Family news and book/movie commentary

Family news

it's hot with overcast but no rain. Lousy for allergies, so I am staying inside

One of the puppies we brought here from the farm is sick: infected foot, not eating well but takes antibiotics. She's so malnourished and thin she may or may not make it. She is so thin that she can squeeze through the gate and might have either eaten garbage or got into a fight.

Ruby has an extra role in a play put on by several of the Christian schools in Manila. So she will go Friday and Saturday for practice, but due to the distance she will miss two other practices.

Here, they have increased the high school graduation from 10 to 12 years for a diploma. She might transfer to another school when she hits grade 11, but so far she is fine homeschooling.

myself, I am busy listening to the classic book The Leopard at Scribd...it is almost as boring as the movie, but I will run it as background when doing other things.

I am also reading some old Elizabeth Goudge books there...

I also read the latest Anne Hillerman mystery novel where she takes up the characters from her father's novels. Fairly good, but my only criticism is that they talk too much (her father would have them think these things, not say them out loud).

This is the same problem I have with Outlander: uh, lady, what happened to the strong silent type?
These are Scotsmen, not Irishmen...

But of course, one reads historical romance for the romance, and even though they often get the history part right, the characters tend to think like modern people...if they actually acted and thought and talked like people did back then, no one would read these things. One runs into this with autobiographies: I was startled when the polite lady Agatha Christie used the N word in her autobiography. Well, it wasn't taboo at the time...

The other problem I have with the later Outlander books is that she made the heroine a doctor. Uh, even in 1960's, getting into a US medical school as a woman was hard, but getting into one after age 25 was near impossible unless you had pull. And a nurse wouldn't have had the academic credentials to actually get admitted. Or did she go to the UK for school, where doctors got a six year course after A levels, and back then they admitted with pull?

But she was supposed to get her MD in Boston, so how did she ever get admitted in those days, when less than five percent of students were women?
Uh, they discriminated back then and it was almost impossible to get into medical school if you were Black or Jewish or a woman, or if you were old (read over 28)...

until a few years before I got in, our medical school had a black quota (one or two), a Jewish quota, and no women. Our class was better: We had 8 percent women, about 20 percent Jewish, one black and one Asian.

When my fellow classmate Carol got pregnant, and didn't drop out, you could hear the chins of the faculty drop...when they suggested she take a year off, she said why, since she had her first baby while working for a PhD and teaching part time...(she had the kid during the Thanksgiving break)...

ah the good old days...

Something to remember the next time you read about nostalgia for the past.

The movie "Woodlawn" actually goes into this...

I had to laugh: It is sort of like Rudy with Jesus: The guy who turns around the team by replacing their racial hatred by pushing the idea of brotherhood in Jesus is the guy who played Rudy...and if you are a sports fan, you know who I am talking about (Sean Astin).