though, right? Could you, TRO, get local kids off your lawn easily, so to speak? I had no qualms about talking to the kids in the park and don't hesitate to intervene if there are no parents around, but I wouldn't as readily with rich white kids.
Could you, TRO, get local kids off your lawn easily, so to speak?
Probably not, because of fear of seeming racist and pissing off their parents, but they're not generally on my lawn in the first place, possibly for fear of the white dude's house. But we're all very friendly and they're good kids anyway and I compliment their skateboarding.
I think that one of the issues with free range kids is that back in the goodoldays neighborhoods were generally filled with people who shared most of their values around raising children, coupled with the fact that people tended to talk to their neighbors more. You could be assured that the nearest responsible adult when something bad was going on would be someone you either new or at least someone whose child raising philosophy wasn't 180 degrees off yours. This is, of course, completely uninformed speculation.
98: Nah, Bobby's not Newt's real name, Bobby's the butcher.
Come to think, that is his real name, but I can't imagine he'd mind.
I wish I could get my kid to play outside. We live in a safe compound with gates and shit, but its boring as hell out there and I don't blame him for not wanting to. Whats he going to do - hang out in the parking lot? There is not much in the way of other kids around.
We've been trying to convince him to walk to school on his own, but doesn't want to. School is nearby, but our neighborhood lacks sidewalks, because why would you have sidewalks in a place where everybody drives?
The iguanas would eat it. You don't want the iguanas getting a sugar rush.
Hanging out alone in a parking lot is not what most people mean when they talk about wanting their kids to play outside.
There's a dead squirrel outside near us. It looks like it fell out of the tree and died. It's flat on it's belly with its limbs splayed out and blood coming from the eyes.
What I'm saying is, can iguanas eat slightly rank meat and, if so, can you send me some?
I rode my bike to/from school pretty regularly when I was between 10 and twelve and while I was often with other kids after school, in the morning and in the afternoon once we split up to go our separate ways home, we were basically alone.
By which I mean: if that's really all there is for him to do, you can't really blame him for not wanting to play outside much, and I'm not really sure why you wish he would.
Yeah, 97 is right, an earlier edit of my comment had "white" in there somewhere, because my (limited) experience in Black churches suggested that the "respect your elders" culture lead to quite different interactions.
To follow up on "respect your elders," my impression is that the old white middle class norm was that if there was a dispute between your kid and another adult the default was for the parent to take the other adult's side, whereas now the default is to take the kid's side. This is especially clear in teacher/kid interactions.
101,102: In which we learn that it takes LB a full minute to remember her son's name. Are you sure he's not Rupert?
100: Very accurate, IMX. That's my childhood in the forties and fifties and my kid's twenty years later.
I assume iguanas love nothing more to eat than slightly rank meat. But no, I can't send you any. There are laws.
you can't really blame him for not wanting to play outside much, and I'm not really sure why you wish he would.
I want him to get exercise, have some practice with self-supervision, have experience interacting with people not inside the house, get out of my hair for a bit, chase some iguanas, maybe. There are reasons.
My very close friend who grew up on a Caribbean island used to hunt iguanas with a pack of terriers for fun. It really is pretty fun to hunt iguanas with dogs. You could get a bunch of dogs and have your kid do that.
You didn't mention that he could chase iguanas. You threw me off with your "Whats he going to do - hang out in the parking lot?" No, he's going to chase iguanas. Get out there, kid.
Also, iguanas don't eat meat. Moby's going to have to eat his own squirrel.
Also, if he learns how to successfully bow hunt iguanas he will never have to worry about being bullied.
It's not my squirrel. I just have to walk past it frequently. We need a neighborhood vulture.
Our bit of the Caribbean is perhaps a bit more urban than your friends. I think we'd run out of iguanas pretty fast. Our compound has four, that I know of. And no dogs allowed.
I mean, while living, it was part of my herd. But like a dropped tree limb, if it dies in somebody else's yard, it is not my problem.
The trouble with chasing iguanas is first you chase them, and then they go into their iguana hole and don't come out. So, that's good for about 10 or 15 seconds of entertainment. You can stretch it out a bit if you stalk the iguana beforehand.
Maybe he can chase rats. The rats have no fear.
Lend the kids your car keys so they run a hose from the exhaust to the iguana hole.
100, 113:
Neighbor in this sense is a selection, though. About a dozen houses were sold in my neighborhood within 1-2 years of our moving in, about 1990, half on our block. It was postwar owners whose kids were grown moving out, those just starting families moving in. They've become my closest friends, still, and we have spooky affinities. I always think of that when I read about micro-marketing to sub-sub-zip codes.
We'd go out on the block when our kids were small, in good weather, and talk with each other while the kids played. In other weather the kids would be in and out of each other's houses. Now the kids are grown, although many stay in touch, but we still have a lot in common with each other besides being parents.
The classic neighborhood; and any of us intervened to correct misbehavior on anybody's kids behalf.
But it was never the whole neighborhood, or even the block. There are people on the block the whole time I've lived here I've never or hardly ever spoken to. I'm friendly with some older people outside my parental cohort, and some young families too, but the core was a group that formed when we moved in en masse.
Teach him to fish for lizards with a stick or pole and fishing line. Use a slip knot loop instead of a hook and loop it over their head, we used to do it with fence lizards as a kid in So Cal.
That's why the terriers are good. The terriers can dig.
If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish for lizards, he eats lizards for a lifetime.
A grand jury has indicted Richard Combs, a white man who, while the police chief of a small South Carolina town, shot and killed an unarmed black man nearly four years ago.
Yes, we can!
As the story was related to us by Bobby later on, casually holding a cleaver.
Evoking the awesome story of my mom threatening a bully at my sister's school, and then answering the front door while holding a chef's knife when the bully's mother showed up to complain.
We found out last week that, at some point, somebody in the park at the end of our block (like, 5 houses down, no cross streets) pulled out his phone to call the cops because Kai (age 6, looks like he's 8, may literally be taller than one of Iris' 10-y.o. friends) was riding his bike in loops on the paths. Totally insane.
To call the cops because Kai was a neglected unattended child, or because Kai was a danger to others who needed to be stopped? (I mean, they both sound crazy, but I'm not dead sure which you meant.)
Or because he was wearing the Scream mask?
94 is class-based, though, right?
Not IME. Back in the mid-'90s BOGF and I worked with this group of 4 6th graders (black kids from the Hill District, 2 of whom lived in what remains one of the city's worst projects) who'd come through a tutoring program and were now writing a newspaper associated with the program (real advertisements from neighborhood businesses, learning Pagemaker, the whole bit). These kids knew each other, had been in the program for 3+ years. Yet one time one of the mothers did something corrective* to one of the other kids, and the other kid's mother freaked out. So that was very similar SES**, culture, neighborhood, the whole bit.
I think most UMC whites would feel uncomfortable about correcting a WWC white or black kid (even if they did it, it would be awkward), and the parent of the corrected kid would be likely to get defensive. And I think UMC whites only correct each others' kids when there are clear markers of shared culture - that is, if I saw a kid who looked like a Waldorf type, I'd be more inclined to intervene, but I'm treating a kid in full Disney gear as too alien to engage.
Oh, and BOGF's white trashy family I don't think would have been open to their kids' being corrected either, again, unless there was super-clear cultural affinity. "Don't you judge me [or my kids]" is the family crest of America's lower classes. I understand why that's so, but this is one of the outcomes.
*I have no recollection what, but she certainly didn't raise her voice or get inappropriate. A little stern, but not shouty
**95% certain it was not one of the non-project moms correcting one of the project kids; that is, if there was class stuff going on, it was truly small differences
131: I can only assume the former. Kai was hazy on the timeframe, but I believe this would have been in October, when the park was pretty much empty after school. And the parts he'd be biking would be mostly deserted in any case.
It's conceivable that he'd be annoying to some of the basketballers, but I can't imagine that they'd call the cops on a little (white) kid on a bike. Plus, he'd probably have mentioned that detail, although he's not the most reliable narrator.
I'd ad, the adult never said a word to Kai before pulling out his phone. Whatever the issue was ("Where are your parents?" or "Don't ride around like such a maniac!"), speaking to the child was never on the table. Straight to 911.
Asshole.
5-6 months of every year I get all kinds of corrective with a bunch of teenagers, but in the context of coaching mock trial so there's a formal acknowledgment that the coaches are there to lead. It always cracks me up how thoroughly the students "cast" the attorney coaches, so that even though I am clearly one of the more stringent coaches and one of the most likely to lay down the law so to speak, they've got me fixed in their minds as being super nice and a fellow lead coach as super strict, etc, even though he's really a big softie.
Disciplining other people's kids comes up not-infrequently on the local mothers board. Everyone seems to think it's great in theory, but people also get defensive when their kid is the one that receives the other-parenting. I suspect it's the kind of thing that happened a lot 20+ years ago - both the scolding of other people's kids, and minor skirmishes among parents who were predisposed to dislike each other.
Huh. It wouldn't even occur to me to let a six year old bike around unattended in a public park, even one very close to home. (Of course, I wouldn't call the cops if I saw such a kid, but I might ask him if he was OK). Is that unforgivably paranoid and crazy and free-range-parenting suppressive?
There was one father of a fellow dancer who used to comb my kids hair before performances every chance he got and my kid hated it, but we just told him he had to learn to deal. Gotta learn to stand up to the Russians when you're young, we said.
As long as the only life you're ruining is you own kid's GT, you're good.
I'm not even judging. Maybe that's the right move. It just actually feels unthinkable.
This thread reminds me that when I was about 20 an (older) friend broke off all contact with me because she worried I was going to steal her baby. Which, obviously I had no intention of stealing her baby, but in retrospect I can see that it was definitely sort of a reasonable fear. I didn't know better at the time, but you shouldn't take people's babies out of their houses at night without telling them.
Which, obviously I had no intention of stealing her baby, but in retrospect I can see that it was definitely sort of a reasonable fear because I am a dingo.
140: Oh, so other kids can get traded for crack at the park but not yours? Man, get over yourself.
141 is vintage urple. Did you remove the baby because you found some really choice mold you wanted to share with it?
Honestly I thought was doing her a favor. I was staying the night, in the middle of the night the baby started crying and she didn't wake up so I took the baby for a walk in the park to get it back to sleep. Returned the baby back to its crib an hour or so later sleeping soundly. She was oblivious to all of this, and when I told her about it the next morning she initially thought I was joking, but I convinced her that I was serious at which point she just glared at me like I was insane and told me I needed to leave.
137: I mean, we can literally see the park from our back porch, and it's probably empty 40% of daylight hours*. Which kind of suggests spookily empty, but also means that he's not exactly surrounded by Stranger Danger. Also, it's across the street from a sort of old folks home where there are always people outside smoking, so eyes on the street, kind of.
Oh, and I should add that this would be a 15 minute diversion, not an all day summer vacation activity. Like, we go for a bike ride, and at the end I suggest that he do a few loops around the park, where there are no cars to fear or long, hard hills.
But I push fairly hard on trying to get the kids free range, because I think current norms are bullshit, and I want the kids to feel like the city is their oyster by the time they're Sally/Newt ages.
*I don't know how to do an estimate that covers all possible daylight hours. On a summer Sunday morning, it's likely to be deserted, if that gives you some sense
urple jokes aside, the behavior in 147 - assuming you weren't just randomly crashing at this house - is 110% reasonable.
It was actually probably much less than an hour but I don't think that's really important to the overall dynamic.
I'm pretty sure that when I was 6 that I was allowed to go anywhere that didn't involve crossing a street, though maybe that wasn't until 7 or 8 (we lived in one place from 6-8 and it all runs together). Our block didn't have a public park, but if it did I'm sure it would have been fine. But I think in the place where I was 6-8 we weren't allowed to visit the friends on our block across the street without an adult to help cross. When I was 9 our best friend was two blocks away, and then we were allowed to cross the street alone to get there (but they were very calm streets).
Not sure about that. I think Miss Manners would say that "ask first before you take someone's baby outside in the night" is at least proper etiquette. On the other hand, this person allowed Urple into her home, so there's an assumption of the risk defense.
148 is like 1,000 percent reasonable.
I'd actually find it surprising. Not all that objectionable, given how it turned out, but I'd be pretty slow to pick up and soothe someone else's baby without the awareness of the parents if I hadn't been expressly left responsible for it, or if we were really really close (like, immediate family), or if the parents' were somehow unavailable.
Depends on the circumstances, though. If I were a guest sleeping in the same room as the crib, I'd probably take that as authorization to soothe. And leaving the house to walk outdoors for a bit doesn't seem like much beyond that.
D'oh, 142 was me.
148 sounds reasonable to me. I'll see CAPA students on the bus occasionally and they handle it fine (actually, they'll usually be more respectful of norms than university students, but that might just be because they ride outside of peak times). Better to get them comfortable with their surroundings earlier; it seems to be a safe city for an observant kid.
148 sounds fine. The thing that changes it for me (not that I was saying it was *wrong* before, just not thinkable) for whatever that's worth, is the ability to view the park from the back porch, which makes it basically analogous to playing for a relatively short time right in front of the house without directly being watched. I'd probably check once or twice from the back porch in that 15 minute window though.
If I were a guest sleeping in the same room as the crib,
I was a guest in the room right next to the crib, with no door in between the two rooms, whereas the mother was down the hall behind closed doors.
Anyway, I honestly didn't think anything of it at the time (other than dear god how do I make this thing shut up so I can go back to sleep), but afterwards I realized how it could have been interpreted. I mean, what if she'd woken up to check on the baby while it and I were both gone? I'd have probably returned to find cops at the house (and then I'd have been shot (although not really because I'm white)).
Regardless, she never wanted to talk to me again.
133 is definitely a real thing and I can't articulate how I gauge what falls in the "She doesn't get to tell my kid what to do!" bucket and what doesn't, and I do tend to defer to not saying anything if I'm not sure, especially because I'm outside my native cultural milieu. But there are a good number of situations where I do speak up or at least say Mmmmmmm! to accompany a significant eyebrow.
Urple's probably leaving something key out of this story like how he brought back the baby naked and covered in BBQ sauce.
We weren't strangers but I didn't know this woman very well at all. I don't actually remember why I was sleeping at her house but I think it may have been because I was drunk. I mostly remember that she made terrible White Russians.
We weren't strangers but I didn't know this woman very well at all.
This came out stronger than I meant--was mostly a stronger to LB's "if we were really really close (like, immediate family)". We were friends at the time, just not particularly close ones.
Maybe she was saving her placenta in the fridge and urple ate it.
strongerreaction. I can't type at all.
You left out the drunk part. I think that might be more relevant than the night part.
I guess the real question, purple, is whether you thought the child was likely to have been yours.
Maybe she was Ferberizing the baby. She thought the baby had learned self-soothing techniques when really a drunk guy took the baby to the park.
I would have said before this thread that Ferberizing worked for us, but maybe it was something else.
In some societies, it's traditional to calm children down by threatening them with nighttime kidnapping by a drunk urple.
It was one of those neighbors you never talked to, idp ...
To know for sure, you need to LoJack the baby. That's what they do in the maternity ward. Of course when somebody stole the baby from the hospital by my office, the tracking thing didn't help at all. If you show up with a newborn, your family will probably call the cops on you if you can't explain why you have a baby and the TV has stories about a stolen baby.
I'd probably check once or twice from the back porch in that 15 minute window though.
I'd intend to check, but would get immersed in the internet.
My younger son was completely thrown when we moved to England when he was nine and he could no longer just go to the park with his friends by themselves, as he'd been doing since he was six. Now he's started secondary school, some of his age cohort are finally starting to hang out and play football after school, or going to Starbucks and ordering the largest possible size of hot chocolate for a dare. A bit of me worries that it's the wilder kids that are the ones who are allowed out, while most of the well-brought-up, more academic ones go straight home. But I'd rather have him out there than playing endless hours of DOTA2 or Counterstrike in his bedroom, which is what he was reduced to for the year and a half before he had anyone of his own age with whom to do anything outdoors. (I'd mind a bit less if it were Minecraft, though even when he was still interested in that he and his brother managed to find servers where they could play the Hunger Games and kill everyone in sight.)
170: You need to stash the baby at a hideout, then come back for it in a few years when the heat's off. Or find a good fence.
We had to ban my son from playing Minecraft Hunger Games, because, when he played, it seemed to turn him into an obnoxious little shit.
173: Urple will bury it in a pot like kimchi.
172 describes more or less what happened to me when I was a kid (I was a bit older but it's close). It can be a pretty rough adjustment, especially since the 'all the kids in the neighborhood just go to this place after school' model of playing is overwhelmingly superior to the suburban style 'everyone makes a series of phone calls and drives the kids somewhere' or 'organized sports league fun!' models. I don't know if anyone around ever called the cops on random kids wandering around (I'm not that young), but it's a pretty massive change in basic social interactions.
All I can say is that this is turning into the best thread ever.
Perhaps it is the vodka martini speaking (in which case, "Zdravstvuite!").
A related thing. The other day I was back in my home street, and what pisses me off is that when I was a kid, its layout was almost like a Swedish summerhouse island - no physical divides between homes, at least on the front street, a continuous sweep of lawn and driveway, which pretty much worked like that for good or ill. Now every bugger has managed to build a wall of some sort, more typically a big hedge because you'd need planning permission for a wall. Completely ruins the place, and turns it into proper suburbia.
178 is interesting We have four front yards across with no divide (ours, then three more) and the fourth and ours have children, though I try to keep our girls in our yard and the one next to it because the women after it hasn't forbidden use but hates all fun. Two is plenty for a ball game with the sidewalk as the dividing line or for gymanastics competitions or whatever else they want to do for now. Back yards are all fenced, but that's a plus too because I can leave them in the back yard while I cook and whatnot and they're secure and can't get in the alley or mess with any of the grouchier neighbors.
177: 3gpabcmbyume! (that's my preferred volapuk transliteration)
178 Same here. My parents still live in the house I grew up in out on LI and when I was a kid it used to be all open backyards for the entire block. At most a few houses had a split rail fence which was more for looks than anything else, and certainly not for privacy. Now it's all 6` high stockade fences all around. I think backyard pools were the initial driver but it's a very different kind of place than the open yards of my childhood.
In other and completely unrelated personal news, the hinge on my laptop broke and it's in for repair - I'm typing this on a temporarily borrowed machine.
Our kids will not go in the back yard to play (by themselves). Drives me nuts. Go! Frolic! Quit bouncing around the living room!
When I was about 12, my brother, a friend, and myself dug a hole in the backyard. It was about 6'x6' and over 5' deep before my dad came home and stopped us. He didn't make us fill it in, but we couldn't go deeper. He talked about turning it into an asparagus patch but never did anything. Four years later, the dog died and it became a grave.
I'm going to assume somehow that was a relevant story.
It was definitely an actual dog, not a baby. Her name was Polly.
I can unite heebie's and Moby's threads by sharing that the older two of my three younger brothers dug a hole (smaller than Moby's) in my parents' back yard and then put the youngest in it when they had to watch him while they played outside.
Tonight's local news has been running promos during Elementary promising to give us details of a "brutal thrill kill" apparently caught on a surveillance camera. I can't imagine why people watching local news would be fearful.
Folks might remember the stand your ground shooting we had just up the street from my house last spring. trial started today. The defense is trying to portray my neighborhood as some sort of post-apocalyptic urban hellscape -- a real achievement if they can pull it off.
But the lead stories are actually:
1. A 16-year-old girl ran over a cop in a stolen car. Apparently: the police showed up, a guy in the car woke up, got out, and ran (and was caught), and the girl drove away. She ran over the policeman's legs, someone from the police shot at the car, girl got away but was caught later at her family's home. The one person they interviewed was a resident in the neighborhood where the car was found, who expressed some concern that the police would open fire on a moving car in a residential area. I think this was after the girl ran the guy over and was getting away.
2. Sink hole. No one was shot or shot at.
3. Protests.
4. #CrimingWhileWhite hashtag.
The "brutal thrill kill" story is still to come.
The story is pretty horrible without the "thrill kill" framing: three men kicked a homeless man to death on the street. They haven't been caught, didn't take any money, so the assumption that's been made up is that they did it for the thrill.
This concludes local news liveblogging for tonight.
I had that roving pack of neighborhood children experience in my midwestern college town in the mid-80s -- we played outside unsupervised, and wandered blocks from home, when we were really pretty young, 6 or so. Majority boy crowd, which may be significant. I didn't exactly like the other kids, but the shared imaginative world was irresistible (and parts of my house were usually under construction by my stay-at-home dad, so being outside was sometimes to be preferred). The worst thing that ever happened to me -- have I mentioned this? -- is that, when I was 10, I badly frostbit the soles of my feet running away from a menacing guy at the skating pond. It was night, there were three of us kids together, maybe? The other two (again, boys) were mystified that I flipped out like that, tearing off down the sidewalk without even putting my boots on. The stranger-danger fear was definitely there, but I was the one who had to be vigilant. But what the hell sense of virtue drove me to keep running for blocks like that, when no one was chasing me? I think I must really have wanted to do something heroic, or to discharge all that free-floating worry in one blow.
My main stake in these discussions, which I find oddly wearying for some reason, is that I have almost no intuitions about the current norms, much less need to judge people harshly on one side or the other. The Michael Chabon piece in the NYRB about the end of that sort of free play, though, really shook me up badly when I read it.
The endangerment of children--that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years--resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.
I'm not even going to click through and read it again. I remember how it ends. Absolutely the stuff of my worst nightmares, and the irrational, emotional component goes so deep that I can't ever manage to pull myself together for a rationalized yet personal discussion.
Oh ye of little interest in reading long comments, feel free to have a go at the blockquoted part.
It was pretty striking how much the free-ish range wandering pack of white kids thing was still alive and well in the Orange County gated community. Admittedly, the kids could pretty much only range down to the community park area or maybe a baseball field, and not get out of the gates, but still, much more unplanned walk outside your house, knock on neighbor's door, grab kid, walk down somewhere in a group and play freedom for middle class kids than I've seen in any US city. All protected by the gate, of course.
Also I suppose the Orange County gated community residents look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty don't give a shit, so maybe that helps.
Hmmm....I spent some time playing in apartment parking lots as a kid. We mostly played with trash and broken glass we found on the ground (no used condoms though, we knew better than to touch those). Parental supervision was minimal. Not sure if this is really making a case for letting kids play in parking lots though. AFAIK no one got tetanus.
I lived on a pretty quiet residential street, and my parents actually encouraged us to play in the street. There was a long crack running the entire width, and we would use it as a 2-square line. We would stand in literally the middle of the street and play for hours, getting out of the way if a car came. Eventually we got a basketball hoop set up in the street, and our adult neighbors would play pick up games there when we weren't playing. Our street was a 50/50 mix of apartment buildings and single family homes, and a mix of immigrants (Italians & SE Asians), working class non-immigrant whites, and gentrifying white people. My sister's first bike didn't actually have braking capabilities, and they taught her to stop by running into a tree and then jumping off if it started to fall. My grandparents had us ride an adult sized bike, where dismounting also involved jumping off while it fell. This was all pre-helmet. I am pretty sure they actively encouraged us to do dangerous things because they thought getting physically injured built character and we were overly cautious ninnies.
My grandparents lived in what had been a Scandinavian immigrant neighborhood, which then became an African-American neighborhood and was becoming a majority Latino neighborhood. When I stayed with them (several times a week throughout my childhood), I roamed the street with packs of neighborhood kids, but they mostly weren't white. Other adults were free to yell at us if we misbehaved. We generally had to be home around dark, which in the summer was about 9 pm.
Oh, I maybe err on the side of parenting other people's kids, and no one has yelled at me. I am an innocuous looking young white woman and probably don't look like urple, so that might help. I avoid telling a kid they're being a brat if the parent is there and they're not doing something actively dangerous themselves or others. I made a 2 YO spit out the paper he was eating on a bus in France, and I frequently tell kids to sit in their seats and not hit each other. I always go through the kids though, and not the parents. I once volunteered to look after an 8 month old baby on airplane so his mom could use the restroom and sleep. (The mom first set him on the seat to go to the bathroom, and I offered to hold him. When she got back I told her she looked pretty tired and I offered to give him a bottle and play with him while she slept. She was pretty happy about that. I was 19 at the time and she was a single mom a few years older than me). It also is a bit of a two way street, because sometimes when I'm on public transit I have young kids request to sit on my lap or talk to me or want to play with my hair. Usually the parent is mortified, but I'm usually ok with it. If a kid is on my lap though, I feel like I have the right to tell them how to behave on the bus.
though I try to keep our girls in our yard and the one next to it because the women after it hasn't forbidden use but hates all fun.
Is she one of those fun hating lizard men from Betelgeuse?
At six I was basically doing the running in packs thing, although we spent a lot of our time in people's back yards because they were there. Also, many of the people I was at school with didn't really live in feasible walking distance, so we were a bit reliant on parental transport. By the time I was eight or nine, if I was playing with the kids on our street we just disappeared into the park behind the houses and came home for tea. If I wanted to spend time with somebody a bit further away, I was given a fistful of change and pointed at the bus stop. Retrospectively, I suppose my mother probably then rang their mother to say I was coming, but that didn't occur to me at the time.
172 - I've said here before that I'm glad I live in, well, the less desirable part of town, because kids round here get lots of freedom. I stopped taking mine to the park (one main road with pelican crossing) when the eldest was ten and the youngest four. Drummed into them that they had to stick together.
As mine get older, their friends who live in town are fairly free to get themselves about the place. The ones who live in the suburbs, or in neighbouring towns get lifts, despite perfectly good public transport. Our house is popular for crashing at, being close to the town centre, and I don't care what time they come in as long as they've come home safely (i.e. not alone, really).
172 - I've said here before that I'm glad I live in, well, the less desirable part of town, because kids round here get lots of freedom. I stopped taking mine to the park (one main road with pelican crossing) when the eldest was ten and the youngest four. Drummed into them that they had to stick together.
As mine get older, their friends who live in town are fairly free to get themselves about the place. The ones who live in the suburbs, or in neighbouring towns get lifts, despite perfectly good public transport. Our house is popular for crashing at, being close to the town centre, and I don't care what time they come in as long as they've come home safely (i.e. not alone, really).
172 - I've said here before that I'm glad I live in, well, the less desirable part of town, because kids round here get lots of freedom. I stopped taking mine to the park (one main road with pelican crossing) when the eldest was ten and the youngest four. Drummed into them that they had to stick together.
As mine get older, their friends who live in town are fairly free to get themselves about the place. The ones who live in the suburbs, or in neighbouring towns get lifts, despite perfectly good public transport. Our house is popular for crashing at, being close to the town centre, and I don't care what time they come in as long as they've come home safely (i.e. not alone, really).
Fuck.
No bloody sign that anything was happening there. So embarrassing.
I was assisted by a helpful college-age type yesterday and it irritated the fuck out of me. On our way to swim lessons, held in the local state university activity center. In the entrance - like in the doorframe - pokey stops to take off a party cone hat that he got at daycare. He gets it tangled in his ears, and will not budge. Then he drops his crackers everywhere.
That's when Mary Poppins swoops in and tries to fix the situation. But I know she'll throw out all the crackers, and I want to save some of the ones not in the most trafficked area. Then she tells pokey that it's better if he doesn't eat before swimming anyway - which, no - and that he can have more crackers after swimming. Also no, since those were the last crackers.
Then she says "you look like a mother who could use a break" (fuck you, I had the situation handled just fine) and hands me her nanny business card. Then she tries to charm both HPs and chat me up about Rascal, and I just wanted to get to the damn locker room and get them changed in time.
Fortunately Pokey was being way too ornery for her advances, and Hawaii kept answering all the questions addressed to Pokey, so she didn't get the joy of magically fixing squat.
Then the swim coach didn't show, and finally I checked my email and discovered she'd cancelled, so I let the kids splash for a bit and then we went home. It was a pain, no $5 whatsoever.
Forgot to explain that pokey is sobbing and carrying on through the entire exchange above. And Hawaii keeps jabbering away and wanting me to listen to her unhelpful suggestions.
just a note: i just took a thread down. explanation later.
205: Hawaii keeps jabbering away and wanting me to listen to her unhelpful suggestions.
Sounds like someone has a remunerative career as a business analyst ahead of her!
Ahimsub all of the idyllic aspects of my hyper free range childhood. Don't know any kids with the same degree of freedom, sadly.
A little girl was trying to make friends with me the other day at the bus stops we were waiting at (we transferred at the same place) but her mother was in a mood, and they were of a different race, so I judged it to be more politic to just "mm-hmm" my way through her attempts at conversation. Nobody really wants a guy like me talking to their 4 year old, sadly.
206: unless I'm totally off, I don't think you did so in a way that addresses the problem?
Huh, didn't know that's how the site works. Fixed. Thank you.
My younger son was completely thrown when we moved to England when he was nine and he could no longer just go to the park with his friends by themselves, as he'd been doing since he was six.
It interests me that your part of England has fewer free range kids than the US, not more. I regularly encounter packs of kids at the local park, and frequently see them in the centre of town. Even more so in the village I lived in when I first arrived. Also lots of kids walking to and from school. It is strikingly different than California, where I moved from.
Hm, read more comments. I guess I hadn't thought about the 'academic' vs 'less-academic' side of things. I suspect the UMC mostly send their kids to private schools around here, and those you don't generally get out of with time to still play after school, do you?
(Not that going to a private school makes you automatically more academic, just thinking that a lot of the state schools around here don't have the best of reputations.)
209: doesn't look fixed from here, but maybe I'm wrong what this is about.
213: I'm pretty sure I know which thread it is, and I can't see it on the main page. I can still access it from my history, though.
History repeats itself, depending on your cache settings.
just a note: i just took a thread down. explanation later.
Argh... I think that's the thread I just spent 20 minutes looking for. Just to confirm, did you take down the thread with the Emily Post advice about not-congratulating women who are getting married? I can't find it anywhere. Anyway, what I want to know is whether it's okay to congratulate a woman who has had a baby, or is that also considered offensive?
It's fine. If it's a boy, just don't mention that Freud suggests having a son will soothe her penis envy.
Just don't say anything nice about the baby. It attracts the attention of evil spirits.
It seems like that would be offensive on roughly the same grounds that congratulating a women for marriage would be offensive.
Just go with something traditional. "Hail, little avenger of Kosovo!" is nearly always appropriate.
Nah. It's specifically pursuing a man that's unladylike. Wanting kids is maternal, so inoffensive. If you're really worried about offense, you might want to stay away from congratulations couched in terms arguably referencing how diligently they must have been screwing to bring about the happy event, but you weren't going to spontaneously go there, were you?
"Best wishes" seems like it could work in both instances.
What the fuck? Those comments are "unpublished." But I guess that means...nothing?
The best congratations for a woman who had just had a baby are Dorothy Parker's, of course: "We all knew you had it in you."
I can follow the reasoning in 221, but I would never spontaneously have come up with it, except maybe as a post-hoc explanation for rules that already existed and needed to be explained. I don't think it's even close to being a conclusion that anyone should be able to reach on their own through organic reasoning.
223: I don't pretend to understand anything about this sort of thing, but if a data point helps - I'm using Chrome, can not see the thread or the comments on the main page, but when I click on it in my history not only can I see the thread up to the point that I remember reading to but also the comments that were made after I last loaded the page.
What have y'all done when you've taken down threads in the past? Deleted everything? That seems drastic.
226: I agree about the post hoc thing. It was explained to me not as in 221 but more like that congratulating a woman on getting engaged implied that getting a husband was like a promotion or something necessary to a complete life.
I think your explanation is feminist reconning for a preexisting rule -- when the rule originated, getting married was absolutely 'necessary' for a woman to lead a complete life. It doesn't have to make sense, it's a vestigial rule that no one observes any more from a past social environment with very different norms than we have now. It'd be weird if you could deduce it from first principles.
You can deduce the rule about not wandering in the park while drunk and pushing around some baby you just grabbed.
But I can see how somebody would just update the reasoning and keep the same rule. It was also implied that congratulating a woman on an engagement was to imply that she got a better husband than you figured she could get. I don't think anybody would mind that implication about a baby.
183. Your dad was on the right track. The asparagus farmer folklore is that to make a great asparagus bed, you bury a mule under it.
You could make it offensive, but you'd have to work at it. "What a beautiful baby! Is there anyone in your family she might be taking after? Are any of your cousins goodlooking?"
(My mother tells a story of getting almost exactly that comment about my sister's brains: she picked up the four-year-old Dr. Oops from a friend's house and was told "Do you know she's reading? Is anyone in your family intelligent?"
That's pretty good. I'll have to borrow it.
210: I moved from Japan, where kids are still free-range in a way that can freak out even relaxed Western mothers. Walking to school without parents from the age of six is an important rite of passage, no matter how far away you live. Friends who live in the Japan Alps have girls who walk two miles eah way up and down a mountain, come rain, wind and snow, with bells attached to their satchels to ward off bears.
Did they start by sending out poisoned kids with the bells to train the bears that they bell wasn't associated with food?
Has anyone actually taken offense, or seen offense taken, on being congratulated on an engagement/marriage? I can understand mulling it over, if you're wondering what to say, but I'd be surprised if it had manifested itself beyond that—or discussions like this one.
I'll admit I didn't read the thread where this seems to have been discussed, unless I'm not recognizing it from the description, but if it's been taken down then I can't very well look it up, can I?
236: Ah! That would explain it! (I think I should have realised that since you've spoken about living in Japan before, but obviously I forgot.)
Just don't say anything nice about the baby. It attracts the attention of evil spirits.
I believe it's ok to say something nice about the baby as long as you spit on it afterwards.
234. And then there was the vicar who was, of course, committed to never telling a lie. So when babies were brought to him to be christened, it it was a particularly attractive child, he would say, "Now that's what I call a baby!"; if it was average looking, he remarked, Well, that's something like a baby!"; and if it had no redeeming features, he exclaimed, "Is that a baby!"
238: I've never heard of anyone actually taking offense at it. I brought up the rule in the other thread to give someone, I've forgotten who, a hard time about violating it, and it's a real rule, in the sense that it's a real rule that you don't bite bread at the dinner table, you tear off small pieces and butter them individually. But I don't think anyone observes it anymore or cares -- it's pretty archaic if you're not an elderly tight-definition-WASP.
You're a Wodehouse-despising/cookie-table-scorning/bread-biter? This gets worse and worse, Mobes.
I break up rolls, but if it is actual sliced bread, I just take a bite.
I have a memory of being at a parade, age five-ish. I was following my father, who was wearing a green gortex raincoat, through a crowd. He sits down and I climb on his lap. After sitting for awhile, I look up and realize it's not my dad, but some other middle aged man. I remembered feeling embarrassed that I made the mistake, and went off looking for my father. Neither the man thought it was a big deal to have some random kid on his lap nor my parents thought it was a big deal that they lost their five year old at a parade.
I always liked this joke:
A woman takes her baby on the train. The first person she sits next to says, "Gosh, what an ugly baby!"
Upset, the woman gets up and changes seats. The new person next to her exclaims, "Wow, that is one ugly baby!"
Now the woman is crying, and she gets up and looks for a seat, and bumps into the porter.
The porter says, "You look very upset!"
The woman sobs and nods.
"Here," says the porter, "I'll take care of you."
"Thank you," sobs the woman.
The porter sits her down and returns quickly, saying "Here's a glass of water. And a banana for your monkey!"
I can't remember how to get the rhythm of the joke right. The above seems too protracted for the punchline.
elderly tight-definition-WASP
Which is a much more restricted group than the one you're happy not to be related to, which seems to include more than half of the commentators, most of whom have never heard of this rule?
And I don't scorn the cookie table. It's just that if you have a bar and cake, I have higher priorities.
240: I believe it's ok to say something nice about the baby as long as you spit on it afterwards.
Most babies come with a related self-protective feature automatically enabled.
it's a real rule that you don't bite bread at the dinner table, you tear off small pieces and butter them individually.
This either means that you don't pick up the entire loaf and chew a bit off (which fair enough) or that you can't bite a bit off a slice of bread and put the residual uneaten bread back on the plate (which is nuts) or that you can't eat bread at all but can just butter it a piece at a time and then leave it on your plate.
You have my permission to place the piece of buttered bread in your mouth and chew it. It's stretching a point, but I'm gracious that way.
(Is it clear to everyone that I have no manners at all myself in person? I just find them an interesting object of study.)
Sometimes, instead of butter, they give you a little plate of oil. That lets you lube up the bread and swallow without chewing.
241: My orthopedist grandfather's version was "That sure is a set of legs under your baby!" or something like that, which apparently reassured all the parents who felt they needed a casual opinion from an expert. With actual patients, he had meaningful responses.
I'm not even a WASP, and I grew up with the bread/butter rule. If you want to butter bread at the dinner table, you had to tear off a bite sized chunk, butter it, and then eat it in one mouthful. Breakfast and lunch were more relaxed.
It appears all of you were raised by wolves?
I suppose you all were allowed to put your elbows on the table?
As long as they were resting on the butter.
257:
I was still referring to the "don't congratulate the engaged" rule, not the bread-and-butter rule. Of course I learned that one, by about the age of 5.
Did everybody have bread on the table at dinner? We didn't. We had either potatoes or pasta every night. You could get bread if you were unable to eat the main course because your mom was trying once again to get you to eat something with peppers in it, but it was only on the table at holidays.
My favorite bread was (and probably still is) the crescent rolls that come in a tube.
My favorite bread was (and probably still is) the crescent rolls that come in a tube.
My brother.
I eat in the American style, fork in right hand, left hand in lap, crossing over to cut.
My wife, the daughter of UMC European immigrants, uses the European style, fork in left hand.
My dad always presumed, in describing the difference to us as kids, to explain such anomalies as why tables were set with the fork to the left, that forks were not commonly used at the time of the settlement of the New World, so when they came use later a different style developed here.
How about you?
I definitely grew up with the bread and butter rule.
261: The only time bread was on the table for dinner when I was a kid was if we had enough left-over chips to make chip butties.
I grew up knowing the bread and butter rule, but I didn't know anybody who adhered to it unless fate took them to an intimidatingly posh restaurant.
267. What are left over chips? I don't understand this concept.
If it helps, I think "chips" means "french fries."
I know what chips means, it was the "left over" in the same sentence that I was having problems with.
Fate often took me to my intimidatingly table-manners-oriented grandmother's table. I suppose her rigidity was that of the arriviste, with trans-Atlantic complications. She was the clever and somewhat spoiled baby of the family in a large working class East End family who wound up working for the BBC in the war, then married to an American (Jewish!) classical pianist -- her house was always immaculate and very midcentury modern, and she cared a lot about immaculate behavior in general.
I supposed it surprises no one that I've never even heard of this bizarre bread-and-butter rule. What exactly is supposed to be the point of the rule?
I seem to remember thread deletion in the past involving putting up a blank thread with the same URL for a while. Unless the thread is really gone but just in the cache on my tablet.
272: East End of Pittsburgh or do other cities use the term?
East End of London in this context, if she was working for the BBC, I guess.
Biting into a big ol' piece of bread is not very delicate. Also bitten-into bread sitting on your plate is not very delicate. Also etiquette is somewhat arbitrary, though I will say that watching my child bite into buttered toast at the breakfast table every morning and getting butter on her cheeks at every bite does give me a sense of why it might be the less formal way of doing things.
241: My father-in-law was a minister who did lots of infant baptisms and followed the first part of the rule. Every time he was introduced to a baby his entire statement was "Now that's what I call a baby!" He did not vary the line when he first met his own grandchildren. Not sure about when he first saw his children.
So very much butter on the cheeks.
277 is an explanation for why you shouldn't bite into messy things that don't fit into your mouth, which makes sense, but doesn't explain why you can't butter the bread on your plate.
"Now that's what I call a baby!"
He had holy water and a bottle of champagne. If he didn't keep things straight, the ceremony would be a disaster.
Not a highfalutin family, but N. American middle class for generations. Shows in pronunciations: aunt sounds like ant, either starts with an ee sound.
But there was always some sort of bread at a sit down meal, and you took a piece and broke it—like the Lord!— on your plate, bread plate if you had one, and buttered the pieces individually. Also what you'd do to eat a dinner roll. American biscuits, such as gravy is poured over but which we often had as a side, you sliced with your knife like a bun, and buttered the halves.
I'm not sure if it counts as etiquette or health advice, but we now have a rule that you can't eat butter without putting it on some food that isn't also butter.
We have a rule that you're only allowed to stick your finger in your ketchup and lick it off one time.
284. How about licking it off the knife?
The rule is that you are never allowed to lick anything off the knife and that if you do you are certainly not allowed to use that knife to get more butter and if you do you are certainly not allowed to mention that you did so thirty minutes after the fact at the end of Thanksgiving dinner at the grandparents.
I liked that Michael Chabon piece lurid linked to in 193:
"Childhood is a branch of cartography."
234: When my uncle saw a baby he considered ugly, he used to say "That's some baby." But I wonder whether what he was thinking was totally obvious, and he was insulting everyone.
I remember at some point learning the bread-and-butter rule, but I have no recollection of whence, nor whether my family observed it when I was growing up.
My family ate tons of bread at dinner but no butter, because my parents were (are) diehard no fat in our diets types.
I think I've saved a lot of room in my brain by being raised by wolves.
283. That was pretty much how we worked it, but we rarely had bread (that is: sliced white bread) at dinner. We tore apart rolls and buttered the pieces. If biscuits were soft enough due to gravy having been applied, you could use a fork to disassemble them.
Moby's crescent rolls from a tube were an exception. It was okay to sort of drill them out and stuff chunks of butter inside, or jam. Almost as good as a popover, which had the same rule exemption.
273. The point of all etiquette rules is, at base, the support of the existing class structure by othering those who don't follow them. Amirite?
I'm reminded of (IIRC) Miss Manners writing that she preferred the American style of knife-fork usage because it was more complicated and therefore obviously more genteel.
I think I've saved a lot of room in my brain by being raised by wolves
But what about all the postures, howls, and smells you had to learn?
Though (AIMHMHB) my parents knew a very UMC Swede who had, as a child, walked through the forest to school with her coat turned inside out to ward off trolls.
294: They came in handy in my day job as NFL linebacker.
How do poor Swedes ward off trolls?
Hmmmmm this is making me wonder when/where I picked up fork in left hand? Apparently this is anomalous for my background, but I can't remember ever using fork in right hand.
I also knit continental rather than English so perhaps there's a lefty on my yearning to breathe free?
French horn keys are on the left as well.
I picked up the fork in left hand from a brief stay in England. I did not pick up the weird thing about holding the fork with the tines pointed so that food has to either be speared by the tines or balanced on the back.
I eat with the fork in my left hand. My parents used to joke when I was kid that I would "make a good spy." I guess it was a trope in cheezy thrillers for American spies to be exposed by using the fork with their right hand?
I did not pick up the weird thing about holding the fork with the tines pointed so that food has to either be speared by the tines or balanced on the back.
I wonder if anybody does that any more, except in intimidatingly post restaurants.
Sometimes I eat with the fork in my left hand, sometimes in my right. Totally depends on what I'm eating.
Sometimes I feel like a nut—sometimes I don't.
Isn't that the default position for holding the fork in your left hand??? It's certainly the most useful....
I had no idea that which hand held a fork was somehow considered to be a matter of etiquette. And I'm not sure I even understand--I hold my fork in my left hand because I am left-handed.
302: Wait, I think that's how I eat. If it's something that I cut first, I use my left hand that way. If a knife was never involved, certain salads, for example, I use my right.
301: Me too, always have. I don't remember any attempts at changing that, and the switching back and forth has never made any sense to me.
Now that Halford's on "hiatus" I am pleased to see this discussion of bread break out on the blog. I love bread. The reason that JC's line about human beings not being able to live on bread alone works, is because, in truth, we can. No meal feels complete without bread. It's why you can have a sandwich for lunch. There, I've confessed my bread love for you all to see.
(Maybe bread-hating paleo-dieting duties can be outsourced to Les Binks)
Same here on the fork switching. If I'm cutting off bites of meat or similar with a knife, fork in the left. If I'm eating something that doesn't require cutting, fork in the right.
I don't think I'm familiar, first-hand, with what I've seen described in books as proper American fork-in-the-right-hand whenever food is conveyed to the mouth manners, and I think maybe that style of eating is uncommon these days?
309: You know what is even better than bread? Fried dough in all of its forms: zeppole, apple fritter, fry bread, funnel cake, puri -- I love you all.
I was raised with context dependent table manners. Usually I eat in what I consider to be the American style, switching fork hands, elbows on the table, the whole thing. If I'm in polite company I do the full bullshit with not only not fork juggling, but also never so much as turning the fork over, as in 300.
One time I apparently made a horrible breach of etiquette by making noise as my cutlery touched the plate. I had not been aware of that rule up until then. As my hosts were pretentious gits I don't really feel bad about it.
French horn keys are on the left as well.
That and its ridiculous small mouthpiece is why it's the wussiest of the brass instruments.
Only skimmed the last few comments: I don't remember ever being told not to bite into a piece of bread at the table, but it's so obviously barbaric that I can't imagine anyone actually doing it, either. Asking the point of a rule of etiquette is pretty silly, unless you like to hear "so we can tell them apart from us." All that said, bread is poison and no one should eat it.
310:
That's what I do now. I think I was expected to cut several bite-sized pieces and cross back to eat them with the right hand. I may do that sometimes also.
I wonder if fork usage can be mapped, the way pronunciations can?
I'd be most curious about non-English Europeans in the New World, like the Acadians. I was talking to my mother last night about "others" in her childhood—she's 96— and the short answer is that there weren't any to speak of. Everybody was English, mostly from New England originally, Scottish or Irish.
I think Skip Gates would find my bloodstream pretty boring.
Fried dough in all of its forms: zeppole, apple fritter, fry bread, funnel cake, puri -- I love you all.
We were brought up fixing "scones" with my mother the way she learned to make them from her pioneer Utah mormon family. I didn't realize until I was older that a Utah scone (a fried yeasted dough like a type of frybread or yeasted doughnut) is totally not what other people are referring to with the word scone.
I'm having falafel seasoned with death risk.
Sounds better than real scones, though.
318: They're amazing. A sweet white dough, only takes one rise, then fry them up and serve hot with honey butter, cinnamon honey butter, sometimes fruit spread, whatever. Glorious. There's fast food chain in this state called Sconecutter that sells them individually or in packs along with a whole sandwich menu using them.
316: A perennial debate between me and colleague: "They're not scones!" "They are here!" "But they're not!" "It's okay if they use the same word to mean a different baked good."
This "no biting bread" rule is completely new to me. I can't remember ever even seeing someone following the rule, although probably such people will be everywhere now that I know about it.
I never heard of the rule, either, which is probably why I was banished to the land of fried scones. mmmmmm
320: Right? Leads to some disappointing encounters. My brother is in Atlanta and his wife is from that area. I guess her family made scones at a family get together or something when they were first married and he got all excited to have one (dude loves his baked goods) and said something like "what the hell is this shit" in front of her straight laced LDS family.
I never tried your kind of scones, but will if I see them.
316. Sounds like they evolved from the same ancestor as what are called "drop scones" here: small sweetened pancakes that are usually made with self raising flour these days, but I could see how they could originally have been yeasted.
The extremes of bore diameter and length of the French horn certainly make it squirrellier to play than e.g. the trumpet or trombone. But if Dennis Brain playing Strauss' first concerto is considered "wussy" then I have zero problem being lumped in the category of wussy!
Besides French horn players can comfortably claim alpen horn maniacs like blathasar streiff as among the tribe which can't be anything but fabulous.
Fry bread - universal celebration food uniting Indians and Indians.
Really good real scones are pretty good, but not spectacular. And they hold badly -- they're good right out of the oven and for a couple of hours, but they get stale-ish really fast. I'll make them very occasionally, but I wouldn't buy them other than at someplace that looked like they actually cared about their baked goods, and even then the best they get to is unexciting.
Although there is definitely a place for the restrained English scone, specifically: fresh, split and underneath sufficient clotted cream and tart-enough strawberry jam.
Yes, fried dough in all its forms. I'm not much for donuts though, go figure.
Fry bread Jesus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv0KLMrTcN8
326: Another theory I've heard is that the pioneers got it from the Navajos and their frybread. The way a lot of the Mormons make them is identical technique wise (stretched out disc of dough fried in a pan) but with a sweeter dough and IIRC the Navajos usually don't have yeast in their recipes.
That makes sense, when you described them that was the first thing I thought of.
Do Utah scones rhyme with "cone" or "con"?
I saw Hermann Baumann at Ravinia in Levine's day, many years ago. He was terrific, and the amount of spit he emptied onto the stage was prodigious. I love his original-instrument recordings, without the keys.
sliced bread isn't served at any formal meal anyhow, or any bread larger than a roll.
My mother has two sets of chop plates we've never used and aren't likely to without a fancier butcher. Some summer we're going to serve the neighborhood banana splits in them and have a pool on whether anyone breaks down and mentions it.
Death falafel was pretty good. Cost a bit more than regular falafel.
Re: Fry bread and Navajo obesity, I recall seeing this quote somewhere a while back. Good times.
"frybread has killed more Indians than the federal government."
Ahhh the crinkle underfoot of dried out spit paper, the madeleine-dipped-in-tissane of my youth!
We've got a lovely recentish recording of one of the Mozart 4 on a natural horn at home, I'll post the name later idp, you'd enjoy it I think.
Per my better half back in the day the workers at an English lp pressing plant used to on their own initiative press certain recordings on more substantial, thicker (and therefore more stable and long-lasting) vinyl, and Brain's recording of Mozart's 4 was always pressed on the thickest most luxurious disks. Certainly my copy from long ago and far away is hefty, and deeply loved.
328: real scones (not the Starbucks variety) are delicious with clotted cream and jams. Trader Joe's used to sell them. I also enjoyed the lemon ginger variation.
340:
Some English inter-war recordings have been very nicely restored from the Acetate, I wonder if that was why?
I've exchanged here with Blume about Webern's 1936 BBC recording of Berg's Violin Concerto, a masterpiece.
And I have possibly the first recording of The Lark Ascending, from 1928, on my ipod. Isolde Menges, a fellow RC professor of Vaughn Williams'. Haunting, and fairly brisk tempo too.
I switch fork hands, very rarely putting food into my mouth with the left hand. My wife is a stickler about a few things -- the noise of fork hitting teeth (which is more likely for gooey foods that stick to the fork) is something she's complained about forever, but beginning just a year or two ago, after 30+ years together, the way I hold a knife in my left hand (specifically, whether it's blade edge up or down on a horizontal knife), after doing a fork switch, falls somewhere between not indicting racist cops and the Rwandan genocide.
The correct answer is to not use left hand to hold the knife, but rather set it down.
I don't think we had the butter rule growing up. I'm guessing my mom just didn't think she could get us to do it. Does the same rule apply to jam?
after 30+ years together, the way I hold a knife in my left hand (specifically, whether it's blade edge up or down on a horizontal knife), after doing a fork switch, falls somewhere between not indicting racist cops and the Rwandan genocide.
I do the fork-in-left-hand, tines-down thing, and if there's food still on the knife, I scrape it onto the back of the fork. This drove my ex crazy—not the straw that broke the camel's back, but definitely in the load.
337: What?
Googling I discovered this little-known fact
The death falafel continues to be one of Al-Qaeda's most powerful weapons against the West
It was all over the local news. I figured everybody heard of it. (Link goes to stupid news site that launches with sound but I'm too lazy to look for a different one.)
Thanks, Moby! Maybe I did hear about it -- the story sounds familiar now.
I think the place where I usually get falafel is a bit cheaper and run by an actual Palestinian instead of whoever hipsters hire to run a politically-oriented food stand.
342.last: I know it's sort of cheesy, but that one is so much fun to play and to listen to. Thanks for the recording recommendation.
When my better half and/or stepdaughter listen to The Lark Ascending, haul out the hankies. They are destroyed every single time.
On a lighter note there's a fantastic musical joke near the end of the Jeeves & Wooster episode (with fry and laurie) where the cottage burns down, I will say no more as don't want to spoil it for you but thorn and idp, get this from the library STAT! So funny.
Jeeves in the Country is the name, Bertie takes up the trombone. Run, don't walk!
I don't know how I missed that one other than maybe stopping at the blackface, but my brother has the whole set and I'm sure I could borrow it.
Good scones are pretty great, but few and far in between.
My understanding is that some of this is because Brit and (non-UT)USian expectations are so different (Brit scones are dry not-sweet and basically designed as a conveyance for butter and/or jam (and clotted cream?), while USian are standalone pastries, usually sweetened. But there seems to be no consensus on texture, baseline flavor, just how sweet "sweet" is.... With other foods you get regional variation (cf. cornbread), but with scones it's a crapshoot at any given purveyor.
Never heard of the bread thing, and my mom was stickler(ish)* about table manners. We didn't often have bread with meals, but we certainly ate out at many restaurants with bread baskets.
The idea that tearing bread with your bare hands is more genteel than taking a (modest) bite from a slice is, frankly, delusional. Try applying it to a drumstick.
*in the end I think she just didn't care enough to enforce every petty rule, but she was AFAIK aware of them and tried to inculcate us with them
Really good real scones are pretty good, but not spectacular.
Come visit me in early July, and I'll make you a blueberry scone that will make you drop that final clause.
Didn't I have one? They were fabulous. But then again I like scones.
I should have probably left the office sooner. The Brown/Garner/Way Too Many Others protests are starting out on the corner near by the death threat falafel place and they usually block traffic for a bit. That will delay the bus.
Still buses. I think the guy who was threatening people in the park with a hatchet is riding with me. He almost got himself killed with a piece of very risky jaywalking.
Protests started near me a while ago, but about an hour beforehand there were already police out in huge numbers.
When I hear of police in huge numbers, I thing of something like Westside Story but with law enforcement.
Now I don't hear helicopters anymore. I wonder where the crowd moved to.
356: You did! Good memory. Which is its own testament to the quality of the scone.
Now, do you recall what else I made for you?
272: Fate often took me to my intimidatingly table-manners-oriented grandmother's table.
Same here*. And if Great Aunt M--r--m was present it was worse. Always with a bread plate, and god forbid you if you used your own knife to the butter in the butter dish, much less the butter knife to put the butter right on to your bread/roll. Another one that made an impression on me at the time was no food in original packaging even at informal breakfasts or lunches (so milk pitchers etc.). I successfully camouflage any lingering effects it had on me. Mentioned here before, I believe.
*How your intimidatingly table-manners-oriented grandmother got my in pajamas I'll never know.
bread plates are actually a no-go thing back-formed from restaurants to home settings. at my dad's we always had either biscuits or cornbread or dinner rolls or sliced homemade bread in a stack (also cut down the middle), or possible hoecakes, with dinner. maybe just crackers if there was chili or oyster stew. he's not a tremendous stickler for manners though. well, but he has perfect ones and you feel sort of an ass not having them. my maternal grandparents were, as you all know, manners fanatics. it has been difficult living with my husbands terrible table manners, I have to say. I sort of hoped my continually correcting the children for his doing something at the same time would help...
I sort of hoped my continually correcting the children for his doing something at the same time would help...
UGH UGH UGH. Just tell him.
god forbid you if you used your own knife to the butter in the butter dish, much less the butter knife to put the butter right on to your bread/roll. Another one that made an impression on me at the time was no food in original packaging even
See, this one I know well.
I saw a guy at the bar tonight who looked like an older you crossed with one of the Waltons. It really worked for him.
Another theory I've heard is that the pioneers got it from the Navajos and their frybread. The way a lot of the Mormons make them is identical technique wise (stretched out disc of dough fried in a pan) but with a sweeter dough and IIRC the Navajos usually don't have yeast in their recipes.
Interesting. It doesn't explain the name "scone," admittedly, but otherwise this makes a lot of sense. The time of transmission of the concept would presumably have been the late nineteenth century (or later), since Navajo frybread dates to the Bosque Redondo era and it also took a while for Mormon settlers to reach the Navajo country south of the San Juan River.
263
Oh yes, using the butter knife on your bread was a cardinal sin. As was using the salt shaker before passing it to the person who'd asked you to pass the salt.
If we ate bread products at dinner it was usually dinner rolls, but if for whatever reason sliced bread was served, the tearing rule also applied. Again, breakfast and lunch were more relaxed, and we could butter (and jam) our toast and eat it, unless it was a formal occasion. Scones or biscuits (biscuits were basically like scones and we ate them with jam) had to be eaten like a roll even at breakfast, and the same rule applied to jam: 1) put a pat of butter on plate with butter knife, 2) put dollop of jam on plate with jam spoon, 3) tear off piece of scone, 4) butter it with your own knife, 5) spread jam with own knife, 6) eat bite.
Elbows were never allowed on the table though, not even at breakfast. Our parents drilled it into us that even with our table manners, we were barbaric Americans compared to UMC Europeans, and I've found that is mostly true. What puts me on the distinctly fussy side of American dining puts me maybe middle of the pack among Scandinavians/continental Europeans. Eating with my bf's UMC (UC?) Italian family is physically exhausting, because you have to sit up very straight and keep your arms hovering over the table for several hours on end.
I eat with the fork in the left hand, mainly because I find it easier to eat in a neat manner if I flip the fork around and spear my food with the tines.
Speaking of eating, I would often eat all of one type of food on my plate before starting on each of the others in turn. my mother would comment that this showed I was like lawyers in this. Anyone else heard of this stereotype? I am being defeated by Google in my attempts to find any mention.
For idp: Jos Van Immerseel, Anima Eterna, 2 piano, 1 flute & harp, and the 3rd horn concerto
Solidly recommended.
Re table manners, despite my decidedly wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing I seem to have somehow acquired table habits that have taken me comfortably through Rothschild hunting lodges, Marais dinner parties up the gueule & etc but am completely mystified how it happened... a bit odd, actually.
Okay so it turns out the musical joke from that Jeeves & Wooster is on the server downstairs. There are things downstairs on that server ...
watching my child bite into buttered toast at the breakfast table every morning and getting butter on her cheeks at every bite does give me a sense of why it might be the less formal way of doing things
What is continuing to puzzle me is how this differs from dozens of other similarly potentially messy foods that don't have corresponding rules. Your child's cheeks get covered with mess when she eats pizza. They get covered with mess when she eats fried chicken. They get covered with mess when she eats a peach. So why do we have this peculiar rule just for butter/bread?
373:None of those foods would be admissible at a table where this rule was relevant.
I was ranting about this to AB (who was familiar with the rule) and pointing out that the implicit rule is that incisors are not to be used.
Well, not for bread at any rate. For asparagus, yes.
I thought you were supposed to cut up asparagus and put it in your mouth with a fork unless you specifically wanted to make an oral sex or Bobbit joke.
I can't tell if 374.1 might be serious. It's impolite to eat an apple or a peach?
373:
All of those foods may be either eaten with a knife and fork—like pizza— or sliced on a plate, like peaches. Tedious to eat fried chicken that way, and leaves you feeling you're not eating it all, but I've done it.
I was told to use the utensils on the food before me starting at the outside and working toward the plate. I guess nobody else heard of this rule and that's why they don't use the bread fork properly.
Urple's point in 373 formed an important part of a good Adventures of Pete and Pete episode.
There's a scene at the beginning of La Faute à Fidel! in which the main character tries to make her cousins (all little kids) eat peaches that haven't been cut up on plates, with knives and forks, it all takes place at a fancy wedding reception. It's meant pretty clearly to illustrate her rigidity but also that her tendencies while extreme are still on the (haute) bourgeoisie spectrum of discomfort with finger food. I took it as a gentle joke in the entire class.
I really enjoyed this movie, btw.