The First Lesson to Teach a Kid

I know that I've mentioned this before but I do not subscribe to the idea that we should have heroes or role models. As with good and evil, there is no such thing as heroes. There are only good and bad acts done by individuals. The practice of idol worship is dangerous.

The most recent example of this is Woody Allen. If you follow this blog you probably know that I adore his movies and I think he is a genius. But as with so many other people that I admire in some way, he leaves me wanting in other areas. And no, I'm not going to reference his relationship with Mia Farrow's daughter (everyone thinks that she was his daughter but she was actually Farrow's daughter).

So what has Woody done now? He's back to defending Roman Polanski. Ugh. "Roman has paid his debt to society", Woody said yesterday. Oh yeah? If living the high life in France is paying his debt then I need to try harder to screw up. Apparently Woody missed the memo that other women have come forward to say that 'ol Roman gave them the same treatment when they were minors. By "treatment", I mean alchohol and forced "love".

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Rebecca's blog is now out there - RebeccaSpace.com. She's a little light on content right now but she expects to add a lot tonight. Among the features of her site will be a sortable recipes area. Stop by and offer her a comment or two. She has a couple of... interesting... recipes on the site right now.

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As you also probably know, two of my favorite things are reading books by Christopher Hitchens and reading about Thomas Jefferson. As luck would have it, my man Hitch wrote a book about Jefferson. Sometimes life just works out.

I'll update the book review later but there is one thing that I found out while reading the other day. If you've been to Washington D.C. you probably saw the Jefferson Memorial. One of the quotes on the wall is the following:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free

That's a fantastic quote, isn't it? Unfortunately, that is only half of the quote. Here is the whole quote in context:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Yowzer. Not nearly as nice. Now before you call Jefferson a racist it probably makes sense to put this quote in context. While Jefferson himself had slaves, he actually did a lot to try to end the horrible practice of slavery (although not nearly enough at the end of his life when he was more worried about his legacy). As with many other abolitionists of the time, he wanted to free the slaves but he did not think that they were the equals of whites when it came to upper-level intelligence. He thought that they were the equals in many other ways, but.... I hope history doesn't judge him too hard for this. He had never been around a black person that had any kind of education so I think it was natural to think that they couldn't be top scientists, doctors, etc.

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I've long held the belief that any one of us could sit down and write a better ten commandments than the ones that we have been present. My man Hitch decided that he was going to take a few minutes and give this a try himself. Fear not - this is not religion bashing and the article is actually very interesting. The video of his new commandments is laugh-out-loud funny towards the end (and it has nothing to do with religion).

Here is the link (the video is below).