Saturday, September 11, 2010
Soooo......?
Does anyone check this anymore? Just curious.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
I can't believe I got it back....
Hackers suck. And they're SOOOO smart....so much so that all they can think of to do is steal emails and hope to get money out of idiots. So, that's an idiot talking to more idiots. It's perfect!
Fuck YOU hacker man.
Fuck YOU hacker man.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Dudes
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude...........seriously. What is the DEAL now? Is it just me?? Maybe I should have grown up in the 40s. Damn. Seriously.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
What the hell?
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
I'm a Racist
Okay, not really. Really! But, I couldn't help thinking on the way to dropping the dogs off at doggie daycare this morning (yeah, my dogs are the spoiled as shit sort of dogs, they go to daycare, and point and laugh at the loser backyard dogs)...I couldn't help thinking, "WHY do the Mexicans always throw beer bottles on the ground IN their neighborhoods?!"
Seriously.....doggie daycare is smack dab in the middle of one of the many Mexican neighborhoods around our house. It's just a fact. Normally, I have to stop the car for a passing "herd" of chickens, or the occassional goat. At least once a week. One time a rabbit. I'm not making this shit up. But the thing that bugs me is, in a neighborhood where everything is essentially clean and normal looking, (well, except for all of the pink flamingos and plastic flower plants pushed into the ground) WHY are there ALWAYS beer bottles and cans in the street or thrown in people's yards?? ESPECIALLY around the railroad tracks that go through the center of the hood.
I mean, I get it. Mexicans like to drink. So do Catholics and the Irish, I should know. But we don't throw our shit on the ground. What the hell? I mean, the Mexicans are obviously throwing the REST of their trash away. There's NOT other trash out in the lawn. ONLY the beer bottles.
WTF????
Seriously.....doggie daycare is smack dab in the middle of one of the many Mexican neighborhoods around our house. It's just a fact. Normally, I have to stop the car for a passing "herd" of chickens, or the occassional goat. At least once a week. One time a rabbit. I'm not making this shit up. But the thing that bugs me is, in a neighborhood where everything is essentially clean and normal looking, (well, except for all of the pink flamingos and plastic flower plants pushed into the ground) WHY are there ALWAYS beer bottles and cans in the street or thrown in people's yards?? ESPECIALLY around the railroad tracks that go through the center of the hood.
I mean, I get it. Mexicans like to drink. So do Catholics and the Irish, I should know. But we don't throw our shit on the ground. What the hell? I mean, the Mexicans are obviously throwing the REST of their trash away. There's NOT other trash out in the lawn. ONLY the beer bottles.
WTF????
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Dog Graduation
Francis, our great dane, was quite interesting last night.....ever since Jake has been gone (was put to sleep about a month ago), about every other night or so when we put Fran to bed in his crate, he complains. Like, little sounds...it goes something like this:
Fran: "Mmmm......"
Silence.
Fran: "Mmmmmmmmmmm......"
Silence.
Fran: "MMMmmmmrrrrrrrr.....mmm.....hummmmmrrrr....."
Me: "Fran, stop."
Fran: "MMRRRRR....rrrrrrr.......rahhh...."
Me: "FRAN, NIGHT NIGHT TIME."
Fran: "rrr...."
And then nothing and he falls to sleep. But last night it was more like this:
Fran: "HUH-UMMMMMMRrrrrrrrrrr................rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr............rrr."
Short silence.
Fran: "RRRRRRWAAAAHHHH...........mmmmmmm.......WAAAHHHHRRRRAAA."
Me: "FRAN!!! STOP"
Fran: "MMMMMMWAAAAAA.............rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.................rrrrrrrrrrAHHHHHHOOOOOOH!"
Bernie: "What the hell?"
Fran: "OOOOOOOOOhhhhhhhhWAAA WAAA......rrrrrrr.........RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR."
Me: "Fucking shit....."
So then I said, "Maybe he's outgrown the cage thing." So Bernie suggested I put his bed by our bed on the floor and see what happens. So, I got his round bed out of the TV room and put it on the floor. Then let him out. He went STRAIGHT BEELINE for the round bed, spun around three times, and plopped down. Never said another word, slept straight through the night, even when I got up to pee he didn't get up. In the morning when Bernie got up before me to shower, THEN he jumped up in the bed and slept next to me.
So, I guess he's all grown up now.
Fran: "Mmmm......"
Silence.
Fran: "Mmmmmmmmmmm......"
Silence.
Fran: "MMMmmmmrrrrrrrr.....mmm.....hummmmmrrrr....."
Me: "Fran, stop."
Fran: "MMRRRRR....rrrrrrr.......rahhh...."
Me: "FRAN, NIGHT NIGHT TIME."
Fran: "rrr...."
And then nothing and he falls to sleep. But last night it was more like this:
Fran: "HUH-UMMMMMMRrrrrrrrrrr................rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr............rrr."
Short silence.
Fran: "RRRRRRWAAAAHHHH...........mmmmmmm.......WAAAHHHHRRRRAAA."
Me: "FRAN!!! STOP"
Fran: "MMMMMMWAAAAAA.............rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.................rrrrrrrrrrAHHHHHHOOOOOOH!"
Bernie: "What the hell?"
Fran: "OOOOOOOOOhhhhhhhhWAAA WAAA......rrrrrrr.........RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR."
Me: "Fucking shit....."
So then I said, "Maybe he's outgrown the cage thing." So Bernie suggested I put his bed by our bed on the floor and see what happens. So, I got his round bed out of the TV room and put it on the floor. Then let him out. He went STRAIGHT BEELINE for the round bed, spun around three times, and plopped down. Never said another word, slept straight through the night, even when I got up to pee he didn't get up. In the morning when Bernie got up before me to shower, THEN he jumped up in the bed and slept next to me.
So, I guess he's all grown up now.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Adding fuel to the fire...
This just adds to my last post, my woes, my daily frustration at work. This also adds to my insane fear of how I will educate my own, not yet born children. I honestly already worry about how "they", "it" will make it through this monster that we have created....
Education Lessons We Left Behind
By George F. Will
Thursday, April 24, 2008; A21
If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)
Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week's melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission's report that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.
Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities -- the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.
Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir ("Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik") that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.
In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" -- Moynihan's description -- that the government almost refused to publish it.
Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class -- fractured families -- would have to be faced.
But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas -- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes -- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.
In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.
In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be "at least" 90 percent and that American students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement." Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas -- solemnly avowed, never fulfilled -- said: "That will not happen." It did not.
Moynihan was a neoconservative before neoconservatism became a doctrine of foreign policy hubris. Originally, it taught domestic policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what is not working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: "The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best." Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier.
A nation at risk? Now more than ever.
Education Lessons We Left Behind
By George F. Will
Thursday, April 24, 2008; A21
If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)
Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week's melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission's report that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.
Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities -- the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.
Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir ("Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik") that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.
In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" -- Moynihan's description -- that the government almost refused to publish it.
Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class -- fractured families -- would have to be faced.
But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas -- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes -- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.
In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.
In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be "at least" 90 percent and that American students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement." Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas -- solemnly avowed, never fulfilled -- said: "That will not happen." It did not.
Moynihan was a neoconservative before neoconservatism became a doctrine of foreign policy hubris. Originally, it taught domestic policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what is not working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: "The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best." Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier.
A nation at risk? Now more than ever.
