From A Chinese Website Selling Cheap Junk

This is from an online catalog selling glowsticks.

Financial Planning

No for those of you who expected a picture of shotguns and canned beans, you'll be surprised to find I'm very upbeat about the prospects of my financial portfolio.

Why you might ask? Because I just blew out of any American Equities we had left. I am going into Canadian Mines and something I like to call a BRIC.

"It's not whether you're right or wrong that's important, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong." - George Soros

This website is not giving unsolicited financial advice. Past performance is no indication of future profits.

Who am I kidding. I'm fucking right all the time. Just ask my cousin Danny how much he wishes he had bought more RNAI when I put him in at a buck. Then ask him if he wishes he didn't start taking profit at $7. I believe Merck bought it at $13.

I like JAN.V MJO.V GXM.V KBGCF.PK and RIO. None of them are dollar backed.

Most of them are sources of indium, selenium and gallium. More importantly. None of them have any worrisome exposure to Central & Western Africa or the risk that such ventures currently enjoy. Demand for In, Se and Ga is about to shoot through every light fixture on Earth as people wake up to the magical wonders of LEDs and Solar Cells. Either one is a hot market place right now and those stocks are all over valued but not the mining stocks. Mines that will supply the raw materials of either one of those technologies will be even more lucrative if both technologies take off. I may actually live to see retirement instead of dropping dead from a Monday morning heart attack.

Thank You

Imagine A World Without Zinc

Fucking hippies.

That car gets the same mileage as my land yacht. I can do this in mine.

At least I'm not this guy.

Yet.

Since y'all are going to be retiring soon how about putting down the bong and spending some of that free time undoing the damage your generation has done to The Constitution of The United States. The Patriot Act happened on your watch. So has the militarization of the local police force. Don't think we'll forget that or forgive it.

It's time your generation starts thinking about the future. You're heading for a nursing home. I'm just vengeful enough to offer you the same dignity you've offered MY G-G-GENERATION.

No Time For Love Doctor Jones!

I haven't really been watching TV much. I'm paying a stinking fortune to those bastards at Comcast for internet and HBO, Skinemax, Starz, Showtime, Encore and The Movie Channel. I don't watch much. Usually if I get that kind of time I fall asleep. I'm still working more 36 hour days then I should. Last week I fell asleep behind the wheel twice. Both times I woke up inches away from side swiping a parked car.

I got a full nights sleep two nights in a row this weekend yet tonight I fell asleep during The Simpsons. I think it was because they've become quite boring. I don't expect The Simpsons to ever be as funny as the Connan O'Brian years but lately they haven't been funny at all. One thing I have been watching lately has been foreign horror and Britcoms.

I have to blame the writers for this. If I remember correctly, The Simpsons is the one show that the writers have control over. Producers aren't allowed to bring "notes" or screw with scripts that have passed "standards". It's uncharacteristically un-republican of me to say this but I support the writers decision to strike. I hope they get fair treatment. I'm sorry the grips, gaffers and other crew are feeling collateral damages but they wouldn't have a job in the first place if the writers didn't camp out at 18th Street Coffee House in front of their laptop. The make-up girl is still going to collect a paycheck regardless of whether I watch "The Office" through my cable connection to the TV set or watch "The Office" through my cable connection to my PowerBook. However, only one path between the writers fingers to my eyeball compensates the writer. That's what this is about.

That's why the writers have their own union in the first place. They were smart enough to know that the Teamsters weren't going to get them a better deal. If the Best Boy wants a residual check maybe he needs to join a union that fights for a better cut of the paycheck. I hear the crew complaining about the writers but what they really need might not be a union that fights for the right to stand around doing nothing but keep the clock running while the director waits for magic hour. I don't blame the studio for layoffs. If you want residual payments too you should elect union reps who are, you know, smart. Maybe Joe Bob was great at swinging a hammer and did great at woodshop in high school but he's out gunned in the frontal lobes when negotiating with front office management that requires an Ivy League degree to be the mail clerk.

No one complained when musicians demanded the same royalty for CD's that they used to get for VINYL platters. Name the last 12 inch diameter black disk you purchased. Admit it, you paused for more then a second. You paused two seconds if you thought that 'S' was a 'C'. It's been that long since records were sold that way. I'll bet you a copy of "Little Miss Sunshine" on VHS that you can't find it.

Writers aren't stupid. They have enough vision to see what's coming around the bend. They have to be smart or they don't get paid. This strike isn't about their greed today it's about knowing when one medium is dead and acknowledging when new technology is taking over.

So maybe American TV isn't worth watching. It's been that way since Philo T Farnsworth first shot electrons through a tube. I've been watching season 6 of The Simpsons in my classroom after school. Listening really, as I set up for labs. I'm thinking of having my Netflixs sent to the school. Maybe abandoning the airwaves will be a good thing. Without the FCC and "Standards & Practice" telling writers what they can write they might have something worthwhile to say. I'd actually miss TV. In the mean time, does anyone remember the '88 writers strike? I vaguely remember that episode of Moonlighting where they ran short so Bruce Willis just sang to Cybil Shepard for 10 minutes?

Credit

MCAS scores for Massachusetts hit the news last week. Thanks for the kind words Mom. Sadly I had nothing to do with our success in chemistry and everything to do with our failure with Science & Technology.

Last year I taught the freshmen intro to physics and engineering design class. It was basically Tech with extra math. It was designed by the Museum of Science and one of the other science teachers. It was poorly conceived from the start. Curriculum was never written, it was just pages pulled from lab manuals with no sense of why we were doing things or what the topics had to do with each other. Even at that, it was meant to be offered to high achieving students not the 2 level kids I taught. It assumed a firm grasp of algebra and geometry including trig straight out of 8th grade. It was a nightmare. To make matters even more fun, we weren't informed that the kids would be expected to take MCAS until February.

My theory is that the teacher who was to write the curriculum never expected to have to share the course with another teacher and was planning on winging it alone. Then half the students were given to me. The other half of the kids ended up with a series of different science teachers as the department imploded under a series of poor staffing judgements. The MCAS the freshmen took was nothing close to the scope of the course. They were set up for failure. I did the best I could.

That was 3 of my 4 classes. The 4th was chemistry. A course for juniors. Only sophomores had to take the MCAS. They took the MCAS for the science they were studying that year. A small handfull of sophomores took chemistry with the rest taking biology. I only had two of the sophomores in my chemistry class. One was a boy who transferred in from another teachers class 2 months before the MCAS. I don't think he takes school very seriously. He didn't pass. I am very proud of my other sophomore. She was one of my knitters. She passed. I like to take some of the credit for her success. The rest of the chemistry students who took MCAS were in classes with the other two teachers.

Some would look at my record and say I have a 50% pass rate. I only got a chance to see individual chemistry students scores. As I didn't have the boy for the full year I'm unwilling to accept his failure as a reflection of my ability. On the other hand, knitting during class didn't hinder the girls abilities. Perhaps it helped. The boy didn't knit.

I haven't been able to see the individual scores for the freshmen. However I hear that the freshmen who scored the highest in the school was one of my students.

That's a good sign.

Yes, I've Heard

It's a good thing that Mac Users aren't generally stupid enough to enter root passwords just because a box pops up on our screen.

Fuck.

More PC Users are switching to the Mac then ever before.

Someone tell them not to fuck it up for the rest of us!