Wait, I'M A Man In A Library!

MAELI: I've never seen a man in a library.
JEFFREY (to MAELI, in a half-grumble): You don't know my dad.


Look, if I've got to wait with the kids for Martha to get done singing with the choir at our second Sunday service I will not be with them the whole time! This sounds like I do a terrible job parenting, but wait ... this scene occurred when the kids -- Maeli goes to Bethany as well and is between Sarah and Jeffrey in age -- were playing on their tablets that Martha let them bring from home (which I didn't know about until they told me!) after Sunday school. And before they played on the tablets Sarah and Jeffrey did their twenty minutes of reading to me to round out their Reading At Home, twenty minutes each for twenty days, in our church home so it qualifies! Jeffrey read from a Danny Dragonbreath book and Sarah read from Disney's 101 Dalmatians. I say Disney's because my money's on a handful (if any) of us recalling the original story the 1961 Disney tale is based on, Dodie Smith's 1956 children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians.


That's ok, I've never read it myself.


Part of the Walt Disney Company's plans to take over all entertainment in the world, but I digress. Anyway, while the kids sat in the nursery and weren't running around -- amazing how much energy they have once church and Sunday school are out -- I was strolling through Bethany Lutheran's church library which I'll admit does need some significant upgrading. But there's some amazing gems too, and I picked up one dealing with Bible characters from 1971 (one tagline on the back cover: "Can the Age of Abraham speak to the Age of Aquarius?") that gives an interesting perspective to now. But I'll review THAT when I'm done with it. Before school today I got Sarah and Jeffrey to Dakota Kids Dentistry for their six-month checkup and they both came out with flying colors ... I mean, no cavities. Just improve brushing on the front particularly their gums and they are both looking at orthodontist appointments in the near future to prevent a terrible overbite.


"OVERBITE! Why you lice-ridden miscreant -- !"


Sorry, that's my Dreadstar sneaking in on me. The cybernetically enhanced sorcerer Syzygy Darlock says it when scavenger and fellow rebel Skeevo Phlatus suggests/digs at him that growing a beard might cover up his very visible mechanical jaw. But again I digress. Might as well Surf Quanlom (paraphrasing the ad from Back to the Future Part II's 2015 sequence, "SURF VIETNAM"), the southeast Asian country that's a rather obvious stand-in for Vietnam or Cambodia in the 2015 graphic novel The Divine (ISBN 9781596436749) by Boaz Lavie and illustrated by Asaf Hanuka and Tomer Hanuka. This is the country Jason encourages his friend Mark to go there for two weeks of engineering work ... with explosives. "Two weeks. 45 grand. Straight from the U.S. government." Yet another example of more going on than your government is telling you, also learned courtesy of several war orphans in the story.


"You think you rule India, but you don't. The old gods still do."


True, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom takes place several decades and further west than I suppose The Divine does, but things that are hard to explain still pervade. "The Divine" refers to a dragon that escapes when the mountain is blown up and the only ones who see it are the ones about to die. And Quanlom statues are animated by magic and become giant soldiers ... blending both empirical and natural outlooks isn't easy, but The Divine pulls it off quite well without being too bleeding heart about the poor indigenes. (That's the ten-dollar word for "indigenous people", but maybe only anthropologists use it on a regular basis.) Countries in the middle of civil war do bring out the worst in people, I would say especially children.


Libraries need you!


David