Oh defenders of cultures Other, between this and female genital mutilation?

Understanding other cultures does not and cannot mean automatic acceptance of every practice they engage in. I wouldn't expect the Nepalese to accept Hooters, either.

Also complicating the situation is the fact that the biter is the child of an employee.

Start looking for a new place yesterday. Unless the employee is a disliked jerk, the others will close ranks around them like the Spartans at Thermopylae.

Put your child in the care of some kindly grandmother who babysits a few kids during the day.

I used to work for a guy who literally disappeared one day. Vanished. Bank account cleaned out, house abandoned. As it turned out, his wife had run a little unlicensed daycare, and a kid died there, by their account accidentally. The medical examiner did not agree--the contusions were not from a fall but from striking, in her opinion--and the couple fled the country that day.

If you can line up an arrangement with a close friend or relative, that's one thing. But licenses exist for a reason.

Compare that to the unbelievable arrogance and imaginative failure of the Lord of the Rings disasters that came out about the same time, resulting in execrable movies that defiled one of the great tales of all literature.

Those would be the ones that won 20 Oscars and made 2 billion dollars, right? Yeah, that's pretty much the textbook definition of execrable.

The correct word for the first two HP movies' attempt at adaptation is "slavish".

My thoughts, such as they are:

Every family member gets one, count them, one handout in their life. It is perfectly OK to attach strings to it, no matter how insulting they may find it. This could even take the form of sending funds to the bill collectors yourself (but do NOT let them have any information that will allow them to contact you), buying them groceries, et al.

Once that handout has been distributed, that's it. Obligation completed. Make sure the family member knows that before any funds change hands, so they can decide if they really want to use it up now. And once it's over, you can do all the nothing you want, a la Cary.

Once in a while the handout, at the right moment, can become a hand up. I would give almost anybody that one chance to redeem themselves.

I wonder if Garrison ever thought about this from the other side?

Why don't you go write it instead of concentrating on the limitations of someone else's work? I mean that seriously and with no malice. It's not a writer's job to present all possible points of view in a balanced way. Any attempt to do so is PC dribble.

Write your own essay from your own experience, with your own point of view, as GK did from his, and then take some delight in the odd combination of friction and consonance the two works will no doubt have.

The last time people were this adamant about keeping people out, they built the Berlin Wall.

The Berlin Wall (and the nasty fortification on the then-border between E. and W. Germany) was built to keep E. Germans IN.

Building walls to keep people OUT (Great Wall of China, Maginot Line, Atlantic Wall) has a much spottier record of success.

T.REX tissue, ok has anyone heard or seen of a T.Rex tissue-blood vessels

Yes, but the scientist who discovered them is having none of this young Earth nonsense:

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/may/dinosaur.php

Jim--

More people online know me by this name than my real name. I have a discernible and stable (and sole) identity, a referent that people can use, and in the case of Salon, through which you can look up my other comments. And it's cooler than Jeff, so there you go.

But I do admit...I have a filter. I just hadn't really thought to use it until now. I can just not bother reading them.

The noise-to-signal ratio on them is just so consistently bad. For example:

along with the right-wingers in his party he has abandoned his opposition to Bush's tax cuts for the rich

This, after the health-care plan announcement that pretty clearly states that rescinding those cuts will fund much of the plan.

Reading is Fundamental.

Pres will pardon the veep, then resign and get pardoned by the next Gerald Ford,

Not necessary. Bush issues blanket pardon and resigns the day before new administration comes in. Cheney is now President, and pardons Bush. They all go off into the sunset together.

Yeah, it sucks, but it could happen.

Wasn't all that thrilled when Ricky Henderson passed Maury Wills.

Or even later, when he passed Lou Brock. ;)

Oh, and Selig's always been a tool. He was a tool when he became Commish, he's a tool now, he'll be a tool when they cart him out in a box.

Actually going green, making the hugely expensive changes and sacrifices necessary to actually make a difference: That's NOT profitable, and therefore will never, ever happen.

An extremely strong case for the opposite is made by the Rocky Mountain Institute, www.rmi.org. Inefficiency costs money. While there is usually an initial expenditure associated with redesigning processes to more closely emulate natural closed-loop models, in the long run it's more profitable to do so.

Now all we have to do is get CEOs to look past the next quarter.