I expect you know the Pope visited the USA? Comments?
I expect that you saw that the Pope visited the USA, comments?
It's really refreshing to get your perspective on my hometown. I guess there's a lot I'd been taking for granted.
Anyway, don't forget to get out of town for a bit while you're there. If you have a whole day, the beach or the mountains are only an hour away. But more realistically, go check out Forest Park - there's a lot to see.
I'm totally not surprised that you liked Portland. I've been there a few times on business (my employer has an office there) and it really is a nice place.
It is a bit weird to see moss growing on the parking lots, though. It rains a lot there. Portland is also the greenest city in the United States, without any question. I have several friends there and it's interesting how they take for granted political positions that would be considered radical in the Midwest. Oregon is a different place, that's for certain.
You might be interested in this recent story on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17872719
I have never been a member of a Greek-letter organization, but the fraternity of which the greatest number of my friends were a part (to my outsider's eye) closely resembled this model, over 15 years ago. Note that this was at a university with a small Greek system and a reputation for an intense focus on academics.
I will mention that, having married into (where "married into" is looser than having actually joined) a coed Greek society, I am impressed by what Greek life can be. As an undergrad, however, I saw the other side of what Greek life can be.
Don, if you know of any students who *would* like to start a chapter of a coed society (Alpha Delta Phi, obviously), and there is no current ADPhi fraternity chapter at Knox, let me know. The society is looking to expand, and I am friends with those in charge of the expansion.
As I said, all tight knit groups seem to face the problem of protecting wrong doers. I think this is worse when the groups, or sub-groups within the larger group have values which devalue certain groups. Those devalued groups become safe targets. You evidently know how difficult it is to force your own values onto a group.
Fraternities as single sex organizations set up women to be a devalued group, since they are already not members. Even if the Fraternity is founded with the value of equality of all men, even the female ones, the years when this was not the norm for Greek house, and the patriarchal bent to our society generally fight against it. And then there are the rapists.
College age rapists abound. They look the same as the average guy, mores the pity, as do those who would just look the other way and condone rape when done by someone they know. I know that there are many men who find either behavior inexplicable and abhorrent, but all too often I hear about and hear from the other kind. I have been shouted down and denounced for pushing the idea that positive verbal consent before an initial sexual encounter with someone would be a good idea.
Note: I was not saying it should be mandatory, just that it would be a good idea especially in light of Illinois law which states that lack of resistance does not constitute consent. But no, that is apparently an outrageous idea. Some have protested that they would never get laid if they did that. (Apparently they could not imagine that asking their partner if he or she was ready to have sex right now could ever be anything but a mood killer. Piss poor imaginations is what I think they have.)
I think that the motivation for hazing is similar to that of rape; there are those who enjoy it, whether just as a power game, or sexually it really doesn't matter. In the past, Fraternities have used hazing to tighten the group bond, and so now, even when there are Fraternities set against hazing, some will dredge up the practice once again. Because they can.
I don't have a solution for wrong doing done by close knit groups. One would hope the groups could promote positive values among its members, but this is not always easy. It is vital that we come up with an answer because although fraternities are not necessary, military, fire fighters, and police still are.
lee -- one thing that has always frustrated me, as someone who was a member of a fraternity founded in part as a statement against hazing at VMI, is that many universities do *not* have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to hazing. If a house has someone on the board of trustees or a big donor, they'll be allowed to re-colonize two or three times after cooling off periods, and every time the alumni come in and create a culture of hazing as soon as the house re-opens. Colleges have a responsibility to end that kind of thing no matter what the cost in alumni/donor support, and the national fraternities should not tolerate it either. (Even my fraternity, which has opposition to hazing as one of its highest values, has had chapters that haze. It blows my mind.) I also agree with what you say about houses protecting rapists and others -- but even the Roman Catholic Church has engaged in that kind of behavior, so I'm at a loss to suggest a systematic solution. :-(
I am coming to think that issues that worry me about the Greek system are very difficult to separate from the close-knit bond which you find as their strength. It is not unique to the Greek system either. We see it at the service academies, in police departments, and elsewhere.
The issues which bother me are that in these groups, when someone within the group behaves less than honorably, others within the group may feel the need to ally themselves with the wrong doer, prevent outsiders from seeing the wrongdoing, or assist in the wrong doing. If someone within the group does not fall in line and protect the wrongdoer, that person, even if they themselves are a member of the group, will be persecuted.
We have all heard about instances where some members of a group behaved in a way not acceptable to general society, and then the wrong doing is compounded because wrongdoing is covered up and witnesses and the victims are pressured to keep quiet and ostracized if they do not. We see this at every level from grade school to the military. The tighter the group bond, the more the pressure not to betray someone in the group no matter what they do.
And make no mistake; the Greek system has long been a safe harbor for dangerous wrong doing. Setting aside the numerous allegations of routine rape and underage drinking which many of the anti-Greek individuals point to and many of the Greeks deny or dismiss, we can look to the hazing rituals college fraternities became notorious for. College fraternity hazing still goes on, and deaths because of it do make the news every so often, as do efforts to tone it down or remove it entirely. Most states now have anti-hazing laws and many fraternities have taken official positions firmly against hazing.
But again, hazing is not unique to college fraternities. It is just an example of a wrong carried out at a fraternity. I don't think the solution is to not allow tight-knit groups. I do think that if a school have a Greek system, they must monitor it to make sure that it is promoting values consistent with the college's and not serving as a safe harbor for dangerous wrong doing.
Fair enough. To be honest, I have a few consistently anti-Greek, over the top faculty in mind when I use the term "anti-Greek faculty". So rather than lumping everyone with objections into some stick-man group, I'm incorrectly applying to term to a small sub-group. :-)
The formative effects of gender-segregated groups are still an issue that weighs on my mind when it comes to fraternities. For all the good that being in a single-gender environment to hash out some life issues was, it did also reinforce some "common wisdom" about some other issues that was not helpful. In my own life, I found I simply had to push myself to be exposed to a wider variety of viewpoints. But that's not a systemic answer to a systemic problem, true.
I don't think it's quite fair to lump the anti-Greek faculty together as you've done; I can't deny there are some who simply hold a caricature in their head and argue based on that, but that is, I think, a small minority of them. Although some of them may have had bad experiences with Greeks elsewhere, all the anti-Greek faculty I've spoken with have some fairly specific anecdotal evidence of students who have had problems with the system right here. Some also have larger philosophical objections to gender-segregated groupings and the formative effects that this and other aspects of group mentality have on the teenage/college-student mind.
Most of your responses are addressing that directly. No need to set up stick men. (They're like straw men, only they at least have a little substance to them. ;)
Oh, and I thought of something else I wanted to add. The criticism that always seemed to come out of the anti-Greek faculty was that we were choosing people like us to pump out some stream of Greekified people, mostly white, mostly affluent, with mostly the same interests and ideas. I found exactly the opposite in my time in the Greek system. Our fraternity fit some stereotypes -- but it was three or four distinct groups that roughly fit three or four different stereotypes, each one made up of a diverse mix of ethnicities and class backgrounds. Being in a fraternity challenged me to work across all those differences in interests and background to forge something in common. I never got interested in the same things as the hip-hop-loving party faction in my house, and I doubt they ever got interested in the choir geek or gamer cultures. But we did create a common life together based on principles of love, truth, and honor, despite all our differences. And we've gone out into the world to try to live out those values. That is pretty powerful, and is exactly the opposite of what the anti-Greek faculty pretend we are up to.
As someone who was responsible for the formation of candidates during my time in a Knox fraternity, I have to admit I'm pretty frustrated that the anti-Greek faculty never once talk to me or (to my knowledge) any others in leadership in my fraternity about their concerns.
Had they done so, they would have found out that many of us in leadership in my particular fraternity had come to Knox very anti-Greek and had had our minds changed by the kind of community and mutual responsibility we found there. Some of the other fraternities are a bit more stereotypical, but even there I think they would have found a surprising amount of diversity and significant departures from the stereotypes.
The last thing I would mention is that at least in my time, the fraternities tried their best to live up to the expectations placed on them. The same cannot be said of the ad-hoc groups of friends throwing parties in the dorms. At least with the Greek system, there are shared values to appeal to and official responsibility to the College. That ought to count for something.
Anyhow, I'm glad you're on this committee, Don. The Greek system is not perfect, but the irrational attacks on it by some faculty get in the way of effective changes to make it better.
Or you could buy a pair of those glove/mitten hybrids. They work great for typing while keeping your hands and (most of) your fingers warm at the same time. When I'm not typing, I can pull the mitten part down over my fingers to keep my fingertips warm.
They exist. I seem to recall seeing them in a magazine (Real Simple, maybe?) very recently. They were talking about how you can use them to lower your energy expenses if you're a "work at home" type - they're the sort of thing that could sit on your desk and keep your work area warm without having to heat space you're not using.
Fixed, thx.
Your link to "instrumentum laboris" is incorrect; seems to be missing a "/wiki/".
Just thought I'd help out a little bit, informationwise. I've only recently considered using silicone-based products for cookware, although my knowledge of silicone-based products goes back perhaps 40 years, when I first started receiving literature from Dow Chemical and General Electric. Silicone products were perhaps first used in the Space industry in the form of silicone sealants, which, believe it or not were guaranteed to last 50 years! Over the years I've become acquainted with many other silicone products (by the way 'silicone' is not the same as 'silicon'--although silicone is silicon-based, their chemical properties are quite different). Silicone is a plastic which can be formulated with a variety of additives which will give it properties ranging from liquids to super-flexible rubber-like plastics to very firm rigid plastics. It is normally a non-stick type of compound unless formulated with adhesive qualities, and one of its most noteworthy qualities has always been its ability to withstand both high and low temperatures without degrading in any way. The variety of products it is added to and its variety of applications is far too extensive to list here. It has always been extensively used in medical applications where a flexible, long-lasting and essentially inert compound was need, as in tubing and implants (for many years it was considered among the safest of products to be used within the human body--until all the fuss about breast implants arose). It is impervious to just about all other kinds of chemicals and will probably not deteriorate in a hundred years! It is slowly finding its way into a new generation of innovative applications, replacing many previous products which would deteriorate with time, with a genuinely long lasting and more fault-resistant version.
I was personally led to this discussion by watching an infomercial on TV (for Smart Ware--see buysmartware.com), but I have also seen some products on store shelves as well. I have also looked at Silicone Zone products which are listed on amazon.com. I noted that Silicone Zone says their product is 'pure' silicone, while implying that cheaper products contain certain 'fillers' which render them inferior. I don't know about that--additives are often used to change the physical properties of silicone to make it more suitable for a particular use. But they can also be added to make it cheaper (and perhaps less suitable), since silicone is a fairly expensive plastic to begin with. The current wave of silicone-based cooking products take advantage of some of silicone's most noteworthy properties--the ability to withstand extremes of high (and low) temperature without degradation, and not sticking to just about anything (as in burnt cooking residues). I am a little bit skeptical of the claims made that anything 'leaches' from silicone 'rubber' products (regardless of what is said about breast implants), although some of the additives which might be compounded with the silicone might possibly leach. Also I'm fairly certain that most ordinary things that come into contact with silicone-based products will not be absorbed to any significant extent by the silicone. Finally, I am not a shill for the silicone industry--I've just found from experience that silicone-based products do a superior job in a lot of different applications. I haven't actually tried the cookware (yet) but I have a hard time believing (as some claim here) that anything sticks to it. Personally, I'm thinking of trying the so-called 'mats' which can be used to work and roll out pastry dough on.
I find it interesting that so many people have problems with silicone bake ware! I have a ton of different silicone baking objects, such as a 13" x 9", a 9"x9", muffin, and I use a number of silicone spatulas for when I cook. I have yet to have a problem with any of my items, and I use them frequently! I do spray my silicone items tho it says you don't have to. Perhaps its the brand your using? I don't know a lot of different brands but I use a lot of Silicone Zone items. The fact that its silicone shouldn't affect your baking to much, perhaps just alter the time a tad....
Can we expect more pics?
iPhone?
Just looking for help with silicone egg forms (round preferably)and ran across this chat. Quite a hoot. And yes, you should watch your grammer if you are going to bash on others. Anyone have any experience with the little egg/pancake forms?
I bought my mom a set for muffins and mini loafs from wallmart. I found the quality of baking to be pretty good, I wouldn't say it's better or worse than traditional metal. The only thing I noticed was that, since we don't use them often, every time we get them out they are covered in some kind of sticky oil or something. Does anyone know anything about that.
I agree that you need to check the quality before you buy it, or anything for that matter.
Be nice to Tom, I'm sure he's just a self-centered insecure person. Then again he did make fun of a mother for misspelling one word.
We bought a muffin set which was a metal frame with removable silicone cups. I also bought mini-bundt cake cups for it. We use the regular for muffins and the bundt cake for fruit cake, I was amazed as the very sticky fruitcake slid out effortlessly from the cups.
Thank you, blahedo, for not deleting the comments. I found your #4 site because I discovered last night, I no longer have a pan suitable for baking brownies. So before investing in yet another aluminum or steel baking pan, I thought I'd see what was in the ether about silicone, as I have been toying w/ the idea of buying some. I found all the comments most helpful. It appears I need to check the quality of the material first, so mail order is out. I like the idea of baked goods being evenly done.
Thank you one & all for contributing. Tom can wear a plastic ixing bowl as a hat for the rest of his days. That way we may all recognize & know ignorance when we see it coming.
That they haven't posted the 2008 acceptees yet. :)
Er, I don't see your name on anything on that page you linked to. What am I missing?
Hurray for Dancing with the Stars! Song number two above is "Fallen", by Lauren Wood. It's the rumba that Jennie and Derek danced to this week. :)
Isn't pumpkin pie more of a thanksgiving thing?
I'm somewhat surprised it's not a lambda.
Don Blaheta /
blog@blahedo.org