here where you are is full of Santeria cigars waiting to be smoked in the kitchen and roses wrapped around the shower stall. you guess this is what you get when you rent a room from someone you don't know without even looking at the whole apartment bc you are so desperate for some place any place where you can shut a door and you need that quiet that a door gives to shut it so i shut it out you out while waiting for that dream place to open up. it's ok. you are on the list. just when you found out you had to leave the first place, you found out you were on that list, the no money list for a skyrise version of heaven. you are on the 80/20 train to St. Peter but there is trash on the tracks. trash on the tracks causes small fires, they say. little mini spurts of hell that cause your train to be delayed.
you knew it was going to be crazy when you got back and it has been. you are going on no sleep after a freelance experience writing about rugs for four or five days. well, they are good for hiding the bodies is all you have left to say.
the Saint Candles that are burning on top of the fridge give the apartment a soft glow. it is appropriate that you are writing a ghost book. today your phone died---couldn't be a power surge bc it wasn't plugged in. Jodie saw it. the screen was stuck on "goodbye". was Jodie willing you off of her couch? anyway, now it works, but you have to charge it in the kitchen with the spirits of the dead because it must be amongst its own kind. plus, you have no outlet in your room. more this way»
Submitted by Tara Parks on 16 October 2006 - 11:20am.
Don't you love it when American right wing nutjobs start crawling even further right and bump right into their avowed enemies?
Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.
"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.
David Horowitz, publisher of FrontPage magazine, and whose archive of articles is available online, has long advocated for something he calls "an academic bill of rights." Essentially, the academic bill of rights argues in language that would make the sophists blush with pleasure, that universities are not teaching, they are indoctrinating, and therefore, "intellectual balance" should be brought to bear. It's carefully worded to indicate that no professor should be hired or fired based on political views. It all sounds so reasonable. And then, when you click on Professor Horowitz's blurbs for his most recent book, The Professors, you find this: more this way»
Submitted by Lorraine on 5 September 2006 - 9:32am.
So Standardized School is the opposite of World-Class Education,
not its divine incarnation?
Good then.
Let's hear no more about the necessary sacrifice of consigning all children to one-dimensional forehand factories for high-priced, high-stakes stamping into quality-controlled widgets, by has-been and never-were corporate charismatics and labor union drones.
"If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same. . ." -- by Rudyard Kipling.
IF we inscribed this on every standardized test booklet for every child our Congressional Coaches promise never to leave behind languishing in the locker room, IF we took it to heart ourselves, then we still might not win 'em all but maybe we could stop feeling like such losers?
I've long called test score mania (in both triumph and disaster) the two-edged sword, but "two-edged imposter" could work even better, might at least shut up the most rigid standard skunks -- clever fellow Kipling. more this way»
My imagination was captivated when I came across someone's account of a quite civil "luncheon" strategy, the notion of inviting famously opposed partisans to sit together for a few hours across a social (not bargaining) table with their charming hostess, and make not only eye contact but real conversation.
The point wasn't to resolve major controversy or hit any other measurable outcome target per se, just to create a context conducive to a civil (if not cordial) relationship, from which future conversations and constructive ideas might spring.
I don't even remember now who the opponents were in the column I happened to see, or its author, but it inspired me last summer as the Fourth of July approached and public education tempers were once again hotter than blazes.
Oh, and "MisEducation" was an author's alter ego I created from desperation years ago and patterned on Judith Martin's Miss Manners persona, when I couldn't find anyone to HAVE a civil and creative conversation with me about education cultures, much less actually go to lunch!
What a week for trying to walk, talk, learn and think at the same time!
First, our 10-year-old son is listening to NPR in the car when he's riveted by news of an important fossil discovery linking fish and land creatures, a so-called tetrapod, lifeforms that left the water to walk on land.
He isn't interested in the news or politics, although he just
discovered Stephen Colbert and gets some of the comedy. He likes the
split screen where the contradictory wisecracks are on the right as
Stephen pontificates on the left. It reminds him of the wisecracking
moose commentary on the Brother Bear DVD.
But yesterday in the car, he suddenly wanted us to turn it up, so
he could hear all about the new fossil link. That was the first really
interesting "news" worth hearing, he proclaimed, but there wasn't enough
to the story. (He actually said this, exactly that way, pronouncing
judgment like a seasoned media critic.)
Intense investigation ensues when we can get online, after which my little boy, who has never been made to think about anything, hugs me with a goofy grin and says, "Hello, my fellow tetrapod!" more this way»
Whenever I travel I almost always end up in deep political conversations with people who identify themselves as conservatives and republicans. I guess people feel like they can open up with me. I did at one point want to be a nun and I guess people get that I am not only willing to listen but I take the conversation seriously to the point of it being sacred. To me communication is communion and those 10, 15, 20 minutes to me are sincerely precious.
"Michael Moore is right";, he said. I asked him about the coming fight over Roberts and the likes of people like Dobson : "You don't understand, they don't care. These people don't care. This is just entertainment to them. A way to keep the masses fighting with each other. They are out to make billions and billions of dollars, amass incredible wealth and power while we're here, the have-nots of all sorts of incomes, down here duking it out. They don't care about Roberts or homosexuals or dead babies. They only care about power. And that power is money and oil." I sat there quietly, with my eyes wide open. The Guy had told me earlier that he worked in satellite broadcasting media. That means his contracts are in the tens of millions. And this guy looked at Bush as the enemy.
Now it's Mr. D's turn.
I met Mr. D on the way over to the airport. Mr. D works in finance and was taking a plane to Las Vegas to take the qualifying exam for their fire department. To my beanie-wearing readers, Mr. D looked like he could be the love child of Clay Shirky and Cam Barrett. Young, white, affluent. Not your typical red stater but certainly of the kind that matters to the GOP (and unfortunately to any political party) : he's a guy with money to spare in the form of campaign contributions.
Why was Mr. D. leaving an extremely well paid job with gobs of economic perks for a chance to work as a firefighter? Two words : September 11. more this way»
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"Besides the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations.
"The establishment of the chaplainship in Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights as well as of Constitutional principles.
"The danger of silent accumulations and encroachments by ecclesiastical bodies has not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S."
