Mother's Day: Babe's, Sculpture Garden, Zoo

On Mother's Day, I gave Maria a "Try the World" box of Spanish food and we drove to Sanger to meet Mom and Dad for lunch at Babe's. On the way down, we stopped in Ardmore to pick up a copy of Nathaniel Philbrick's The Last Stand so that Mom can follow along with us on our summer trip to Little Bighorn.

After lunch, Dad led us to a surprising alley sculpture garden.

After lunch, we made our first visit to the Frank Buck Zoo in Gainesville.

Kindergarten

"We talk the talk, we walk the walk . . ."
"I like school." And duck lips?

"Life can be a challenge for anyone: a mother, a daughter, a dad, a son."

Testing the Grounds

Aught Six: Act One

This past Wednesday, I turned in final grades for my students this semester, so I feel that summer has begun (even though we've seen some accursed forty-degree temperatures since then). On the occasion of the changing of the season, I thought I might offer a look back at the first trimester of 2006. Every week I receive a free e-mail from Harper’s magazine reviewing the important news events of the week. I save some of the most interesting bits from these e-mails into a single file and at the end of the year, I whittle that file down to a single list of the top news events of the year to put in my annual time capsule. I have grouped the news events by theme here.

Scene 1: Africa
1. In January, it was reported that each month in Congo (home of Dallas Maverick third-string center Didier Ilunga-Mbenga, and erstwhile revolutionary laboratory for Che Guevara) thirty-eight thousand people were dying, mostly from treatable diseases. In April, we learned that 35 percent of Botswanans in the 15 to 49 age group are infected with HIV and that three quarters of Africa's farmland lacked the basic nutrients needed to grow crops.
2. Click here to learn more about how can help provide insecticide-treated bed nets to African families for protection against Malaria (as described in "Nothing but Nets," Rick Reilly's May 1st column in Sports Illustrated.)
3. In February, Uganda held its first multiparty elections in 25 years. Yoweri Museveni, who has been president since 1986, was re-elected. Riots followed.
4. Also in February, the number of people who have been forced to flee their homes due to violence in South Darfur reached 70,000. In April, five Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives (including Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas) were arrested outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington for protesting the genocide in Darfur. Between October 2003 and January 2006, 180,000 people had been killed in Darfur. Check out the educational video game at www.DarfurIsDying.Com (thanks for the link, Lisa).

Scene 2: The Americas
1. In January, socialist and former political prisoner Michelle Bachelet became the first female president of Chile.
2. In February, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (on right in photo below) to Adolf Hitler because both Chavez and Hitler were elected legally and then "consolidated power." He also pointed out that Chavez has "a lot of oil money." (In August 2005, Donald Rumsfeld compared supporters of the anti-war movement in the U.S. to the supporters of Joseph Stalin. In December, state-controlled Venezuelan oil company Citgo announced that it would provide over 11 million gallons of oil to poor people in Boston and New York.)
3. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court voted to refuse Puerto Ricans the right to vote in U.S. Presidential elections.
4. In March, between 300,000 and 500,000 people marched in Chicago to protest a House bill that would make illegal immigration a felony. An even larger crowd turned out on May first.
5. In April, the Mexican senate passed a bill legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, opium, cocaine, and heroin; President Vicente Fox (on left in photo at left) was expected to approve the bill. (He later changed his mind after U.S. government officials expressed disapproval.)

Scene 3: Europe
1. In February, riots erupted over newspaper cartoons, printed first in Denmark and subsequently throughout Europe, that caricatured the prophet Muhammad. In Syria, demonstrators attacked the Danish and Norwegian embassies, and in Lebanon they set the Danish embassy on fire. Later riots broke out in India, Indonesia, Kashmir, Palestine, Thailand, the autonomous Somali region of Puntland, and Afghanistan--where 11 demonstrators were killed, at least 4 of them by NATO troops.
2. In March, between 260,000 and 500,000 French students demonstrated and vandalized buildings and cars to protest a new employment law that makes it easier for young workers to be fired. In April, 2.6 million French folks (including one Gerardo Ruiz) went on strike to the same law.
3. In March, the Basque separatist group ETA declared a permanent ceasefire. Formed in the 1960s, ETA’s deadliest years came between 1978 and 1980, when they were responsible for 245 deaths. About a month before I moved to Madrid in August 1987, an ETA bomb killed 21 people in a Barcelona supermarket. In 1997, ETA kidnapped and later murdered a member of the right-wing Partido Popular, Miguel Ángel Blanco. Blanco was born in 1968, making him one year younger than the author of this blog.

Scene 4: Israel and Palestine
In January, the Islamic group Hamas won 76 of 132 parliamentary seats in Palestine's parliamentary elections, unseating the Fatah party (new Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, is in the photo below). Bush, who had supported open democratic elections in Palestine, said that the United States would not negotiate with Hamas until the organization renounced its chartered goal of destroying Israel. By February, the United States and Israel were working together to destabilize the Hamas-led government. In April, Canada cut off all relations with Palestine (In January, the Conservative Party won a plurality of seats in Canada's federal election, making Stephen Harper Canada's next prime minister). Hamas let it be known that it would recognize Israel's right to exist if the Jewish state were to withdraw from the entire West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. On April 17th, Hamas said a suicide bomb attack in Tel Aviv, which killed nine, was justified.

Scene 5: Asia
1. In February, in the Philippines, President Gloria Arroyo declared emergency rule after an attempted coup by several politicians, military officers, and a former nun.
2. In April 17th edition of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh claimed that strategic planners inside the Bush administration are considering using tactical nuclear weapons—specifically, bunker busters—to destroy underground Iranian nuclear sites and that covert U.S. military teams are already in Iran. Later in the month, Iran announced that it had successfully produced low-grade enriched uranium.

Scene Six: The History Stacks
1. In February, the human population reaches 6.5 billion.
2. In March, an Italian commission found that the Soviet Union organized the shooting of Pope John Paul II in 1981.
3. In April, a translation of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas was released. In the text, originally written in Greek and translated into Coptic around 300 A.D., Jesus Christ asks his favorite disciple Judas Iscariot to turn him over to the Romans for sacrifice.

Scene Seven: The Cemetery
1. Don Knotts died in February. (From the Knotts trivia file: he served in the Army during World War II; his father was a schizophrenic; he appeared regularly on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow between 1953 and 1955 and became a regular on the Steve Allen show in 1956.)
2. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), which attacked industrial societies for pressuring women into accepting stifling roles as full-time homemakers, died in February.
3. Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) died in April.

Scene Eight: Iraq
1. In January, U.S. auditors found that of $120 million in Iraqi oil revenue allocated to fund reconstruction $97 million had gone missing. One month later, the Bush Administration submitted a $2.77 trillion budget to Congress calling for a 7 percent increase in Pentagon spending and a $36 billion cut to the growth of Medicare spending. An additional $120 billion was expected to be requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. In February, it was reported that at least 7,600 U.S. soldiers had been severely wounded serving in Iraq. (2406 American soldiers have died since the war began in March, 2003; 224 during the first four months of 2006).
3. In March, Iyad Allawi, the former interim prime minister of Iraq, said "We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." Donald Rumsfeld denied that Iraq was in a civil war. The U.S. military later announced that 1,313 Iraqi civilians had been killed in sectarian violence in March alone.
4. Six former U.S. generals called for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

Scene Nine: Al Qaeda Situation Room
1. In January, the United States bombed Pakistan. The missiles were intended to kill Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was expected at a dinner; instead, 18 people were killed, including women and children, and al-Zawahiri remains alive.
2. In February, the United Nations issued a report calling on the United States to either try the 490 inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison for their crimes or release them.
3. In February, in Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda attempted to bomb the Abqaiq oil facility (not far from the home of our good friends, the Gibsons) but the attack was thwarted. Two guards were killed, though.
4. In March, the U.S. State Department issued a report criticizing the human rights records of Jordan and Egypt, two countries where the United States has sent detainees to be interrogated.
5. In April, the United States announced that it would free 141 of the 490 "enemy combatants" at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba because they do not threaten U.S. security after all.

Scene 10: The Courts
1. In February, staunch conservative Samuel Alito was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.
2. Also in February, the South Dakota Senate passed a bill that outlaws nearly all abortions; victims of incest or rape are not exempt from the proposed ban. In March, Cecilia Fire Thunder, President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, vowed to use tribal land to provide abortions to South Dakotans, despite the state's near-total ban on the procedure. Said Fire Thunder: "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land.”
3. In April, the Louisiana state senate approved a bill that bans abortion except when the procedure can save a woman's life; an amendment to allow exceptions in the cases of women who have been raped or are victims of incest was defeated.

Scene Eleven: The Executive Office
1. In April, former Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican, was convicted of racketeering.
2. Also in April, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney (in photo at left with the President and Vice President of the NRA) shot and severely injured a fellow hunter, Texas attorney Harry Whittington, while hunting quail at a friend's 50,000-acre Texas ranch. Whittington later apologized for the trouble he caused Cheney.
3. In March, a videotape emerged showing President Bush being warned that Hurricane Katrina could flood New Orleans.
4. In the wake of a series of deadly mine disasters, it was revealed that the Bush Administration had lowered the fines for mine safety violations and failed to collect nearly one half of the fines levied.

Scene Twelve: Looking Up
1. In April, The Massachusetts legislature voted to make health insurance mandatory for all state residents by July 2007.