things are not great here. we have a lot of kids who just stay over because their own dysfunctional families are no better than ours, but we at least have some food. my wife defends the feeding of whoever is around as it's only right, and besides, they're only kids. two of them, their grandmother just passed out; she's old, she has cancer, i took one home and his grandmother was there passed out on the floor. he called the right people and had her taken to the hospital, but then he was home alone, so he called us, and we went and got him.

they aren't too much trouble. they try to not get in our way; they sometimes come downstairs hoping to grab a snack or a bite to eat when they can do it unobtrusively. And we've told them this is ok. in my book the best way of keeping kids out of jail is feeding them and getting them to school if at all possible. but we can't adopt five kids; we can hardly feed the ones we've already adopted. and they each come with a host of baggage which, when they move it in, will be a little overwhelming.

one of our problems is that we have a young fifteen-year-old girl remaining in the house; she has a boyfriend; they are reasonably stable, and she's willing to go to school every day and just live her life. She's not crazy about having a bunch of older boys around (what was one, turned into two, and now more like three or four guests). too many boys. they're all respectful to her; some even treat her like a younger sister. it doesn't matter. it's something she and i and even sometimes my wife don't seem to be able to control. it's what one daughter calls "pathological inability to say no."

last night, in her sleep, she gave permission for one other boy to come and stay. he turned out to be the fourth guest. A third was staying without permission but i thought he had permission. this made five boys in the room on a school night. it turns out that all of them are going to go to school except my own eighteen-year-old who won't go to school in any case. they want to go to school. even he does. the fact was, he couldn't make it; he couldn't do anything they wanted. he couldn't wake up in the morning. but he knew he needed it and he's sorry now that he dropped out.

the rest are getting up and going to school. last day before the holidays.

Harvardinates

John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724), used Harvardinates (sons of Harvard), instead of Sons of the Prophets, to refer to Harvard alumni. That was his way of saying, we educate all men, not just divinity students (yes it was boys only at that time). This is the story of opening up Harvard, and all higher education in North America, to a wider audience - which is still a trend in progress.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CND89PZS

dismayed by horrible news of war in the Middle East, and by a family situation that is cause of great frustration, i get increasingly drawn into puritan massachusetts. an ancestor gets dragged in 1673 into court for yelling and screaming, obscene and dangerous things. he's fined fifty pounds and thrown in jail for a week.

his father is governor of the colony. A governor can't have his son fined and thrown in jail for a week, so, eventually, the fine is remitted; i don't know if he actually did any time. it seems weird that they would throw him in there in the first place, given that everyone knew who he was, but apparently it was bad enough that they did, and wrote it up in court.

his oldest son, john, about eleven at this time, would go on to become president of harvard, by keeping his head in the books and doing well in school. but his second son, bezaliel, about nine at the time, is much more of a mystery, and i find myself thinking about him a lot, since i was a second son whose older brother went to harvard. this second son has been ignored since he "died young;" often his death date is given as the same as his birth date. but he actually lived to at least ten, because of an incident in those same court records in 1674. one man is accusing another of having stolen some ribbon which was found in his workshop; to get to the bottom of it, it was ten-year-old bezaliel who stole it, and bezaliel is sent packing, with his father told to reprimand him in front of the constable.

this is the only appearance of bezaliel anywhere, the only evidence that he lived to the age of ten and beyond. when he died, there was no record; i have no idea when or where he died. what was he like? how old did he become, and how did he die?

back to the father, who got sued for non-payment of over two thousand pounds worth of virginia tobacco the same year. his father, keep in mind, was governor. what was he doing, dealing this tobacco? or smoking it all? or possibly, helping his father ship it abroad, as it was bought in 1669 (before father became governor) and father was well known for running ships around, bringing back things such as madiera from the canary islands and such. financial problems. alcoholism. and his dad was governor.

i'd like to go further, but i can't. the following year, all hell breaks loose as tribes throughout the colony attack the villages, pillaging, burning, scalping, doing every kind of unforgivable offense one can imagine. it's possible that raping was involved, as it was in israel, so in a sense, i have not gotten away from anything. and this time it's my ancestor (apparently) who was governor at the time. he did what he had to do; he marshalled forces, and gave the militia the resources they needed; thousands died; the tribes were finished in massachusetts.

bezaliel was lost out of sight forever, apparently. his father remarried and moved out to roxbury, with yet another younger sister, but not bezaliel. his brother john was only 13 when war broke out; bezaliel was only 11 and couldn't have lived much longer. the grandfather died in office, a hero, in 1679; they had a huge parade for him. what happened to the rest? it's all a mystery. i can hardly bear to think about it.

weblog museum

the below pictures are part of a collection. the purple one, my dad's original (i believe) is the source of about a half-dozen others, including the orange one, so my first goal is to find them all and make them a logo more or less for my weblog museum.

what has happened is that a whole array of esl weblogs have become endangered by google's willingness to eliminate any set of weblogs that isn't logged in to regularly. i can understand their move, yet what it means is the possible destruction of a very interesting trove of weblogs. some are already gone though, if i'm careful, i might be able to catalog the web archive's record of them. in fact that may be the best fate for all of them, as most of the authors/creators have forgotten about them and probably don't care.

what interests me is that weblogs were used for a variety of purposes, so it was a time of experimentation in purpose and finding out what they were best at. in the esl field we concentrated on using them to get our students to write for public consumption, and we explained that even though the actual number of readers would be very low, it would at least include all of us and therefore, they were in effect speaking in public. there were a number of purposes we used them for.

i will report more here on the development of the museum. part of my plan is to make a logo and put it on all those ancient weblogs (you can find many of them in the template of this one), so that random hits that they get may lead to a museum-goer experiencing any or all of the more interesting of weblogs of that era. If they are united by their mere connection to each other it will begin to resemble a museum, and will possibly include links to other early experiments in weblog use. i have a friend, for example, who made a weblog for webheads (tech users) of early days at each of many tesol conventions. because he shared authorship with me, i could probably post this logo on each one and attract tesol professionals from that era who are wading through his old work.

a lot of this is fading quickly into the hazy past, and, with my passing, can expect to be forgotten altogether. a little organization, however, will at least prevent that from happening.