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Did we nail the dress or what?

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It's possible that I am a cultural rage-oholic.
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Dear Men:

Please, I am begging you, please stop writing about chick lit (and I am using "chick lit" in the widest possible definition). I'm talking to you, Brian Prisco, your review of Jane Eyre, and all your ilk. Stop trying to be More Feminist Than Thou. Stop thinking you understand us (Team St. John? TEAM ST. JOHN???). You are out of your depth. Just . . . stop.

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I just signed up for a subscription to Birchbox.com. This is a website that offers a kind of cosmetic-of-the-month club as well as traditional retail makeup. For $10 a month, they send you five samples based on your skin type and coloring. I will report back on its worthiness or lack thereof!
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Water for Elephants, while wonderful, is sometimes hard to watch and contains short scenes of animal suffering. Therefore, the Green Moon Pax office has had to issue a rating of NC-ED: not appropriate for Ed Weber.



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On behalf of my beloved niece's school project:

An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane, such as long life or recovery from illness or injury.  The goal of ONE MILLION CRANES is for children from 1,000 US schools and groups to each make 1,000 origami cranes wishing good health, happiness, and healing to the children and people of Japan.  Each crane will be sponsored for $1.00 and all of the money raised will be sent to the Red Cross Japanese Relief effort.

Wellwood International School, a Baltimore County magnet school in Pikesville, MD has registered to participate in ONE MILLION CRANES. Wellwood is currently the only school in Maryland that is participating in the project and has a fund raising goal of at least $1,000.  If you would like to participate by sponsoring a crane, checks should be made payable to the American Red Cross with Japan Relief noted in the memo line.  Your canceled check will act as your receipt for tax purposes.  Please send all checks to

       Wellwood International School

       2901 Smith Avenue

       Pikesville, MD 21208

       Attn:  Eve Greco/Karen Keubler

Or to

       Eve Greco

       8126 Clyde Bank Road

       Parkville, MD 21234

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after reading the greatest novel in the English language? EVERYTHING seems tepid after Jane Eyre.

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Why did I go on the "Giant Swing" at Terrapin Adventures today with two fourteen-year-olds, which hauls you approximately four stories into the air and lets you go with a force that shoots your duodenum up your gullet?
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I will now be referring to other people as "my feeble fellow-worms."

(Thank you, Charlotte Bronte.)

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There will never be another William Donald Schaefer.

He got elected to the Baltimore City Council in 1955, stayed in one city or state office into the new millennium, never losing an election until his run for comptroller in 2006 (at age 84, if my math is right).

As mayor, he

* drove around Baltimore, checking on trash pickup and looking for potholes in his big old car
* developed the Inner Harbor into a world attraction
* dove into the seal poll at the National Aquarium with a rubber ducky
* invented "trash ball"
* sold abandoned row homes for $1

And when he was elected governor, he jumped out of a box labeled Baltimore's Gift to Maryland. He was also a first-class curmudgeon, writing nasty letters to people he disliked and calling the Eastern Shore a "shithouse" for not supporting him enough. Apparently he got even more vituperative as the years went on, but I prefer to remember him with the rubber ducky.

As it happens, my grandfather's name was also Schafer and he looked like the mayor. So he occasionally got a "Hi, Mr. Schafer!" on the streets of Baltimore from people he didn't know. They were good doppelgangers, as my grandfather would have totally rocked the striped swimsuit.
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There's been a lot of great stuff on Jezebel.com this week: a critique of a Rolling Stone article listing all the ways that the wives of bailout investment bankers spent the taxpayers' money; various reports on conservative craziness; and "Everyone Wins in Showdown between Baby Polar Bear and Bucket." But my favorite Jezebel tidbit of the week is the writer who described the experience of being ambushed by one of those fragrance sprayers at the department store as a "live action pop-up ad."
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A little manual labor, a little study, a little communion with my fellow man: the perfect Sunday.
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Dogs are better than cats.
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Rocky with half his body in a crevice, looking for bunnies.

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I kind of like this shot of the marsh that's on our daily dog-walking route.

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This new series on Starz is without a doubt my favorite retelling of the Arthurian stories. Casting is perfect, especially Jamie Bower Campbell as the young king and the ever incredible Eva Green as Morgan.

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Dear filmmakers: Please, please, stop trying to not bore us.

I know we're children of the digital age and have grown up on (or become swallowed by) explosions and Mario Kart and Twitter. And those things are all good and wonderful.

But there are some things that cannot be conveyed with briskness and efficiency. And one of those things is a complex, doubt-ridden, hope-infested relationship between two people separated by some elements (class, experience, power, position, guilt) and joined by others (soul, honesty, desire). There's nothing more fascinating than the human heart, so please don't be afraid of lingering. Take your time, build your layers, tell your story, and I promise: we will pay attention. 
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So I'm driving around town today with the windows wide open, blaring DC Talk on the speakers. "Free Free I'm Free At Last! Thank God Almighty I'm Free At Last!"  And then Martin Luther King's voice comes in at the end of the song, and I feel like I'm an itinerant preacher, sermonizing to the neighbors as I drive by. That's right . . .  Listen up, children.
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I read this mystery almost constantly from the time I started it. The last time I read a book so obsessively was Eclipse, by the master of compulsive readability, Stephenie Meyer. This is the third Lippman novel I've read, and the best. When her first novel, Baltimore Blues, came out, I read it out of loyalty, since Baltimore is infrequently the setting of literature. It was just okay, and I didn't read another Lippman novel until her latest one, I'd Know You Anywhere,  garnered such amazing reviews. It was a quantum leap from that debut novel, a book that got better the longer I read. This one was even better.
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Jay and I went to the BSO last night to see a performance of Prokofiev's Cinderella Suite, and the symphony had invited four students from Hopkins to write new versions of the Cinderella story to go with it. It was interesting to see how the writers balanced traditional elements with new elements from either a fresh time period or place.

I'd like to extend an invitation for others to join me in writing their own take on the Cinderella story. I'm giving myself till May 1 to write my version. If anyone wants to join me in this, I'd love to have some company!
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It is with great excitement that we at Green Moon Pax announce the establishment of a new honor, induction into the Order of the Circular Wag. The nomenclature comes from observation of that most noble beast, the beagle. The beagle has many expressive tail wags, including the small jiggle (indicating pleasant contentment), the rapid back-and-forth (great excitement), and the upward-curled sweep (denoting full engagement in the hunt). But perhaps the greatest of all wags is the circular wag, in which the tail completes a 360-degree rotation in celebration of the arrival of a greatly beloved individual. It is the highest honor the beagle can bestow upon a human.

And so we unveil the Order of the Circular Wag, honoring those individuals whose greatness must be acknowledged in the wider world. The first recipient of the O.C.W. is one Archbishop Raymund of Toledo, a 12th-century Christian bishop in northern Spain. Says Richard Rubenstein, author of Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages:

"Nowadays when people think about the response of the Catholic Church to new knowledge, they often recall Rome's hostility to free inquiry and its willingness to suppress unpalatable truths. But the travails of scientific pioneers such as Giordano Bruno and Galileo have obscured an earlier, brighter image: that of Archbishop Raymund of Toledo, one of the unrecognized heroes of Western culture, who did more than any man to make the treasures of Greek philosophy and science available to the Latin world, and who opened the door to advanced Arab and Jewish ideas as well. Little is known of Raymund's career and personality, but all agree it was his idea to create a translation center in Toledo and to recruit the best scholars available to work there, whether they be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Latin, Greek, or Slav. Moreover, this work would be carried out without censorship. There would be no attempt by Raymund and his colleagues to distinguish between potentially dangerous and inoffensive books, or to substitute orthodox language for non-Christian words or phrases."

In honor of this extraordinary man, whose unsung and largely administrative accomplishments opened the door to the freedoms and scientific advancement of Western culture, we award the Order of the Circular Wag to Bishop Raymund of Toledo.
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Incontrovertible Truth #6

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Thanks to the labor activists who brought us the weekend, "Friday" is one of the most beautiful words in the English language.
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