Misheru

I found this article posted on Fark.com, and couldn’t resist re-posting it here. I know this is a hot button topic, but a boot camp simulating border crossing is just…cool. I totally want to do it.

Watching the video took me back to a game I played as a kid, called Christians and Commies. It was always played at night, and we had to get through the “Commies” with Bibles for the “Christians.” (I guess you can tell I had a really religious childhood?) Anyway, there were police to “capture” you, and comrades to give you away, and there were thrilling tales of prison escapes that I remember listening to in awe as a 13-year-old. I recently read Escape and was only nominally surprised to see that fundamentalist Mormon children have a similar game.

Maybe it says something about human nature, that we like the thrill of a challenge. Running Bibles through communist Russia was a crime; we didn’t see it as practicing a crime, but it was. How much is the “dream” the Mexicans run for just the same?

Dubbed the Caminata Nocturna (Night Hike), the three-hour simulation is a combination obstacle course, sociology lesson and PG-rated family outing. Founded in 2004, it’s run by members of a local village of Hñahñu Indians, an indigenous people of south-central Mexico. The village’s former population of about 2,500 has been decimated by migration to the United States.

The 7 1/2 -mile hike, which involves quite a bit of running, costs about $10 per person. The money raised from the Caminata, and other park activities such as cabin rentals, rappelling and boating trips, is shared evenly among the villagers.

Occasionally I run across really funny stories in the personal finance blogosphere, and I have to thank Boston Gal’s Open Wallet for posting this video of Stephen Colbert talking about gas prices. Enjoy!

On our road trip, we stopped to see Sande and Margo McNabb in Ames, IA. Sande and Margo are dear, dear friends of mine. They are also Maya and Ben’s honorary grandparents (their two children never had any children of their own). Sande “adopted” me around my second year of college. My first year was a rough year, and I nearly flunked out due to a combination of overloading, poor class choices and emotional immaturity. As a former straight ‘A’ student in high school, I was about as low as I could get (in my mind, anyway) when Sande called and offered me an internship with the Program for Women in Science and Engineering at Iowa State University. He likes to remind me of my response at the time: “Why me?” (Just a side note: female undergrads can still apply for this program here)

While I never made any groundbreaking discoveries (I did discover a new strain of a tree pathogen, but it was hardly overwhelming), I discovered Sande, and that has made all the difference. He and Margo mentored me through college (read: got me through it) and have continued to be my good friends through thick and thin. They turned 80 this year and for the first time I saw them begin to slow down (Sande didn’t actually retire until he was 73, despite lots of begging from Margo). He still, to this day, mentors one student a summer.

My parents like to blame Gonzaga for my turn to liberal views, but I like to blame Sande and Margo. Margo speaks of Republicans the way some people speak of death-row inmates. The bumper-sticker on their car reads: “Democrats. They care about people.” Which made Marti and I chortle more than once. Heaven forbid you should ever get the moniker “Republican” with Margo: she says things like “Dr. So and so - Republican (in a low whisper) - cut the funding for [insert valuable research here]” in the tone one reserves to whisper about petty scandals. I love her to death.

I do admit that Sande and Margo were the first liberals I ever met that were also devout Christians. They changed my entire world view, and I am not exaggerating. I’m not sure they really know how dear they are to me; they won’t even know that I wrote about them, as they have abandoned the complicated world of the Internet. However, after I spent a summer with them I went home and, at the urging of my friend Cheryl (Democrat) I joined the GU Progressives and learned, for the first time, about labor rights and anyone’s ability to petition the state senate, and about modern workplace issues such immigrants getting sprayed with pesticides as they worked, slave labor and the plight of migrating laborers. To this day, I think the other progressives (dressed all in black, or all in hemp, depending) thought I was a mole from the Young Republicans. Little did they know! (I would link to them, but apparently they are no more — only Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians on campus now).

Anyway, here’s Sande and Margo on YouTube declaring their support for John Edwards’ campaign for President ‘08. Enjoy!

Must…stop…can’t…

Another article on the Golden Compass.

Protest over ‘Golden Compass’ loses its point
By Jeff Strickler, Star Tribune

Photo by Matt Dunham, Associated Press

Plans by a Catholic group to boycott a new movie appear to be fizzling after the church’s own reviewers praised it.

An effort among some Roman Catholics to boycott the movie “The Golden Compass” is looking for direction after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops gave the movie a thumbs-up.

Like the book upon which it’s based, the movie, which opens in theaters today, has been the subject of criticism that it’s anti-Catholic. The story is a fantasy about a youngster who leads a battle against an evil militaristic group that is trying to take control of the world by doing away with free will. The group is called the Magisterium, which in real life is the name of a panel composed of the pope and his immediate bishops.

A conservative Catholic leader is demanding that the critics who reviewed the movie for the Conference of Bishops be fired. In the meantime, rank-and-file Catholics are trying to figure out what their next step should be.

“Two weeks ago there was a lot of buzz about a boycott, but now the talk is about the review,” said Joe Towalski, editor of the Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

I recently started reading some books by author Scott Westerfeld, and I have to say — his books are really amazing. I started by accidentally picking up “Pretties,” a book in his “Uglies” series (with the fourth book, it’s no longer a trilogy, amusingly enough). Anyway, he has his own blog and has a lot of interesting information about other authors and such, and apparently there has been a lot of debate about The Golden Compass. Here’s what he has to say (click here to read the whole post; it’s full of information and very balanced).

However, I want to point out one thing that keeps going missing in the debate about Pullman: At no point in His Dark Materials do the characters kill god. This rumor isn’t a “controversial” aspect of the trilogy, it’s a lie about the trilogy. And like so many lies these days, this one is spread by people forwarding emails to each other. You probably have seen this sort of thing happen with rumors in school; after all, it’s more fun to spread a nasty rumor than it is figure out the truth behind it.

But how do I know this rumor isn’t true? Well, unlike rumors about what happened at someone’s party or who kissed whom, everything in His Dark Material is written down, and you can read it to find out exactly what happens. So if you go to page 188 of the US mass market paperback of Amber Spyglass, you’ll discover that Pullman’s Authority is not the creator. He’s not god. Ogunwe says so in the following words, “It shocked some of us, too, to learn that the Authority was not the creator.”

. . .

I’m not saying you all have to go read Pullman right now. Maybe you just don’t like armoured bears. But there’s one thing you really should remember: People who tell you juicy rumors, on the internet or in real life, usually aren’t trying to help you by giving you secret, important info. Very often, they’re trying to make themselves feel important, or hurt someone else, or control you in some way.

Don’t assume rumors are true, no matter how often you hear them.

I agree with Westerfeld here; the sad thing is that so much of this debate is based on his characters “killing” god — except that they don’t. There’s room for a lot of debate about Pullman’s books — they are quite deep for children’s books, after all — but this debate isn’t one of them.