Appointments

Today Vincent goes to his weekly appointment with his counselor and then we follow up with an appointment with her also, at 7 p.m. Vincent and we have backslid in the last few days, arguing about things like language, chores, and school progress. Vincent has not applied for any jobs for a couple of weeks now.

Earlier today Grandma Martha has her annual doctor’s appointment. Her back and also her knee have been bothering her lately. I have a lunch appointment with a possible Presbyterian Panel client today also.

I am slated to leave for a week in Florida at midday Tuesday. I will drop off the car for assessment and possible repair and the way to the airport. Tuesday is also Frisco’s ninth birthday, which we may celebrate a little today.

I’m trying hard to finish several projects today and Tuesday, but will have to take my laptop with me Tuesday to keep working.

Stephanie is tentatively slated to have her book club over this Thursday evening. We’ve been trying to clean the inside and work on the outside in preparation for that and Grandma Martha’s 2 ½-day visit next week. We’re all set with walkers, extra toilet seat, and food for Mom. I still have a little cleaning to do.

Stephanie has been keeping up with books but hasn’t actually been to book club for several months.

This week I’ll be visiting with friends in the Miami area, then at a fancy hotel on the beach in nearby Hollywood (the Westin Diplomat Resort and Spa - pictured above) for an expensive survey research conference (American Association for Public Opinion Research – my first time to this meeting, which my manager – the former Associate for Survey Research – used to go to). Sunday or Monday I’ll drive on Alligator Alley and past Naples and Fort Myers to the Sarasota-Bradenton area, where I’ll tool around and visit friends (my first visit there since I spent most of a day there prior to a conference in Tampa). Then I’ll fly from Tampa to Louisville Tuesday, arriving a few minutes after Mom arrives from Tallahassee. Mom and I are slated (during Days 3 and 4 of the furlough) to visit local tourist sites and perhaps Stephanie’s school) before heading for Ohio, where we plan to rendezvous with Stephanie, Vincent, Frisco, Penny, Serge, and Jacob and visit relatives over the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

-- Perry

Transitions

Oaks winner Rachel Alexandra has been sold and turned over to another trainer. You might recall that the previous owner was dead set against allowing a filly (female horse) to race against colts (male horses). The new horses may reconsider this, and so it’s possible that the horse – which you’ll recall won the all-fillies Oaks, on the day before Derby – may race in the Preakness next weekend in Maryland. Calvin Borel, a Lousiville native who last weekend rode both Rachel and dark horse Derby winner Mine That Bird said that – if Rachel runs the Preakness and the new team gives him an option – he’d have to race Rachel instead of Mine. Rachel has won five straight races with Borel jockeying.

Published reports say that University of Louisville men’s basketball Coach Rick Pitino is considering jumping ship to the NBA’s Sacrament Kings. The Kings – formerly the Kansas City Kings – haven’t been good since Houston Rockets Coach Rick Adelman was their coach. Pitino has gone back and forth between the college and pro ranks during his career. He was the New York Knicks coach when I got to New York City in 1987, and he spent five years with the Boston Celtics in between coaching down the road from here at the University of Kentucky, before returning to Kentucky to the Wildcats’ arch rivals, the Louisville Cardinals. The local paper put this story on an inside page in the sports section, which makes me think they’re skeptical about the reports.

In an even more local sequence of events, it’s been a whole month – in the post-Oscar movies to the discount movie theater lull – that I’ve been to the closest of the two local discount movie theaters, Apex’s Village 8 Cinemas, on the other side of St. Matthews from our house (near the gym). We went there last night to see “Adventureland,” and – in the interim – a new manager apparently came in and got rid of the hot dog machine, which we used a lot, and cleaned house with the staff, as most of the staff people we talked with regularly (and during parts of the year we or I am there about twice a week) are gone – some of them involuntarily. (A week ago we picked up an Apex theaters job application from the sibling Baxter theater, but it looks like Vincent has let this opportunity – like others – slip away, since he hasn’t touched it). We’ll miss the hot dogs and the people we’ve liked.

-- Perry

Pushy or desperate?

After a great day out on Derby Day Perry and I returned home. We were tired and exhausted. We grabbed the mail and walked into the house thinking only of bed. Then we looked at what exactly we had received in the mail.

Earlier this year and late last year, we had gotten rid of two of our cars and added two new cars to our insurance. This meant multiple changes to our car insurance policies since we didn’t do these transactions all at the same time. But we have kept the same insurance company through out all these transactions (actually pretty much since we’ve been married…I went with Perry’s insurance company).

Since December, when the first of the cars was decommissioned and the first insurance change, we have received phone calls and mailings from State Farm Insurance. I even called back once to tell them that we weren’t interested (partly because Vincent said the phone calls were keeping him from getting class work done…I wasn’t going to give him any excuses).

Well, Derby Day, State Farm showed how aggressive their marketing campaign really is. I received six different quote offers and, since Perry has a different last name, he also received six different quote offers. That means a total of twelve different envelopes and twelve different letters. That is a lot of trees being killed…even if we do recycle.

I was a little concerned about the flood of marketing. I called State Farm to be removed from their mailing lists. I did tell them that I understand that in this bad economy they are looking for people who can afford their insurance but this marketing ploy makes me wonder…Do I want to be insured by a company that is that desperate or pushy? How financially sound is State Farm if they have to resort to this kind of marketing?

The answer is…I’ll keep my own insurance company thank you. Even if I were looking for new insurance I wouldn’t go with a company that is giving off the vibe of being financially unsound and desperate for my business.

Sorry State Farm. This was a bust marketing ploy.


---- Stephanie

Creation Museum

When I proposed a trip up the Ohio River Valley towards Cincinnati, Stephanie suggested we go to the controversial Creation Museum - which turns out to be a mixed Bible history/natural history/cultural conservative politics museum with petting zoo - west of the Cincinnati airport (which is actually located in Kentucky) very near the Ohio River. We drove up midday Saturday, stopped for lunch at the Japanese restaurant in the Florence Mall (should have just eaten in the museum cafe), and then drove over on the Cincinnati beltway to the museum. The museum blends an interesting version of scientific creationism/intelligent design theory. Central to the museum's version of this theory is that the earth is just about 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and people co-existed. The great flood is also central to the story - and, very recently, a mini-intraspecies version of Darwin's natural selection - and the idea that some 6,000 years ago God created people and a variety of other species that coexisted until dinosaurs eventually died off and some other species - internally evolved. (There's little direct confrontation with the idea that the Bible's 6,000 years could be treated as metaphor or that this could be a non-essential part of the Bible that reflected pre-scientific understandings of the time.) There is some conservative morality story included here, including a critique of social Darwinism and scientific racism. Images of the dinosaur-people coexistence jump out pretty quickly at the museum.

The figure below is of an actual scientific creationist archeologist, who was also speaking in a film projected in the same room. This man explicitly said he's out to prove the scientific creationist interpretation of the Bible. The exhibit on the whole conveys a rather relativist view of science, a view that some postmodernists would like. There's one theory (Darwin's evolution theory) and another theory (scientific creationism) - perhaps both plausible. It's not easy simply to test one versus the other. We must accept both as valid theories. It's just that only one of them is Biblically valid also.

Here's where they quickly get into contemporary history/cultural critique. There is a pro-scientific creationism take on the Scopes monkey trial, in which a TN science teacher was tried and convicted for teaching the theory of evolution in public schools. Even though the prosecution prevailed, the trial - popularized in the movie "Inherit the Wind," which the museum criticizes - discredited opponents of the theory of evolution in many circles.

The museum sends visitors through a gritty supposedly urban secular humanist wasteland/tunnel in which all truth is relative and moral decay sets in (though keep in mind the scientific relativism outlined before).

Stephanie and Vincent have always loved natural history museums. Stephanie knows plenty about just about everything except for U.S. history, and there's plenty about prehistory, anthropology, archeology, zoology, and geology in natural history museums to keep her occupied.

Stephanie snapped this picture of me "petting" one of the dinosaurs (really good dinosaur models, by the way.)

Below Stephanie was reaching for the apple - apparently from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (as in scripture).

Stephanie thought this model of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was a little risque (she said they were basically having sex). Interestingly, they don't have blond hair, but they're not black either. (And how does Adam have a trimmed beard?)

Here (below) is the snake lurking - about to lure Eve and Adam into trying that forbidden fruit.

Stephanie wanted me to take a picture of her posing with a Methusalah figure (below) because she ways she sometimes tells her students she's as old as Methusalah (the oldest figure in the Bible).

Stephanie also sat down in a model of the ark. I mentioned that the flood is very important to this version of the scientific creationist story. Apparently the existence of the flood and its effects helps explain many trends (like the creation of the Grand Canyon?) that otherwise we might need to explain by the passing of millions of years (which of course isn't an available explanation if you're trying to explain how the earth is only 6,000 plus years old).

A smaller ark model of just the exterior ark appears (below) in a diorama. (Later in the gift shop we bought a Noah's ark puzzle for one of Stephanie's students. Recall that one of the churches we have visited in Guatemala is the Arca de Noe church.)

This is apparently a new exhibit of the museum that touts a central part of Darwin's theory of evolution: natural selection - how species - well - "evolve" - at least within the species (apparently inter-species evolution - like other primates turning into people - is out - partly because God created certain species and they've only had 6,000 years to change anyway.) The example that I couldn't get a good picture was blind cave fish (but in the exhibit they were being exposed to light - how many generations before they might get their sight back?) No direct comment here on how - according to what I learned in college - the principle tenet of natural selection - the essential random quality of it - violates a central tenet of scientific creationism - that God is in control over everything, that everything has a purpose.

What came next (and below) was a fascinating sociological analysis of - among other things - racism that tied - somewhat correctly - the appearance of Darwin's theory of evolution with the subsequent rise of social Darwinism (individuals and families that are more fit rise to the top of the economic ladder in a Darwin-esque survival of the fittest competition (a set of ideas that justified new wealth in the Gilded Age)) and of the scientific racism that followed (evident in the justification for the 1920/21 U.S. immigration quotas and Nazism). Creation Museum founder Ken Ham (who I've heard talk somewhere on TV or in person) apparently had more to say about this in a book we saw in the bookstore that apparently also defends interracial marriage (we're all God's children, all created from Adam and Eve). Left out from this exhibit are concern for religious discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination and a recognition that oppression long predates the release of Darwin's "Origin of the Species."

I snuck on ahead to a pretty cool dinosaur exhibit, presenting a lot of the images and information that any brand-new natural history museum would present - plus the claim that dinosaurs and people co-existed and dinosaurs lived until a few thousand years ago (but why does God permit extinction, if everything God created was perfect?).

Back in the earlier exhibits was a somewhat confusing argument about horses and how (interspecies?) evolution couldn't possibly proceed quickly enough to work (at least not in 6,000 years?).

The text of the sign below suggests that the museum folks believe in some forms of evolution.

Back to the dinosaur exhibits below.

Two films helped punctuate the tail end of the main set of exhibits (we missed several extra-fee presentations.) One film highlighted aspects of Jesus' life and made an altar call-type pitch. Stephanie compared the young woman who shepherded us into the film and talked a little before and after to the young Mormon woman who beckoned us into the house in Carthage, IL, where Joseph Smith was killed and then finished off by making the pro-Mormon pitch. A striking thing about the museum's understanding of world history and theology is the stress on sin, punishment, sacrifice, and atonement. Our pastor says she's not even sure about the theory of atonement, and our theology of graces puts somewhat different emphasis on things. But the museum really stresses Adam and Eve's original sin, ongoing sin, and the need for sacrifice to atone for this (first the sacrifice by Jewish people of gentle lambs, which I found it was odd the Christian museum was essentially talking up), and then Jesus' sacrifice on the cross (along with - implicitly - the sacrifice of Christian martyrs throughout the centuries - like the sacrifice of the Korean Christians whose sacrifices my father is helping chronicle.) While Stephanie awaited her chai at one of the cafes, I watched part of film that started out talking about St. George and the dragon and went on to argue that various historical and modern-day sightings of dragons (and even Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and UFOs?) may be evidence of at least the historic co-existence of people and dinosaurs, just as scientific creationists argue should be the case.

No dinosaurs were visible in the petting zoo we went to as we left the inside museum and ventured around the pond on the way to a kind of nature area. But there were some pretty neat mammals and marsupials. Below is an Australian animal.

There were also peacocks (below).

Stephanie had great fun feeding the most assertive of the goats and a camel. Both of them could scarf up the food faster than Stepanie could get out another quarter.

The camel (below) freaked Stephanie out somewhat because its lips were not only separated top and bottom but also right and left. With four different parts to its lips, the lips felt almost opposable, like fingers/hand.

Afterwards - all the more so with the "swine flu" circulating and those odd-feeling camel lips, Stephanie made sure to wash her hands (below).

Below is also a video clip of one of the first dinosaur exhibits we came across in the museum.

-- Perry

Congrats, Rachel!

The 2009 Kentucky Oaks, the all-fillies version of the Kentucky Derby - that takes place at Louisville's Churchill Downs, on Oaks day - Derby eve - took place late Friday afternoon. Rachel Alexandra - ridden by jockey Calvin Borel, rider of Derby winner Street Sense a couple of years ago - took the lead coming out of the final turn.

She ended up winning by 20 lengths - a record margin of victory - and - had Borel pushed her - might have set a track record for the distance: 1 1/4 miles. Horse people might be leery about racing fillies in the Derby, after the death last year of Derby runner-up Eight Belles (also a filly), but Rachel Alesandra's owner said he thinks the Derby should be all-stallions.

We ended up being invited to no parties and - partly to avoid a friend of ours - are heading up to Northern Kentucky/Southeastern Indiana for part of the day. We haven't decided whether Frisco is coming with us. Vincent - we last heard - was slated to come back late from Marietta College late and was to stay with the Davis family last night. I don't know about Vincent, but hopefully Stephanie and I will get to watch today's (probably rain-soaked) race on TV up there. Click here to watch Friday's amazing Oaks race: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZmGzFD-k8c

-- Perry

Parade video

Click on play below to watch a fun video from Thursday's Pegasus Parade - of of a disabled (and moving target) basketball game .

Pegasus Parade

I've been to the Thursday afternoon parade associated with the Kentucky Derby Festival - the Pegasus Parade - including the first time by myself when I lived two blocks from the parade's start on east Broadway and the two years after that with Stephanie, Vincent, and Frisco (who was very poorly behaved both times - too large a crowd and too many horses). This year Stephanie and I didn't reach 3rd Street and Broadway - the middle of the route - in between the (majority white) east side of Broadway and the (majority black) west side of Broadway. (In the past, we've usually watched it on the west side). This is a somewhat working-class event that typically yields more trash than I've ever seen elsewhere in my life (but somehow most of it gets cleaned up). This time the very high winds were the big story - winds so strong that they weren't able to carry the usual, huge, inflated balloons (including the Pegasus balloon) in the parade. It never really rained, but the strong winds made the event kind of cooly surreal (even more so than usual). Some years it's been very hot.

This folks from a veteran's health organization had trouble holding onto the U.S. flag (below).

This tiny horse pulling a carriage (below) was one of hundreds of horses in the parade.

Behind all the horses were volunteers - many of them kids - ready to scoop up any trailing horse feces.

The Derby Festival has princesses and queens just like many other festivals (on a float below).

This is definitely one event (even more than Thunder) that mixes Anglos and African Americans. Many of the folks who live on the West side are African American, and I used to live in one of only three of four East side neighborhoods that were majoity African American. The parade starts right between my old Phoenix Hill and the adjacent Smoketown (where I volunteer to help do taxes), both African American neighborhoods.

The Derby City Rollers (below) combined hip hop rhythms with skillful skating and airborne acrobatics.

This couple was visiting Louisville for the Derby - combining pleasure with a couple of business meeting for him - from Springfield, IL, near where Stephanie and I used to live (briefly).

A troope of people trying to carry Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean flags - from Spanish-speaking countries - but facing a lot of wind resistance - included a man carrying a Guatemalan flag (below). I saw no signs of hostility despite concern about "swine flu" transmission.

Many of the horseback riders wore colorful outfits (below).

Stephanie enjoyed the parade again this year (though we missed Vincent and Frisco somewhat).

The crazy Shriners - with their funny hats, loud parade mini-cars (below), and float mocking Middle Easterners - get on my nerves. But - in this era of shrinking communitiy involvement - they have managed to retain some members. And two of the hospitals they support - Children's Hospitals in Columbus (OH) and Louisville - have saved Vincent's life - when he was six weeks old and almost died from an electrolyte imbalance and two months ago when he losing it after getting kicked out of school. And the first time they didn't charge us!

The parade included a mock Abraham Lincoln (I didn't get a good picture) and a Mack truck with Lincoln exhibits inside. KY includes Lincoln's birthplace, and Louisville will unveil a large statue of a seated Lincoln in Waterfront Park - by famed local African American sculptor Ed Hamilton - whose studio is half a block from my old apartment, in Phoenix Hill - in June. We've invited Lincolnphile President Obama! (Readers with good memories may recall that we now have a Lincoln license plate on one of our cars.)

Happy Oaks Day, everyone!

-- Perry