At Long Last, a Solution to the Iraq War

Yes, please do.

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Confronting Childhood Toys as an Adult

I played with an aircraft carrier as a child, I realized.

This weekend, my siblings and I sifted through some of our old childhood toys as my mom brought containers and boxes out of our storage shed in the backyard. GI-Joes, Star Wars figurines, plastic dinosaur bones, a model B-17 bomber, puzzles, cowboy six-shooters, blocks, an ancient Cookie Monster puzzle, and even a Cabbage Patch doll. It was strange to see everything paraded before us. Memories welled up.

I got a rag and washed the dust off the plastic flight deck of the Gulf War vintage U.S.S. Enterprise. It was sitting on a box of toy airplanes, replicas of military jets common in 1991. A-10 warthogs, F-14 tomcats, and the like. How long ago it seemed. How simple, how uncomplicated a time it was. Wolf Blitzer and Bernard Shaw ducking in a Baghdad gazebo, green tracer rounds flying in the background, as we watched from the couch.

I couldn't help but think how much childhood has changed and how much it will change as we accelerate forward. My childhood toys incorporated pretty simple technology - an electronic spelling game, stiff-walking dinosaurs, simple Capsela electric motors, and Nintendo games like Duck Hunter and Mario 1 at grandma's house.

I lived a pre-internet childhood. With a vacant lot on either side of the house and a field with corn or alfalfa stretching off to a treeline in the back. And, while the naysayers are never quite accurate in their doom about change, I'm very glad I did.

It was fort building with hand tools and sand box toys. It was a little wooden barn and a swingset. It was basic Nerf guns and marbles in the dust.

As we placed the boxes back in the shed, I gripped the unbent brim of a blue mesh trucker's hat. I had acquired it as a five year-old at the Mammoth Dig Site in Yellowstone National Park. With its cheap, half-faded mammoth majestic in blue against the white horizon, it looked like something one might wear out to a hipsterish joint these days, Pabst in hand.

And I realized I must be getting old, fashions and wars having come and gone and returned, cycles repeating before my eyes.

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Unacceptable

The Pentagon, inspections and hearings reveal, cannot account for nearly 15 billion dollars in payments for goods and services in Iraq.

Heads should roll after such a thing.

And here I thought the ridiculous amount of subsidy spending in the recent Farm Bill was shameful.

*Here's a bit on the interesting constitutional gripe raised by some Republicans when it was discovered 34 pages of the bill had not been included in the version vetoed by President Bush.

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A Madison Momento

Digging through a drawer, I came across this pin that I found last spring on a State Street bench back in Madison.

I laughed even harder when discovering it a second time.

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