The Blaisdell Blog

I was a student at North High School in Denver when I read, Deliver Us From Evil, by Dr. Thomas Anthony Dooley.    I went on to read The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain.   Dr. Dooley is one of the people whose life story has made an impact on my life.   It also made me a hawk on the misbegotten war that Viet Nam became.               Dr. Tom Dooley was born in St. Louis , Missouri , which, in one of life’s coincidences, became my home for most of my adult life.   As you might guess, given his intensely Irish name, Dooley was raised Catholic in a Catholic city.   He acquired a Jesuit education at St. Louis University High School , Notre Dame and St. Louis University School of Medicine.   He joined the U. S. Navy and found himself on the U. S. S. Montague, heading to Viet Nam to evacuate refugees.   This was 1954, long before this country’s involvement...

Earlier this week, on some ridiculous award show, people witnessed the meltdown of a 20 year old girl, Miley Cyrus.   We have all seen the snippets of her pathetic performance.   It wasn’t so much offensive as it was tremendously sad.   I am not defending her but she must be terrified.   While most people hit their maximum income earning potential in their 40’s, Miley is living her life knowing that she has already passed her expiration date before her 21 st birthday.   This girl’s implicit debasement of her body put me in mind of an article by Rabbi Hyim Shafner.   The Rabbi writes both a blog and a column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.   Like many people who make faith their line of work, he is wise, comforting and offers a kinder and gentler look at many of the world’s ills.   On Saturday, July 9, 2011 he had a column entitled, “Framing Physical Beauty in a New Light.”   He postulated that physical, relational and spiritual beaut...

When my oldest daughter was in high school she asked me to go with her to a beauty pageant in which her best friend was an entrant.   When we got to the Washington University campus that evening the way from the parking lot to the auditorium was crowded with students protesting the event.   My daughter stopped, confused and dismayed.   I said, “Don’t worry; your Mother is a barricade runner from the ‘60’s.   Grab my hand and stay close.”   We ducked, ran and got in without incident.   My daughter looked at me like I had two heads.   Memory becomes history so very quickly. My daughter’s friend in the pageant happened to be Black.   We lived in a community that was at least half Black.   They were our friends, our neighbors, and our guests.   It took little effort to see why it was a good neighborhood.   Our families were essentially the same.   Both parents worked.   There were few professionals, but lots of sk...

I awoke this morning in a good mood.   My husband and I had shared our Friday night with good friends, a great dinner and an evening of bridge.   I slept late, got my coffee and turned on the computer.   The first few news items just made me laugh, though ruefully.             It seems that now that he has been convicted of being a pusillanimous little weasel, Bradley Manning wants to be a woman.   Now that is both sexist and funny—women are made of sterner stuff.   Corporal Klinger has decided he would be safer in a woman’s prison than general population so he is playing the disability card.   He actually wants the country he despises to pay for his rehabilitation.   This is more self-serving, manipulative, whinny clap trap from a rat caught in a trap.   Thankfully, the Army has said, “no.”   The Army will undoubtedly face a fight on this one, but Manning is not a sympathetic char...

Brave New World , by Aldous Huxley, has been ranked among the top 100 novels ever written by a good handful of surveys.   I have read it and thought it was a rather pedestrian futuristic novel, but I have been wrong before.   What has my teeth itching is the eerie way that the current cabal of left-leaning extremists seems to be using Brave New World as their master plan for taking over the minds of the blunt skulls of this planet.   […maniacal laughter off stage.]             Try these comparisons.   Reproduction is turned into loveless technology with humans decanted as needed and only meeting the needs of the central authority.   The people are controlled and manipulated through ritualized sexual experimentation (even among children) and with legalized drugs.   There is a general, “give them what they want for immediate gratification and they won't notice what we are doing” attitude b...

Within the next 3 or 4 months our sun is going to reverse its polarity.   Observatories are watching the events of this normal 11 year solar cycle and trying to describe what this means to us.   This magnetic flip marks the mid-point in the sun’s solar maximum which is the peak of its solar weather cycle.   The north magnetic pole has already changed sign and the South Pole is skewed and moving quickly to align properly with its natural counterpart.   This holds consequences for the blunt skulls of Earth.   All of this is occurring during the weakest solar maximum in 100 years.   Usually these maximums are associated with high sunspot activity and the solar flares and ejections that accompany them.   All of these phenomenon have been less pronounced than usual, despite the grand dark matter prominence that was photographed, shooting out from the sun’s surface on August 13-14 of this year.   The triggering mechanism of these prominences, by the...

This spring I came home and found the gift of a book on my front porch.   The book, Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of the Baroque by Paul Anderson is 1,323 pages of text.   It weighs a little more than a Pomeranian.   Not only is this a heavy book physically, it is a heavy book intellectually.   It is two novels in one, each centered on the life of Mexico ’s leading poet, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz.   Besides all of the history, and poetry and stream of consciousness writing (which I usually hate, but accept as valid in this case) there is an almost constant presentation of philosophy, not as holy writ, but as cause for thought.               Sor Juana herself is someone you will want to meet.   She was born in 1651, and had taught herself to read by the age of 3.   At nineteen she entered the convent and became a prolific, world renowned writer and poet.   She died, ministering to fellow...

When I first learned what a pearl was and how it was made I thought it was a grand mystery.   I imagined myself growing very, very small and diving through the layers of nacre to the center of the pearl.   In my mind, when I sat on the center grain of sand that was my pearly home, my world always seemed very large, even though I was a spec and my universe only a pearl.   When I study astronomy, I feel like I am back inside that pearl.   Physicists understand what it is like to be very small and very large all at the same time.   Tonight is the big finale for this year’s Perseid Meteor Shower, as the earth passes through the debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle.   [This shower, full of fire and beauty, is really a tribute to the birth of my second daughter, but that is another story.] But the real excitement in astrophysics isn’t the highly visible and deeply understood excitement of meteor showers.   No, the real buzz concerns the concept of Dar...

I woke up this morning to a nightmare!   In China , there have been over 134 cases of bird flu being passed from person to person.   Up to this point, this killer has only been capable of being transmitted to humans from the avian host itself.   For those of you who do not believe in evolution, you are now watching it in action, and it is not working in our favor.   In December of last year, I addressed my fears for this very issue in a column called, “Frankenstein.”   Here is what you need to know.   The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson is a non-fiction book about the search for the source of the cholera epidemic in London in 1854.   In the last chapter of the book he talks about why workers in the poultry industry in Asia are given flu shots.   The shots don’t keep them from getting avian flu, they keep them from getting the basic, human influenza.   Why?   Because doctors and scientists want to make sure that there is no way f...

Okay, I have had it.   Maybe it was Charlie Rangel deciding he can call anyone in the Tea Party a, “cracker” and get away with it.   Maybe it was the double standard of punishing Riley Cooper for his use of the n-word, while giving Rangel a pass.     [I consider both terms ugly and demeaning, and would not allow either to be used in my presence without a challenge.]   In either event, I am sick unto death of being the whipping boy for every second rate, failing and desperate person who wants to avoid responsibility by calling me names.   YOU DON’T KNOW ME!   Since I abhor ignorance, and recognize it as a curable condition, let me try to explain a few things to Charlie Rangel.   This is what I know:   1.        It is not my fault that you are black any more that my being white was a choice.   I am, however, educated, disciplined, polite and hard working by choice, you are none of these. 2.  ...

On Thursday, March 27, 2003, Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson, Sr. addressed the opening general session of the National Science Teachers’ Association’s national convention in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania .   It was my introduction to a man who has been much in the news lately.   I am pleased to say I knew him, “when.”               Let me backtrack just long enough to say that my husband and I were both science teachers (I at the elementary level, Tom in Junior High).   We were active in the National Science Teachers Association and attended one regional and the national convention each year.   We have seen a host of great speakers: Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Mae Jemison, Richard Leaky…the list goes on.   Dr. Carson stands out for two reasons.   First, no one can fail to be inspired by his message of success in the face of adversity.   Second, this man has one standard of honesty and he sti...

I am one of those women who can’t drink out of the same glass as her husband without getting pregnant.   As a result I found myself, “in the family way” just two years into my marriage despite efforts to prevent same.   I was a young teacher, but not worried about completing the year as my due date was after the school year ended.   I was never healthier, didn’t know what morning sickness was and had abundant energy.   There was just one little wrinkle. In November I got a note to drop by the administration building after work.   When I got there I was taken to the assistant superintendent’s office and told that I needed to fill out the forms for maternity leave, starting at the end of the first semester in mid-January.   [I realize this is ancient history, but the 70’s were a different time.]    This meant that there would be no income for the second semester and no guaranteed job for the next school year.   I told Dr. A., “thanks but...

I must be from Lake Wobegone because I come from a place where, in the charming words of Garrison Keillor, “…all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.”   I am sure that our grandchildren have inherited all of the strengths and none of the weaknesses of their ancestors.   We love taking our grandkids on vacation.   The Children’s Museum in Indianapolis; The Volksmarch hike to the top of the Crazy Horse Monument; and the aquarium in Monterey, CA are all at the top of my list.   Along the way we have learned some things.   If you ask a child if they have to go to the bathroom they will say, “No.”   They are lying to you.   They will suddenly have an, “emergency” and the bathroom will be in the geographically most remote spot from where you presently are.   When you get to a bathroom there will be a line.   If there is no line, the bathroom will be a port-o-potty that the child will...

On the South Side of Chicago, a young man started shooting at two other men in a crowd.   They returned fire.   When the dust settled a six year old girl was down.   She had been hit in the chest and was lying on the ground covered in an ever widening pool of her own blood.    The victim, who is fighting for her life, is Quianna Tompkins.   Quianna is Black.   The shooter is Black.   The only other victim, a 52 year old woman, is Black.   The intended victims of the shooter are Black.               Surprisingly, Michelle Obama has not issued a statement saying that she, “could be” Quianna, even though she also grew up in South Side Chicago.   Shockingly, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Attorney General Eric Holder and the usual array of race baiters that popped up like whack-a-moles for the George Zimmerman case, have nothing to say about this horrible violence.   There ...

There was a time when the grandest thing a person could say was, “Civus Romanus sum.”   I am a Roman citizen .   That time is gone.   There was a time when the sun never set upon the British flag.   That time is gone.   Right now, the United States of America is the strongest, wealthiest and wisest world power on the planet.   According to Nobel Prize winning economist Michael Spence, that time also will pass.   Unlike most of the people interviewed on network television or running for Congress this man actually can get his intellectual flag all the way up the pole.     I have a master’s degree in economic education and put my daughters through college by teaching economics at night at the local community college.   So, while I am certainly not eating at the same table as Michael Spence, I can still read his menu.    Let me say that I have tremendous respect for Mr. Spence, which extends to admiring this work, whil...