Oma's Choice?

Given the choice, I am not sure that Oma would have eaten here. We didn't either, but mostly because it was closed on Mothers day. The gas station across the way did also sell some of their more portable items (salsas, jellies, etc), but I was not moved enough by the drollness of the name to actually buy any.

But William did take a picture of the BIG sign.

And yes, that is a giant bull with a sign board on his side. 

Desmond Dekker passes away

Ska pioneer Desmond Dekker has passed away.

The past is overrated

I'm going to do a subset of the Canonical Rant called a Cranky Diatribe. I won't explain why it's more specific than the general class of C-R. So, T.S.

Ben posted Quindlen: Hillary Is Wrong About Youth - Newsweek Columnists - MSNBC.com on his blog, words because he was responding to the "the rat race is not all it's cracked up to be." I'll leave it to Trav to discuss whether the real reason there is so much middle-class discontentment is (a) the revolution of rising expectations and (b) crazy people stretching for a house jacks up prices on everyone. I want to go to one of my canonical rants:

The past is overrated. Quindlen tears into the notion (from our ancestors) that our ancestors were nobler then than we are now and that the good old days are gone. But I think Quindlen's focus on codgerims (her term) is wrong. It's not finding fault with the present that's wrong (that's a good thing to do); it's comparing the present with the past, which is overrated.

There is no such thing as the good old days, and our ancestors were not better than us. The past was bad, and we improved it. Some of these improvements helped the situation; some just caused new problems. Nevertheless, in the past, the (then) present-day people were a whole lot more honest about the fact that the (then) present needed a whole lot of fixing up, and the (then) modern-day contemporaries spent a whole lot of time and effort developing {technology X} and {medicine y} and fighting {evil historical figure Z} and on beyond Zebra.

Do you know that in the past, people had to get out of their chairs to change the channel on the TV, and in any case, it hardly mattered because there were basically only three channels, and all of them had virtually identical programming? And before that, people just listened to the radio? And before that, the one person who could read would merely read the latest installment of a serialized drama out loud to his illiterate family. Today, I don't even need to watch the show. TiVo will suggest something for me and record it for me; I can read the summary and flip through the good parts, and be done with it. I watched the movie "Emma" this way. I can tell you for certain that I would have hated the movie, hated the radio play, and hated having to listen to it being read by my dad in my drafty Victorian hovel. However, I liked the movie at 2x speed for the parts featuring Alan Cumming and 8x speed for everything else. I finished the movie in 3 minutes.

"But you don't know what it was about?"

I wouldn't have known what the heck they were going on about any better if I had been forced to suffer through one of those other delivery methods, but at least this way, I can tell you who was in the film and that it depicts the past, and as best I can tell: the past is overrated.

Local Girl Makes Good

I was taking a break to read about how An Incumbent Proves Resilient in New Orleans when I noticed the byline was former Thresher editor Shalia Dewan. Then I noticed that, in fact, she seems to have been a Time correspondant for a while.

Well congratulations NY Times for making a smart hiring decision. Maybe you are on the road to recovery after all.

Walk Barry Bonds

William Li(from Dartmouth) this entry is for you.

I saw Decision to boycott Barry Bonds is not about race and thought that pitchers (or rather, Managers) had decided to Intentionally Walk Barry Bonds for the rest of the season, which is far better than the bean ball that he got from my Astros and vaguely honorable. But that article isn't about that.

I, however, am all about giving BBs to BB for the rest of the reason. It's not without precedent either. In 1985 when Randy Bass came within 1 HR of tying the single-season record of Sadaharu Oh, none of the Japanese pitchers would pitch to him.

"William, they were exhibiting Anti-Gaijin prejudice."

It's true, William, they were and I'm not here to defend Japanese baseball. I nevertheless wonder if the motive was specifically rascist or more a panicked reaction that the unintended consequence of importing MLB players is that the untouchable records of national icons might be broken. I wonder if a Japanese-American MLB player wouldn't have had the same treatment.

"So you admit that Walking Bonds would be prejudice."

Not at all. The parallel which I am making is about the panicked reaction to unintended consequences. Until Bonds threatened Ruth's record, I don't think people woke up to the meaning of steriods use. People were still saying stuff like "these are big boys and it's their body" and not giving any thought to the idea that the game itself might have some integrity. Now that the consequences (in the form of the graceless and self-pitying Barry Bonds) draw near, we see second rate pitchers chucking bean-balls. Intentional Walks aren't ideal, but they are far better and its also more out in the open. Journalists can then question the pitchers and a managers who can then make statements like:

"Baseball has always been more than just about baseball. See those thousands of fans holding up the asterisk sign. That's not just a message to Bonds, that's a message to me. When Baseball Almanac makes the entry with the Asterisk, I don't want to be associated with the record. I don't want to go down in baseball history as the person who served up a fat meatball to the steriod-using cheater."

"We are talking about breaking Babe Ruth's record, not Hank Aaron's. Ruth was a great hitter, and an icon, but he himself is hardly a paragon of virtue."

I was going to do a humorous comparison between Bonds and Ruth saying untrue things like Babe Ruth was a teetotaler and a devoted husband and that he always helped old ladies cross the street, while Bonds always had a chip on his shoulder and even called his mother's obstetrician a rascist after he got spanked on the bottom. But the material wasn't all that funny once I started trying to write it out and I need to shave and go to work, so let me close up.

Because Barry Bonds has never played either for the Yankees or the Astros, I assume that all of the bad things ever said about him are true and to me, it's the best possible argument for walking him for the rest of the year. That said, if he does happen to break Ruth's record, let it be against the Mets. The Mets... ha!

1984 by George Orwell: Chapter 9 (unedited excerpt)

1984 by George Orwell: Chapter 9:

On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns -- after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.

Last exam of the semester

I know it's totally lame to post a link to super-popular viral videos and call that a blog post, but hey... Urban Ninjas have me psyched.

First lunch... then test. (Yes, I'll be having the Grill Cook's Medal Li)

The New York Times: A bunch of haters

Check out
The New York Times: Search for 'david blaine'

Read the ones written by NYT writers.

What is the deal? Why kick a man when man when he is just trying to entertain us with improbable feats of endurance? Elitist snobs!

JUST MY LUCK

JUST MY LUCK Marlene King and Amy Harris stole "Commuter Notes and Parables" #1.

Darn it!

Follow-up entry on Jason's exam

Jason seems to be recovered after his horrible exam. Having just had one horrible exam and with two more horrible exams to go, I literally feel my son's pain.

So funny story: We are in the doctor's office and Jason is crying and screaming from feeling sick and especially for way they took their sample and I am trying to comfort him when I giggle inappropriately.


The PA looks at me. I cough and say nothing but she I think that she somehow knew that I was laughing about the joke about the difference between a phlebotomist and a uralogist.

What do you eat for lunch when you have last minute jitters and won't eat dinner?

There are no honor code restrictions on that disclosure.

Go for the "Grill Cook's Medley."

As if it wasn't hard enough being Jason

He spent Saturday night throwing up, giving me the chance to bunk in his room for the night.

Sunday, he was weak and mopey, recovering from the gastric pyrotechnics.

Monday, the daycareladies call to say first that they think he has thrush, and then to say that he has a fever of 103.1.

The Dr. first ignores my please for an immediate appointment to diagnose the thrush, but then one of the other docs sees him with the report of the high fever. Which led to bloodwork and
***(WARNING!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE WEAK STOMACHED OR WILLIAM ** catheterization, followed by a diagnosis of a big bad ear infection which was minimized by his constant use of his asthma medications. Oh, and he is cutting 4 teeth (2 molars, 2 incisors right now).

On top of all this, today, his "girlfriend" at daycare bit him on the arm.

Poor Baby :(

The good news is he has started drinking milk again, and sitting cross-legged in front of me, eating bites of chicken.

Bites small enough that he doesn't really have to chew them, though.

The paperwork has gone through!

Well, in this digital age we live in, of course I mean "virtual paperwork" i.e. I got an email saying that my transfer had been approved, and that as of next school year, I will be teaching high school! I will not list the name here, but you can ask Dave, or Will, or momanddad.

I am thrilled, elated, anxious, terrified, impatient, mellow and contemplative all at the same time.

So far the responses have all been positive. My favorite (repeated) comment is, "oh. Does it pay more to teach older kids?" Um. No, of course not. If teacher pay was correlated to the age of the student, college professors would make WAY more than they do, and nobody would teach Kindergarten. And as I have said before, teaching Kindergarten automatically qualifies you for sainthood in my book.

***

So then if not for more money, then why?

It just felt like the right time. That's all. I have nothing but love for elementary and my current campus.

That and I love a good challenge. And I am pretty sure that none of my high school students will ask me to tie their shoes.