Sometimes, I Love People

K, so they passed a law to get rid of "happy hour" in pubs in Edinburgh. They did this by ordering that no drink specials could last for less than 72 hours. Pubs have responded...by "happy days" drink specials. From the commercials I've heard on BobFM, they'll probably run them Tues-Thurs, and catch the week-day crowd. I can't remember exactly who it was or how it was phrased, but I seem to remember a GK Chesterton quote involving trying to outlaw drinking, but rather than just saying "no drinking" (which no-one would allow) they tried to ban pub signs, so that no-one would know where pubs where, and he then followed the various creative ways folks got around that.... (if anyone can clarify this, I'd be grateful!)

"You didn’t get off the boat for years?"

Winner of the dumb comment contest for today..... Patterico has a post (language warning) on the "living conditions" release of a bunch of criminals in Cali. For comparison, he has a bunch of pictures of WWII bunks, with folks. (See the picture at the bottom, which is just about head-on? That is more space than I've ever seen on a ship-- Elf says he had about one inch, maybe two, clearance when he'd turn over in the bunk.) He's got a good point-- I think I've told the story before, how we had an "expose" show up on the ship's TV about how horrible the living arrangements in Cali prisons were... the cat-calls about how we were living in more cramped quarters, AND had to keep uniforms inspection-ready, were loud and long. So, for folks who really don't know anything about the Navy: No, you don't get off the boat for years. When the ship is deployed, you're on the ship 24/7; when the ship is at home port, if you're not married or don't have special permission to get an allowance to live off base (not generally given until you're E-5, with good behavior), then you still live on the ship. Some bases will have barracks, kind of like low-rent college dorms, where you can try to get permission to sleep instead of on the ship when you're in port. It's not unusual for lower ranking folks with over-night privileges to throw into a pot and rent a house from their own small paychecks. A normal example would be the Geek House in Sasebo-- two to a room, one guy in the closet(yes, much jokes), and generally at least two guests in the living room and kitchen. I believe it was a four bedroom house, I never visited-- I was able to get a housing allowance and my geeks would usually come over to game at my place if we were in port, because fitting six people into my kitchen was easier than finding gaming room at their place.

Saw GI Joe

Mr. Not-Harrison-Ford was channeling John Wayne so hard that it was funny, I still am not sure what shoes Baroness was wearing-- they looked like a cross between high heels, cowboy boots and platforms-- and there were a few other roles that I remember setting there and thinking "that guy is trying to be X" but I can't remember. If you can survive the first fifteen minutes, you might enjoy the rest of the movie; if the pain from the damage your suspension of disbelief takes is too much during the first ten, not a movie for you.

Cool Things Old Folks Have Done

...well, that's what I would have titled this article.... Here's a sample:

Arthur Rubenstein -- One of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century played his last concert at the age of 89, only after his sight began to fail. And even then he continued to teach master classes until shortly before his death at age 95. Grandma Moses -- A renowned American folk artist who began painting in her seventies after abandoning a career in embroidery because of arthritis. Instead of allowing herself to be pushed into the nearest bone yard, as Dr. Emanuel would have prescribed, she began her new career. She lived to be more than 100 and in those thirty years produced 3600 canvases. A work she painted in 1943, "Sugaring Off," was sold for $1.2 million in 2006.

Oh, and I love this one:

Venus Ramey, aged 82, balanced on her walker and fired her handgun to shoot out an intruder's tires. Ramey, who had been winner of the 1944 Miss America pageant, confronted the man on her Kentucky farm and disabled his vehicle so he couldn't escape.

The point of the article is "just because you're old doesn't mean you're worthless"-- sad that it has to be said, but when you have folks who want to spend most of the nation's healthcare dollars on folks under 40 (!!!) then it really does need to be said.

Tin Ear

I'm thinking of making a series of posts on this, since it seems so very common with this administration....

tin ear n. Informal An insensitivity to music or to sounds of a given kind: a writer with a tin ear for dialogue.

I can vaguely remember saying to myself: "I can't believe they actually just said that!" with the most recent example being the "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president" thing.

 As I remember more, I'll try to add to this list. Here's what set me off:

In an interview today, CNBC reporter John Harwood asked White House Press Secretary about Santelli. Remarkably, Gibbs responded that while he had previously invited Santelli to the White House for coffee to discuss the subject, the Secret Service probably wouldn’t allow Santelli to come now: (video at link) Objecting to the President’s policies can put an American on a Secret Service ban list? Amazing. – DRJ

DRJ at Patterico's is always a good read...she's got a habit of cutting to the guts of things, too.

AP Scumbags.

Own It, Mr. Secretary When you decided to allow journalists to photograph the coffins of returning service members at Dover, you broke down a barrier that should have been left intact. Since the dawn of time, human societies have had taboos. They exist for a reason. They exist because some things simply ought to be unthinkable, and nothing short of a total ban will prevent some people from pushing the envelope. The media have contended, over and over, that the photographing of coffins and dead bodies and wounded soldiers or Marines thrashing about in agony are necessary to help the American people understand the cost of war. Evidently, the availability of graphic war movies depicting fountains of blood and oozing gore are insufficient visual aids.

What she said; Cassandra is much better at writing than I am.

There is a good death

and it is not suicide.

Apologizing for Hitler

kinda.

The Polish government sent out the invitation three months ago to the White House, but an answer was received only on Wednesday, a mere five days before the ceremony. Repeated attempts over the summer by the Poles to contact the White House and the State Department met with a long period of silence. One White House aide actually replied that everyone was on vacation until after Labor Day, which caused a Polish official to say he apologized that Adolf Hitler had invaded his country on Sept. 1.

And again with the "let's be rude to anyone who doesn't hate our guts" theory. Dang, wish they'd at least done something like make a group of Marines who came to the US from Poland show up and do something respectful.... (I swear, can you have more than fifteen Marines without ending up with one who answers to "Ski"?)

'Education', or: 'Escaping The Handbasket?'

I've been thinking about education a lot the last few months, ever since I found out we're having a baby.
 (As a short explanation on why my blogging has been sub-par of late, I offer this: the mentioning of Kiddo here sent my mind off on an attempt to visualize a half elf/kitsune chibi character, utterly out of left field.)

 The meat of this topic is going to be outside of the "()"-- the stuff on the inside might interest you or might bore you silly, but can easily be skipped without losing anything unless you need clarification. My folks were a major part of my education, growing up-- mom and dad took us nearly everywhere it wasn't too dangerous to simply be around, and explained things. Later on, they wouldn't explain and would ask questions instead-- my mom in particular was a very effective teacher of the lesson: "if you can't argue against something you support, you probably don't know enough about it to support it."
 This teaching helps you see through a lot of reporting-a-story-instead-of-information things, and is part of why I like the internet. (Of course, even the net doesn't always have enough information, or the information is unreliable, but those are universal problems and it's useful to know who acts like you're a crazy person when you question why they believe X.)

 For most of school, I was bored stiff in the classroom. So was my husband-- my brother and his sister have similar stories, although they were both more like my sister in seeing school as social-time instead of learning-time. Classes were even worse if the topic was something I was interested in-- by the time I got to high school, I'd already learned how to read ahead in the text book and use that information to research elsewhere, and not infrequently the lessons were either outdated information or so shallow that it was worse than nothing.

 On the up side, I usually had my homework done by the end of class and I read a truly epic number of Forgotten Realms books from the school library, and towards the end of school a couple of teachers asked me to help other kids. (Did zip for my popularity, but it was very useful when I got to school in the Navy and worked with the other guys in my class to keep them from failing.) I do remember that even in the ones I was bored stiff during, there was *usually* some kind of extra information that I got from the teacher-- especially Mr. Reiber, a great science teacher, who was very good at teaching folks tricks for figuring things out and worked stories into his class. (Another class I didn't get bored in was Mr. Kallery's English, which was partly because he taught it like a college class-- all lecture, lots of notes, lots of thinking-- and partly because he was really good at picking out kids like me and keeping us busy. Sneaky suspicion both teachers were the "bored in generic school" type, although Mr. Reiber may have just been a really good teacher.) Needless to say, I'm already worrying about how I'm going to be even half the teacher my folks are; I don't have a thriving ranch and 4H group to act as a classroom, and it's highly likely we'll even be living in town.

 Visits to Grandma and Grandpa can make dang sure they don't get silly ideas about cows and horses, and there's always the cats for some more non-human-interaction, but I look at how bad schools are compared to the ones I went through, and thinking of how piss-poor my education in history, basic art, poetry that is actually enjoyable to read, the years wasted in sex ed (Every. Single. Year. From Jr. High on-- more than any other topic.), the pathetic excuse for civic education (we had roughly one semester on the US Constitution-- worked into a class on world gov'ts and current events, senior year)....
I'm sure I can go on, but most everyone knows the basic direction I'm pointing, now.

 I'm not even looking at the quality of teachers-- you know, the ones that copy out of the book on to the board and call that enough, or whose generally political hobby horse is a constant class mascot-- just focus, for now, on the basic quality of the education being offered. Yes, I'm even skipping this happy horse-pucky, for now. When I got into the Navy, I got to experience a wide range of types of classes-- general information classes during bootcamp, when everyone is so dead tired (I actually fell asleep a few times standing up) that the level of pre-existing education didn't matter much, from A and C school-- where everyone had tested high enough on relevant areas to qualify to be offered the rating, and the computer based distance-learning classes I took in my free time. I'll have to toss out the boot camp classes from this musing, since I wouldn't wish that on anyone but a volunteer.
 The "set-up-classes-based-on-how-you-test" -- maybe rephrasing it as "grades" instead of "classes," since it's not a matter of what you're allowed to learn, just when it's offered to you-- would probably work rather well, although it would cost a bit to organize the tests, grade them, organize the classes... there'd have to be some kind of a system to organize various learning styles, testing styles and teaching styles. (I've got an uncle. Disgustingly smart. Master Electrician and former biology teacher. The only 100% he ever got on a test in high school or college was when he was on heavy duty painkillers for a root canal and spent most of the test utterly relaxed-- generally, he barely passed tests.)

 Organizing classes around what kids can do instead of what year they were born will have a lot of the folks who support "social promotion" bouncing off of walls, but it would probably make it so the kids who can and want to learn actually do learn without screwing over the kids who simply aren't on the same level. {Shoot, I was classified as illiterate in second or third grade, and it nearly broke my mom's heart to have me in special ed-- turns out the "special" part boiled down to "do any of these books look interesting? Alright, so read it-- yes, you're allowed to without reading Dick and Jane books...wow, you're reading at fifth or sixth grade level!" (In defense of my teachers, they were pushed along towards the assumption that I was illiterate because they tested us on letters with flip cards. To this day I remember the horrible blankness when T or I would come up-- I'd say "telephone pole" for T every dang time. I remember by patterns-- I could write out the alphabet easy, and tell you what they were, I just didn't test well in that style. Also, more kids in special ed= more money.)}

 Now that we've spent extra money to get the kids sorted into specialty levels-- keep in mind, just because you're grade 5 on math doesn't mean you'll be put in grade 5 English, each subject would have to be independent of the others-- we have to find a way to teach them all. Maybe big schools would have enough teachers to simply reorganize classes by skill instead of age, but some of the schools I went to had grade-teachers instead of subject-teachers. (Possibly this is why I've never been too sympathetic to the argument that home-schooling parents can't possibly teach their own kids-- something about an education degree makes an English major magically able to be a great science teacher for kids of X age when they have a prepared course, but it won't work with parents of average intelligence and skill?)

 So, solving a shortage of teachers specialized into a topic. Well, from the classes I took, I notice the two limits on class size are "how many will fit" and "will they get enough help?"

 The way that the "will they fit?" was avoided in my college classes was by having an e-class-- so the remaining limit is "how many kids can a teacher provide sufficient education support to?"

  ShrinkWrapped has a similar post to my musings here, focusing on the "catch'em early" theory of, well, teaching kids to learn. It would take some smallish school experiments to figure out how much support kids who are learning from a terminal (E-Machines are about two to three hundred bucks, less than a year's text books-- if they are used in the place of individual books, this may be practical.) will actually need. Depending on the student, you might not even need to physically place them in a classic school. I can see options ranging from homeschooling-but-with-a-proffessional-teacher to cubicle farms to the classic classroom but with a computer. This could be twisted into a nightmare-- think cubical farm with vast, centralized indoctrination (the type that shows up now is bad enough, thanks) and the kids taken entirely out of their parents' control. (think this, or this, but better run) On the other hand, if done privately or locally, this could be a revolutionary change in education-- putting control and supervision of what one's kids are learning at the finger tips of parents, either in assisted homeschooling settings or by making it much less expensive to run a private or charter school. At the same time we'd be saving time and energy by NOT having to move kids physically from place to place-- leaving more time for PE or study. It's e-commuting for school! Just like e-commuting, it wouldn't work for every subject-- little kid stuff, cursive, learning to read, learning to type, probably most music classes would need at the very, very least a TA on site, and probably need a real, life, physically there teacher. Even with these disclaimers, we could adapt for the dearth of teachers and improve the quality of the education our kids are getting, while making it possible for parents to be more involved.

Following the Chewbaca Defense

I’m a little tired of these overplayed hands and overused labels; I think they’re bandied about much too easily by people who prefer to call names rather than make a cogent, reasonable case for their positions.

The “racism” charge is especially tiresome. Our “post-racial” president has managed to take the sting and the scar out of the word in just, what, 9 short months, not because he’s “transcended” race and brought us all together into the sunshine of his love, but because he and his minions, his presscorp, his party and many of his supports have so quickly made “racism” the de facto excuse for his every failing that they have managed to render the word almost meaningless, to the detriment of those people who actually do suffer the real effects of racism, still, in this country.

NY’s hapless knucklehead of a governor, David Patterson has also been going on about how people think he’s a lousy governor because they’re racists and don’t like black people in power, he suggests (!) that President Obama was going to be the “next” victim of racism masquerading as substantive criticism.

Governor, please! New Yorkers think you’re a lousy governor because you’re a lousy governor. And people are displeased with President Obama’s policies and programs because he’s not doing the things he said he would do, and he is doing the things he said he wouldn’t do, and he seems completely frazzled, lost, whiney, annoyed and out-of-his depths. The guy can make a great speech, it’s true. But a likely-14-Trillion-Dollar Deficit, a jobless “recovery,” dozens of unaccountable czars, a healthcare plan long on control and short on cohesion, no jobs “saved or created,” questions about who his Attorney General will or will not prosecute, White House that seems out of control (and a president who hides behind blame and lacks the stamina to forebear his vacation – none of these inspire confidence.

Anchoress. Nuff said. TBD, similar subject, different tone.

TV Tropes

are eating my brain.... But this is awesome: Chewbacca Defense ...

Has nothing to do with threatening to rip your opponent's arms off if they beat you at chess or its equivalents, though it operates on similar principle

...

The common Chewbacca Defense is based on the following misconceptions and/or fallacies: *If you can prove the other side wrong, it makes you right. *If you can word your statements and arguments in a way that is too confusing, intelligent-sounding, or nonsensical for the opponent to respond to, it makes them wrong and it makes you right. *If you can shock or confuse your opponent and make them think you are a lost cause and not worth arguing with, you are right. *If you can make an opponent look bad, their logic must be equally as bad, and therefore you are right. (See also: Godwins Law) *If you are more popular than your opponent, it makes them wrong and it makes you right. *If you just keep arguing and shouting, even if everyone else (not just everyone else in the debate - everyone else in the world) thinks you are not just wrong, but insane, until everyone else just gets tired of listening to you spew nonsense, you're the last man standing, and, by default, you are right. *And of course, that Chewbacca lives on Endor. Unfortunately, the mere existence of the Chewbacca Defense leads to an unfortunate problem in debate called Chewbacca's Dilemma: No matter what you say in an argument, no matter how intelligently and clearly you word your rebuttals and assertions, it is possible that your opponent will always perceive whatever you say to be a Chewbacca Defense. In fact, a common political maneuver is to use a Chewbacca Defense in order to accuse the opponent of using a Chewbacca Defense. Confusing, isn't it? Here, look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey! *pop*

...and then it goes on to list examples from tons of shows, books and sometimes from reality....