Wren Anderson

Ellacott & Strike shipper. Kama'aina. Anglophile. Nipponophile. Georgette Heyer, Janeite. Tudormania. Scrabble!

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@NicklessPamela They do need to see it now and again

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@HarmeetKDhillon May his memory be a blessing always

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

School is starting back up here in Hawaii. I taught 6th grade for 6 years and it was a fun age to work with. Looking at these pictures mists me up. Funny how I can never enter the shopping mall without former students, all grown up now, greeting me with affection. All worth it.

[Waiākea Titans @WaiakeaTitans]

First days of school. 6th graders yesterday, all students today.

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@Gugly0Remedied @CuriosityonX Love that this was your pick Googley! My school mascot was a Titan. I was a Titan for 3 lovely years and then later in life taught Titans for 8 years. I have a lot of Titan Pride.

[Petronella Wyatt @PetronellaWyatt]

Eleanor Powell, the greatest female tap dancer of all time, gives Fred Astaire a run for his money in ‘Broadway Melody of 1940.’ Powell possessed such precision that even Astaire was nervous of dancing with her.

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

Hope you’re well. I’m recovering from jet lag. Flew from Hawaii to Boston and then a week later back again. I tried to pace myself but my grandchildren are 3 and 6 and as you know, these keiki have a lot of energy! My husband taught the 6 old to play poker and she got very good at it by end and now apparently plaguing her parents to play after dinner every night. You haven’t lived until you have had your 6 year old granddaughter recite the Rank of Hands as she’s helping to dry the dishes.

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

Last year an acquaintance asked me who I felt was the most important person in history, leaving out religious figures like Buddha and Jesus. This person felt the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was the most important. In my head I immediately responded with “what about Adam Smith?” because he’s the man

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

Adam Smith’s most famous sentence remains one of the clearest statements in all of social science:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

The point is simple and profound. We do not rely on the kindness of strangers to put food on the table. We rely on their self-interest. The butcher supplies meat because he profits by doing so. The baker rises early because customers will pay for bread. Their desire to improve their own condition leads them, without any central direction, to serve ours.

This is the central mechanism of a market economy. Self-interest, channelled through voluntary exchange, produces cooperation on a vast scale. No one has to love their customers or share their political views. They only have to respond to incentives. The result is a system that regularly feeds, clothes, and houses millions of people who will never meet.

Many on the left still struggle to accept this. Self-interest is treated as morally suspect - a form of greed that should be restrained or replaced by appeals to solidarity and collective purpose. The preference is for systems that rely on moral exhortation or state direction rather than on the everyday pursuit of personal advantage. Yet the historical record is clear: societies that suppress self-interest in the name of higher motives tend to produce shortages, stagnation, and coercion. Societies that allow people to benefit from serving others tend to produce abundance.

Smith’s insight is not a celebration of selfishness. It is a recognition of reality. People are more reliable when they can improve their own lives by improving the lives of others. That simple alignment of interests remains the most powerful engine of social cooperation ever discovered.

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

Okay so…showing my age here…this brings to mind the final chapter of The Devil’s Cub by Georgette Heyer. As all plot lines are resolved the humorous Rupert character muses about how to get the wine he bought back to London and his brother informs him it must surely go by canal. I was 14 when I first read this novel in 1974. A favorite comfort read, I have immersed myself in this book many times.

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@LauraAKarim @rerxer I enjoyed the joke. It was a voluntary exchange of humor

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@MrMagspie @jk_rowling @badly_wired Bratislava! Sigh. I have been living in a rock in the sea for a lifetime. It’s beautiful but I need to get off for a bit and see a bit of the world. Living vicariously through x friends

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@gbjeffen Another lovely walk. It’s been so muggy here but last night it cooled down and I was able to sleep soundly

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@GingerBriq Ginger I visited the church in Masham in May and the church ladies’ circle was meeting that day; gleefully they told me that in that wedding scene, it’s not an actor but their actual parson/vicar/clergyman! What fun eh?

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@Satureja2 @AndrewMackeyUK You’re so funny; I can imagine this. Let’s have a full story about this mouse and his quest.

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@NoraTheBora @jk_rowling It’s the little actions we take that define us

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

If you don’t think he’s a woman, you’re transphobic. When he claimed to be a woman, he became a woman. He now belongs in women’s changing rooms, bathrooms, hospital wards, prison cells and rape support centres.

If you try and differentiate between him and a trans woman who looks more convincing as a woman, you are promoting patriarchal beauty norms. If you admit to seeing an aggressive and possibly unbalanced man in this video, you’re saying all trans people are mentally ill predators. If you refuse to let him into female-only spaces, you’re removing his right to exist. If you suggest he could comfortably use male facilities, you secretly want him assaulted. If you refuse to call him ‘she’, you are guilty of unpardonable cruelty. If you’re a woman who wouldn’t want to share a locker room with him, or a man who wouldn’t want your daughter, sister or mother to get undressed in close proximity to him, you belong to the far-right. If you point out that there is no objective difference between his claim to be a woman and that of any other biological male claiming a trans identity, you are too stupid to understand the circular arguments explaining why he’s not really trans whereas other men who say they’re women are really trans.

If you’re righteous, you must argue that this man’s self-declared identity overrides any consideration of the safety and rights of females. To be godly, you must agree he’s as ‘valid’ as every other trans woman, because people are who they say they are. No matter what your eyes, ears and common sense are telling you, if you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of history, you must pretend to believe that this angry, intimidating man is actually a vulnerable, oppressed woman.

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

Ugh. We had a terrible drought here last year. Frightening actually. Then it finally began to rain in late January and it hasn’t stopped raining! Been raining nearly every day. I’m grateful because the aquifers are filling up, but the rain combined with 30 degree days has made for muggy hot weather day after day.

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@jk_rowling @tamarashapiro Queen!

[Making the effort @NicklessPamela]

Looking absolutely stunning!

[Wren Anderson @Litz17D]

@CormStrikeFan A lovely Yorkshire Rose!

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is one of the most beloved paintings in America, and it puts its finger on something we all pass through, first as the child, and one day as the parent left behind...

The painting is Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1954. A father and his teenage son sit side by side on the running board of a battered farm truck, waiting at a railway stop. A single track runs along the bottom of the picture. A ticket pokes from the boy's pocket. His suitcase is stacked with schoolbooks and wears a "State U" pennant. The train is coming to carry him off to college, away from home, for the first time in his life.

Everything is in the way they sit.

The son sits upright, scrubbed and dressed in his best, eyes fixed on the horizon, on the track, on the future rushing toward him. He is already half gone. For him that train is the beginning of everything.

His father sits beside him in worn work clothes and scuffed boots, looking the other way, down the line, as if he cannot bear to watch it arrive. The same train means the opposite thing to him. For the son it is the start of a life. For the father it is the day the house grows quieter, the chair at the table sits empty, and the person he built his world around walks out into a life that no longer has him at its centre.

Look at his hands. He is holding two hats. His own battered one, and resting on top of it, his son's crisp new one, held carefully together, because it is the last small thing he can still do for the boy...

And then the dog, its head laid in the son's lap, gazing up, refusing to look away. Rockwell knew exactly what that was for: "The father couldn't show how he felt about the boy's leaving," he said. "The dog did."

It has moved people for 70 years because every leaving is a beginning for one person and an ending for another. The child steps out into the world, as they should. And someone stays behind, watching them go, and loving them enough to let them go anyway...