In the car earlier, as we were pulling away from our apartment, Gloriana was talking to the Confessor as the two were sitting in the back seat (BoE was in the passenger seat). At first I wasn't paying attention to what she was saying, then it hit me.

Just now the Confessor came up to his mother and informed her solemnly that he told his sister to do a time-out because she called him a dummy.

Note the first city listed on the calendar.

The kids and I are so there, dudes and dudettes.

(NASN was advertising this on heavy rotation as we watched the Twins go down swinging against the O's.)

Today was one of the English children's groups, and although BoE and the kids aren't here for the weekend, I had to go to let people into the parish hall that we use.

Caught the opening game with the Braves on tape delay on NASN with the kids, and though we missed the opening innings (where the Nats jumped ahead 2-1) it was a great game -- great way to break in the new stadium, particularly with Zimmermann's walk-off homer to win the game 3-2.

While Gloriana was decked out in her Nats ballcap and was swinging a Nats kiddie bat, the Confessor interestingly enough didn't want to wear his Nats or his Braves gear...until the Braves tied the game on an error by the Nats catcher and sending a runner home, when I asked him out of curiosity which team he wanted to win. The Braves, he said. (Em is now grinning ear to ear.) Shortly after that, the Nats got the winning run, and he was a bit unhappy about it...oh well, kid, welcome to baseball. :-)

(Hat tip to Jeremiah again.)

I've seen some nonsense floating around the Web that John McCain supposedly doesn't qualify to run for the Presidency. Whatever you may think of him, it's simply untrue -- the result of a common misconception.

The premise of this is that McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone and not on US soil. To wit:

7 FAM 1116.1-4 Not Included in the Meaning of "In the United States"

(TL:CON-64; 11-30-95)

a. A U.S.-registered or documented ship on the high seas or in the exclusive economic zone is not considered to be part of the United States. A child born on such a vessel does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of the place of birth (Lam Mow v. Nagle, 24 F.2d 316 (9th Cir., 1928)).

b. A U.S.-registered aircraft outside U.S. airspace is not considered to be part of U.S. territory. A child born on such an aircraft outside U.S. airspace does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of the place of birth.

c. Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.

Sounds damning, doesn't it? Well, it isn't.

Ius soli, the "right of the soil", is only one way to become a natural-born American citizen. The other way is ius sanguinis, "the right of the blood". Since McCain's parents were/are American citizens, he therefore is a natural-born citizen.

Similarly the Confessor is a natural-born American citizen and has American citizenship because I'm an American citizen. See US Code § 1401 (g):

(g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years...

Won't BoE be pleased to know she is an alien. Well, I always knew that, but I married her anyway. As for McCain,US Code § 1401 (c) says:

(c) a person born outside of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents both of whom are citizens of the United States and one of whom has had a residence in the United States or one of its outlying possessions, prior to the birth of such person...

German citizenship law is pretty much ius sanguinis only, but since his mother is German, he thus also gets German citizenship. Currently Gloriana only has German citizenship, but she is entitled to American citizenship as well (we just haven't bothered to go to the embassy to claim it). Should either child live continuously for 14 years in America, and reach 35 years of age (as per the US Constitution, Article II, Section 1), he or she would thus also qualify to run for President -- just as John McCain does now.

Earlier today we finally got around to doing this year's installment of an annual tradition in Europe, especially in Germany, referred to as Sternsinger. In the usual form, children dressed as the Three Kings arrive around Epiphany, sing songs, and say a blessing for the household, writing something like this above the door, using a piece of chalk or crayon blessed by a priest for the purpose:

20 * C + M + B * 08

The 20 and 08 is the year; "C + M + B" stands for Christus mansionem benedicat, which means "Christ, bless this house". (The CMB may also be related to the folklore origin of the "names" of the Three Kings -- Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.) The tradition goes back to at least the 16th century.

Since our parish is so scattered, we don't have kids in the neighborhood to visit homes and do it, so we improvise by inviting our priest over to do the honors, and we have a little something to eat, sing some songs, have a Bible reading and then get out a thurible, load it up with incense and cense the whole apartment, room for room.

So the priest duly got out the thurible and we put in some incense (we had a nice mixture with a good bit of sandalwood), and I went from room to room, starting with the workroom and kitchen and working our way to the bedrooms. The Confessor found this all hugely exciting and was following me around, with smoke billowing all over the place.

When we got to the master bedroom (which adjoins the kids' room), the Confessor excitedly asked if I'd do his room as well. Sure, I said. So I walked into their room and started swinging the thurible around (using the technique I learned as an acolyte -- held at chest height, swung twice to the left, twice to the right, and twice again to the left), and the Confessor instructed me to swing it around his bed some more, because his bed smells.

(Needless to say, we all just about fell over laughing.)

I give Pocahontas' rack five stars.

Meanwhile I was disgusted by Disney's flagrant attempt to bait family fathers by having a babe-a-licious Poke-me-hotness in the movie, and to demonstrate this I watched the movie 4,325 times while only visibly drooling once.

Oh yeah, and the raccoon was a laugh.

And my lungs, too.

Had a nasty cold the past week that just won't go away. Probably got a nasty case of bronchitis. Feel like total donkeybongles, too. Keep getting migraines on top of it all, just to make things interesting.

Bleah.

Great thing about having kids in kindergarden: all the interesting bugs that they bring back home with them. :-p

So even though my parents arrived yesterday, I mainly am lying around in bed feeling miserable. Sigh. (Have to drag myself to the doctor this afternoon. Not looking forward to the trip.)

The article is to weep.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

The funny (not ha-ha funny but why-why funny) thing is that recently iTunes began offering free Sesame Street clips for download. I was delighted by this and downloaded some...and was annoyed and flabbergasted at how utterly lobotomized the clips were. They were singularly unfunny, unentertaining, blatantly paranoid about offending anyone.

Jim Henson must be spinning in his grave.

I can see it now. Parents buying Sesame Street: Old School and showing it to their kids should be locked up for child abuse. (Count me in. I'm a-gonna "abuse" my kids that way, sho' nuff.)

The other thought that occurred to me: Al-Qaeda doesn't need to terrorize us. We're doing a fine job ourselves.

...

Addendum
BoE showed me this in our local (German) paper. When I read the article I assumed it was another story that had been distorted or misrepresented or perhaps even a bad joke (it happens sometimes in reports about America and other places). But I went on Google and found out that the article didn't even come close to the bitter, sad reality.

This was originally in response to a post by neim0 in Some Woman's journal. I moved it here. neim0 asked if Germany's population was still increasing, and if so, if it was due solely to immigration; he also asked about what life is like for Jews in Germany.

Germany's population is more or less holding steady or very slightly decreasing, and even then it's not imploding wholesale because of immigration. (Though Hannover actually managed a slight increase in its birth rate for once this year -- woo-hoo!)

There are literally whole towns being dissolved (as in, torn down and wiped off the map) and counties being merged in eastern Germany to save administration costs. Even here in Lower Saxony, our state, some towns are struggling to survive with occupancy rates of less than 50%. There is also some talk of merging entire states. (Imagine merging, say, Vermont and New Hampshire to save money, and you get the picture of the direness of the situation.) Yet a lot of people here have a "what, me worry?" attitude about it...

Some regions are still growing strongly (not surprisingly those that are heavily Catholic), while the former east is pretty much collapsing wholesale, in spite of the massive (and I mean massive) amounts of money being pumped into it in the form of subsidies and investments by the government (the so-called Solidaritätszuschlag -- an extra tax paid by all Westerners and paid out in the east in the form of investments, tax breaks and subsidies) and much lower cost of living.

As an aside, what gets me is that after the war, they carved up apartments and houses left and right to make space for people (our apartment is actually a third of what was a much larger one before the war -- when it was rebuilt they just carved it up into smaller units). But rather than re-combine them, they just tear them down or leave them standing empty. You can't get larger apartments even if you want them -- 3 and 4 room apartments (plus kitchen, hall and bath) are the norm, 5 and 6 room ones are nearly impossible to find.

Anyway, as for Jews in Germany, it's actually kinda funny. Jews today have the opposite problem of being almost worshipped by a lot of people. I've heard that it's hard to be "normal" as a Jew in Germany just because some people try so hard to be nice to you. Some carry it to the extreme of wanting to be Jewish themselves (which I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, but it does seem a bit odd and some Jews get annoyed by it). Meanwhile there are unfortunately a few idiots running around who wouldn't know a Jew if a bar mitzvah happened right around them, but they spray swastikas on Jewish monuments and so on just to be dumbshits.

Either way, Jewish life is actually starting to come back pretty strongly, so things can't be too bad. Today there's 100,000-200,000 (depending on how you count them) living here and a Jewish rabbinical school, Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg, recently graduated its first students (the first such students since the war), and a number of synagogues have been founded (not least in Munich). We have a synagogue in Hannover, for that matter, though their website is a serious eyesore...and it sure doesn't compare to the original pre-war one destroyed in Kristallnacht.

Meanwhile, Gloriana has finally mastered the art of walking on her own, at the ripe old age of 18 months.

It was pretty funny yesterday. I was talking on the phone with my parents, sitting in the easy chair in the living room, when it dawned on me that Gloriana was walking back and forth between me and the coffee table (a distance of about five feet or so). Up until now she'd manage just a few steps and then grab something or fall over, but this time she was doing it all on her own without falling over.

So it was fun just watching her. I got up and moved to a different spot, and she would go to the coffee table, play for a few seconds with the train set that is on the table, then walk to the easy chair where I had been sitting, look at the book that was lying there for a few seconds, walk to Daddy (about six feet away from both the chair), smile at Daddy a few seconds, and back to the coffee table (just a couple feet), rinse and repeat.

Now of course we have to put the ball and chain on her.