1. This article is a gas. Quite literally. And I’m thinking it should be kept a secret because otherwise all the men who would have been aided by this drug will go flaccid at the thought of fart-induced erections.
2. This is just creepy. Bleeding from the mouth. Gross. And it got me to thinking about what it must have been to be alive during the plague. Can you even imagine? I believe there may be places in the world today where people live under similar circumstances, but here in the cushy bubble where we live, it’s just impossible to imagine. The idea that (conservatively estimating) one third of the people you know would die – and die suddenly is just mind boggling. Our personal philosophies would have to shift so drastically to accommodate that kind of reality that it’s hard to even hazard to guess how different we would be…

That is all but for one question of the day: I was at a coffee shop this weekend looking at the magazine rack and I took a gander at Adbusters. Except that Adbusters comes in a plastic sheath so I could only see the front and back covers. And I could SWEAR there was an honest-to-goodness advertisement on the back. Was I duped or has someone gone mad? If you have the answer, please take a moment to comment because I will not be able to sleep until I find out if indeed the culture jamming headquarters has sold out, which would be simultaneously ironically hilarious, and utterly sadtimes.

1. One of the companies we use for court reporting sent us a double-decker box of See’s chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Only about half of our (exceedingly small) office was in, and after about three hours, it looked like this:

2. I just found out that a girl I grew up with recently competed in the Miss America pageant.

3. The geek’s cool tool.

4. Takin’ it old-school.

5. Pyimpin:

I recently had a conversation with a friend about my dilemma regarding air travel: on the one hand, some of my big life plans involve seeing things that may be gone within a few generations, things like coral reefs and rain forests. And on the other hand, the primary way for me to get to the places where I can see these things is one of the main reasons they may not be around much longer. Add to that the fact that some of my very closest people are a country, or even continent away, and I just don’t know.

As we discussed this, my friend said, “Well, it can’t be that bad. You just have to make up for your flights by tightening the carbon belt in other areas.” My memory was hazy on the topic, so the best answer I could come up with was, “no…I think it’s bad…like…BAD.” But best I could remember, despite not owning a car, not running the heat, living in a studio apartment, not having shopoholic blood, and more, my carbon footprint was multiple times that of the average (i.e. in the grand scheme, wasteful and gluttonous) American. Yikes.

Well, to set my hazy mind straight, today I found a series of slides on the New Scientist website with captions including this one:

A single flight across the Atlantic can guzzle about 60,000 litres of kerosene – more fuel than an average motorist uses in 50 years of driving – generating around 140 tonnes of carbon dioxide, along with 750 kilograms of nitrogen oxide.

Ouch.

So, while I have fun with this at work:

You should have fun with this. I’m very enamored of the idea of putting the impact of our actions into terms that we can comprehend. Sometimes my brain simply can’t count high enough to make sense of statistics, and this is an interesting and fun way to get the big picture (har har).

I saw this headline at the grocery store yesterday, got really excited, but was then too cheap to spend a whole five dollars to read it. Fortunately, the boy kindly pointed out to me that I could read it online for free. Please do.

Let us for a moment take a quote from early on in this article:

The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition.

And let me respond to this quote, in the context of Proposition 8 in California, and in the name of bastardizing the intelligence of the article, with the following sentiment:

Step off my “secular” government, asshole. For ruhlz.

Seriously. Don’t. Because I will start like you’ve never seen anyone start in your life.

One summer during my babysitting years I was asked by a woman to babysit her two sons and tutor the younger one. They were sweet boys, and I was quite happy to oblige. But the ‘tutor’ part got a little sticky.

I was given a list of pre-requisites for kindergarten (seriously?) and a stack of alphabet flash cards. I looked over the sheet from the school: some things on the list were along the lines of “being able to wipe your own bottom,” and I can totally get behind that because I’m sure the funding available for staffing just does not afford classrooms the ability to send a few adults to the bathroom while someone else watches over the rest of the class. Sure, maybe that’s a travesty. Maybe we need more people in the classrooms. Maybe (I’m not sold on it). But that’s a whole other can of worms.

But the other things on the list were more like, “cut a circle, square, and triangle” and “know the alphabet.” I’m still not sure if it was intended as a list of guidelines, or strict “requirements.” It’s not that these tasks are so advanced for a four year old. It’s not that I don’t think we should engage our children and, even more so, find ways to engage them that ALSO teach them useful information like how to read or how gravity works. But to punish or admonish a child that young, in this manner, for not having reached certain goals is frightening to me. What do we think this will accomplish? I would bet a whole lot that all this will get you is a kid who develops a bad taste in his mouth whenever the word “school” is uttered. And the damage that will do to him and his life is epically worse than how far behind he will be if, at the age of 4, he hasn’t yet mastered writing “p”. Trying to force-feed knowledge of any sort is so obviously less effective than teaching to ready and willing pupils that I’m not even going to go there.

So there I was, asked to drill a four year old on letters and numbers and all manner of tediously boring things for a certain amount of time each day. And he was slouched across the table from me, eyes always wandering, looking so tortured it hurt to watch.

At this point I could digress into how the creation and implementation of our Prussian-modeled (compulsory) education system was formulated as a means to create a work force of physical labor to support factories in the industrial era. Or how many of the ‘uneducated’ in the 1800s were reading books at the age of 10 that we consider too advanced or too mature for our high schoolers. Or how our schools promote values that encourage us to see the world as potentially (if we are nice enough and wait our turn) without conflict and, consequently, teach our children that it IS possible for the earth to sustain the 6 plus billion people currently on it and, at the same time, that our Hummer and wide screen TV habits have no direct correlation to people starving in the third world.

I could. But you don’t want to get me started.

Where was I?

Oh. Right.

Lest this be construed as a rant in favor of hippie dippie childrearing wherein we let the kids decide what they want, when, and how, let me assure you that I can be a quite a hard ass; manners and responsible behavior are a must.*

But, ya, I think I that a different educational model is long past due.

I don’t know that I think taking kids away from their parents, as in the Summerhill model, is quite the way to go. And I’m not laid back enough to have complete faith that my child would flourish with no requirements or parameters in the Sudbury model. Truth be told, I’m not sure, practically, exactly what I DO think would work. But I can’t in good conscience give the current system my seal of approval just because I’m not genius enough to invent the solution. I simply think there needs to be more dialogue about this, more often, across a wider spectrum of the population.

Surely allowing our children to go untamed is not what we should strive for (children do need structure, I agree), but nor is our current system. It has devolved so far from what we idealize it to be that it has become a fiscal cancer on our society. We pour endless dollars into a system that pays wages to many, many deserving and hard working individuals (and otherwise), but overall still does not attain that which it has set out to. It is a system that assumes one prescription will fit all and ignores the fact that some households raise wealthy children who can afford to value knowledge for its own sake while other households raise children who know that their little brother won’t have any food to eat if they don’t ditch to work a shift at Taco Bell (and, of course, most households likely defy these stereotypes all together). It is a system that assumes it is possible to create a curriculum that is simultaneously effective and bland enough to refrain from offending any of the more than 300 million citizens of this country. It is all at once too unrealistically ambitious and entirely ineffectual.

This is a topic I encourage everyone to think a little harder about…

*As a side note, it will be very interesting to see what my child rearing skills are like when I leave the ideals of Hypothetical Land behind and actually have a screaming 2 year old standing in front of me, won’t it?

NOTE: Most of these opinions have been formed via classes and books and discussions more than anything I can point to on the internet, but I didn’t want to only point to book titles, so much of my supporting documentation was hastily complied via haphazard google searches; academic blasphemy, I know. I’d be more than happy to discuss the things that have led me to this pontification if anyone is so interested. Just let me know.