Why worry?

The Name Game

I just stumbled upon a fantastic post at the new (and equally fantastic) blog “Red State Blue State” that manages to mention both Sarah Palin and a member of my own family (who shall remain nameless but is listed prominently among the “Blue State names” specified below.  Wattenberg has my number:

“Blue parents who name with red values”

Laura Wattenberg has a fascinating discussion of the one topic you think you’ve already heard enough about . . . Sarah Palin’s kids’ names. You really have to read the whole thing, but here’s the gist:

No naming event has ever filled my [Wattenberg's] inbox with as many reader queries as the unveiling of Sarah Palin–mom to Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig–as John McCain’s running mate. “Any comment?” “I’ve never heard Trig as a name for anything but a math class.” “Is this ‘an Alaska thing’?’”

In a way, yes, it is “an Alaska thing.” If you had nothing to go on but the baby names and had to guess about who the parents were, you’d guess that that they lived in an idiosyncratic, sparsely populated region of the country…and that they were conservative Republicans. . . .

For the past two decades, a core set of “cultural conservative” opinions has served as a theoretical dividing line between “red” (Republican/conservative) and “blue” (Democratic/liberal) America. These incude attitudes toward sex roles, the centrality of Christianity in culture, and a social traditionalism focused on patriotism and the family. If you were to translate that divide into baby names it might place a name like Peter—classic, Christian, masculine—on one side, staring down an androgynous pagan newcomer like Dakota on the other. In fact, that does describe the political baby name divide quite accurately. But it describes it backwards.

Characteristic blue state names: Angela, Catherine, Henry, Margaret, Mark, Patrick, Peter and Sophie.

Characteristic red state names: Addison, Ashlyn, Dakota, Gage, Peyton, Reagan, Rylee and Tanner. . . .

Why is it the blue parents who name with red values? Because in baby naming as in so many parts of life, style, not values, is the guiding light. . . .

You can read the rest of the post here: http://redbluerichpoor.com/blog/?p=85

Walkable Cities

I love Ferndale.

Ferndale, my home in the United States, is a lovely inner-ring suburb of about 21,000 people with housing stock built primarily between 1910 and 1940, fantastic municipal services, and wonderful people. It even has a great wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferndale,_Michigan. It is also a Michigan-designated Cool City and has received considerable attention as a fine example of the “new urbanism” that makes for attractive, inviting and ecologically-conscious places to live.

One of Ferndale’s main advantages its its walkability. A quick check with the ruler tool on Google Earth shows that my house is 1061 feet from a playground and recreation center, 2390 feet from a grocery store, 3480 feet from a coffee shop, 4463 feet from a library.

And yet, how much better from this perspective is the old new urbanism of Bratislava. I know there are many reasons for the difference and that there are places in the United States that are similar (much of the island of Manhattan, for example) but all factors aside, I am simply delighted at my good fortune to live in a place like the one we do now. The same Google Earth ruler gives the following remarkable distances from our front door to places we like to go (yes I know I should do this in meters, but I am not going to): 43 feet from a coffee house, 127 feet from the vegetable market, flower shop and sandwich shop, 149 feet from a Czech pub, 306 feet from a pizza place, 161 feet from a coffee house, 201 feet from small grocery store, 156 feet from the best bookstore in Slovakia, 330 feet from a pharmacy, 503 feet from the EU information center, 489 feet from a church with English-language services, 615 feet from the library, 949 feet from Bratislava’s English language bookstore. We could, quite literally, live for months without ever going more than 1000 feet from our apartment. Not that we will, since beyond that 1000 foot limit is a beautiful and vibrant city that I am again coming to know.

I love Bratislava.

Kevin

A plug for Drayton Avenue Cooperative Preschool (DACP) in Ferndale

For whatever reason, we are having a difficult time getting google to give a good page rank to the homepage of Elena’s and (presumably) Peter’s school–Drayton Avenue Cooperative Preschool (DACP), so I figured it would not hurt to throw a link in here:

http://draytonpreschool.googlepages.com

And it probably wouldn’t hurt to throw in the alternate link:

http://www.la.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/stuff/draytonpreschool.htm

We’ve enjoyed the school a lot and the parental involvement is fantastic (as it must be for a school like ours that is a true co-op).

Kevin