Category Archives: General

One Small Step

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A Small, Belated Step for Grammarians – The New York Times

An Australian computer programmer says he found the missing “a” from Neil Armstrong’s famous first words from the moon in 1969, when the world heard him say, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” …

Some historians and critics have dogged Mr. Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct, “One small step for a man.” Without the missing “a,” critics say, Mr. Armstrong said the equivalent of “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.”

Is this really that big a deal? “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind” would be just a poetic in its own right. It still means that one particular thing is both a small step and a giant leap.

(This concludes the least consequential blog post ever.)

Oh, For a Helicopter

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New Jersey’s two Democratic senators, Frank Lautenberg and Bob Menendez – the latter of whom is in a tight race against Republican Tom Kean, Jr. – both voted for the president’s awful torture/enemy combatant/habeas-corpus-stripping bill yesterday.

If I were still a New Jersey resident, I would consider not even voting for U.S. Senate this year. If Democrats can’t stand up for themselves, they don’t deserve to control either house of Congress.

Except.

Except that Glenn Greenwald makes an excellent point.

But a desire to see the Democrats take over Congress — even a strong desire for that outcome and willingness to work for it — does not have to be, and at least for me is not, driven by a belief that Washington Democrats are commendable or praiseworthy and deserve to be put into power. Instead, a Democratic victory is an instrument — an indispensable weapon — in battling the growing excesses and profound abuses and indescribably destructive behavior of the Bush administration and their increasingly authoritarian followers. A Democratic victory does not have to be seen as being anything more than that in order to realize how critically important it is.

A desire for a Democratic victory is, at least for me, about the fact that this country simply cannot endure two more years of a Bush administration which is free to operate with even fewer constraints than before, including the fact that George Bush and Dick Cheney will never face even another midterm election ever again. They will be free to run wild for the next two years with a Congress that is so submissive and blindly loyal that it is genuinely creepy to behold.

Greenwald also makes the point that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is 86 years old, so Bush might get another court appointment in the next two years. If the Republicans keep the Senate and Stevens dies or becomes incapacitated, then Bush can get nominate whomever he wants in his place, meaning that “the Supreme Court will be composed of a very young five-Justice majority of absolute worshippers of Executive Power — Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Alito and New Justice — which will control the Court and endorse unlimited executive abuses for decades to come.”

Or, as she puts it:

Imagine you are stranded on your roof in rising floodwaters. Sooner or later you’re going to drown if you aren’t rescued. Yet you refuse to be rescued in an old rowboat because it might be leaky and you are waiting for a helicopter.

Well, folks, the Dems are the rowboat, and there ain’t gonna be a helicopter.

Sigh.

My Grandma

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My grandmother died early this morning. She was 93.

In April 2005, she suffered a massive stroke. Since then, she’d been confined to a bed in a nursing home in New Jersey, barely able to speak, unable to eat solid food, barely able to move one side of her body.

This was a woman who – although she was often a pain in the ass – was always very much alive. She was stubborn, very smart, much too overweight, loved food, never forgot a name or face, constantly interjected comments into conversations whenever she felt like it (particularly when she felt ignored), and engaged in selective hearing.

But she was my grandma and I loved her. And I know she adored me and my brother. And it was sad to think of her in the condition she was in.

I visited her last Saturday during Rosh Hashannah. She was in the hospital because she’d developed a blood clot in her leg and had needed surgery to relieve it. It was only the second time I’d seen her since the stroke. She looked about as bad as I’d expected. But she was aware. I stood by her head and stroked her hair. She couldn’t take her eyes off me. I kissed her forehead. I felt bad that I hadn’t visited her in so long.

Two or three days later, she had to go back into the ICU because her body was weakening. The oxygen levels in her blood were not where they should be, her heart rate shot up, and her body kept going into seizures. We knew she was rapidly deteriorating, and she died around 3:00 this morning.

Ever since she had the stroke, I hoped she wouldn’t last much longer. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her for the past year and a half. It wasn’t really a life.

So while I’m sad that she’s passed away, I’m also glad that she doesn’t have to suffer anymore.

My grandpa died at 94, and my grandma lived to be 93. So my dad’s got some good longevity genes. I hope he passed them onto me.

My grandma survived lymphoma, she survived a stroke, she survived numerous trips to the hospital. She lived into her nineties despite having chronic high blood pressure.

As my dad said to me on the phone this morning, “She was a tough old lady.”

Indeed she was.