WTF

Why did the government think they could do something about a child trapped in a balloon except wait for it to fall out of the sky? I mean do something other than shoot the balloon down.

So Then We Really Don't Need So Many Cops In The First Place

Most of the crimes the cops go after and most of the "criminals" in jail are there for small time drug problems. I guess it's the cops causing the problem. Leave people alone and you don't have nearly as much crime.

Good, get rid of the cops so we don't end up with more of these.

Two years ago I witnessed 100 jackbooted armored thugs walking arms locked down Derby Street in Salem. They would have beaten me senseless if it weren't for "the pin" I was wearing on my jacket. One good cop pulled me aside and said stand here with me. He was an older gentleman. Kind of like that pilot who ditched into the Hudson a while back. He struck me as someone who was good and decent and tired of the shit his job has become but powerless to do anything about it and so now just want's to quietly run out the clock until pension time.

The two cops on two separate occasions who were really disappointed when I blew significantly below intoxicated can fuck off.

Papers Please

The State of Hawaii is considering a law that will, if enacted, ruin tourism. It seems that in order to stamp out uninsured drivers they're going to require identity papers and permission slips before you can purchase gasoline. Now the first thing that comes to my mind is that not every last drop of gasoline purchased goes to the automobile. If I'm riding a moped or want to mow the lawn or use the weed wacker I'm fucked. No insurance card needed for those activities so no gasoline for me. And I'm totally fucked if I want gasoline for the backup electric generator I keep for my continuous home oxygen machine.

As proposed the law does not take into consideration the rent-a-car business. I'm sure they'll be noticing this and get the law changed so that they can issue temporary cards. They will definitely make it so that only their insurance rider will count. This will kill the credit card waiver or for guys like me whose regular policy will cover a rental car. We'll be forced to tack on the $15 per day extra. Market forces will drive tourism down. Why go to Hawaii where a rent-a-car, and now an expensive rent-a-car, is a necessity when you can go elsewhere and save.

But what this will really do to kill the tourism industry is what's scary. Driving without insurance makes one an outlaw. Now it can be argued that such antisocial behavior is benign but I don't believe so. It doesn't take much for some folks to go from thinking the law doesn't apply to me to thinking they can get away with more. Tourists with rented cars are already a target for theft or worse. Now with the insurance gasoline card boondoggle they'll be even more of a target.

How this will just paint a bigger target on the tourist. Mr. Criminal wakes up one morning and thinks "Hmmm who can I rip off today?" Then he remembers there's no gas in the car. So instead of the elderly woman with a spaghetti strap purse he goes looking for a tourist with a gas card first off.

The easy fix for me the well informed traveler is to avoid Hawaii. I just hope I'm not kidnapped walking out of the Cold Stone in Santa Fe. But I digress.

The other unintended consequence of this law will be a surge in black market gasoline. From the friend asking a friend to go fill their car for them to families making sure they have at least one car insured (minimum, no collision, high deductible) and into more outright profiteering. I'll make a fortune selling gas cans full of water with just a thin layer of gasoline on top so when my customer sniffs it they'll think it's real.

Or I'll switch to a diesel car and buy a lot of #2 fuel oil "for-the-house." It's already a cheaper alternative to gasoline right now anyway.

And come on! Really? Do you want to fuck up your tourism industry even more than TSA?

I Take A Nearly Lethal Dose Of Ritalin Every Day And I Have To Admit This Guy Is King Of All ADD Patients!!!

If ever there was a case of it taking one to know one this is it. So there's this guy who's nearly 60 and he's a junk collector in North Carolina. Dude has a simple dream, one he's been pursuing for a while now. He's got these Christmas trees that he's been growing. He wants to string lights on them. Six hundred and fifty thousand lights to be exact. So far the story seems kind of ordinary. Lots of people dream of having the biggest something or other. Especially around the holidays. Many fine individuals go over the deep end decorating without accusations of being hyperactive. Stu Ellis is no mere decorator. He wants to finance this operation by short selling the stock market which by his estimate should see the DJIA listing around 500 by next year. A year ago you would have thought he was crazy to say that out loud. Today it seems perfectly plausible. Still no ADHD there. This is the kind of thing that you can't make up. He's going to finance his private equity fund by selling one of the 7 wonders of the modern science fiction world. It turns out that he's got a very significant movie prop hanging on a string in his garage. He's going to sell the model space ship from Forbidden Planet which was just about the greatest Science Fiction movie of all time. OK still no Attention Deficit Disorder here. He's cashing in on some luck in the collectables market. What makes this the perfect storm of ADD is that his mother had to remind him to take a look around his house for something valuable that he could sell. It's like me with the closet doors. Some of you may remember I have to take them off the hinges or else I forget I have clothes.

As for Forbidden Planet, it is probably the most optimistic expression of art ever created. It's loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and blessed with all the cheerful sensibility that 1950's America could handle. The plot is borrowed from Elizabethan theater and the underlying theme remains that of the horrors that mankind may bring upon our self if suddenly our dreams become real. It explores the moral that perhaps some dreams should not come true.

Perhaps like dreaming that you'll bring down all of Wall Street so that you can generate enough light pollution in your backyard that space aliens will want to land at your house and then getting your mom to help you bring that dream to reality.

That man's a fucking genius. All I have to show for my ADD is this blog and some late homework.

Greed Is Good

Ever wonder why fund managers can't beat the S&P 500? 'Cause they're sheep -- and the sheep get slaughtered. I been in the business since '69. Most of these Harvard MBA types don't add up to dog shit. Give me guys that are poor smart and hungry and no feelings. You win a few, lose a few, you keep on fighting... I got 20 other brokers analyzing charts, pal. I don't need another one.

Gordon Gekko

I have a new hero in life and his name is Andrew Lahde!

What's Wrong With Education In America Part 4: Journalists and Social Scientists

Read this. Pay particular and close attention to the block quote in the "Gangsta Generation" section. I thought the author of this piece clearly didn't understand the irony inherent in his or her prose. It is clearly lost on David Kupelian. There are so many things wrong with Kupelian's use of this citation in his assault on modern culture.

The quotation felt dated and trite the first time I read it in 1989. I don't remember who originally said it but I think I read it as a block quote in a book called "The 13th Generation" which if I remember was a compilation of soundbites about how lazy and scared Generation X is.

As for that quote, the biggest giveaway as to the outdated source material is the assertion that all MTV plays is Hip Hop videos. Wait for it... Wait for it... There someone said it. MTV doesn't play music videos anymore. Hello... 1995 called they want that joke back. Also white kids don't wear Malcolm X hats anymore. Malcolm X hasn't been cool since Tim Burton's "Batman" made it cool to be white again.

As for the whole damn article. It made for an interesting chuckle the first time I saw it. That's right, the same article from two different websites. However if you notice, the first is dated 2008 with the second 2004. I'm wondering if I could dig a little deeper and find it with a 2002 byline.

Ultimately this two part rail into everything that's wrong with kids 15 years ago ends up blaming in exceedingly well cited detail the corporations that run the country and with no citations at all the public schools of America. OK, maybe teachers are solely to blame for why your kid finds Beakmans World fascinating and the members of their community who actually care about them boring. Sorry about that.

Kupelian does offer conclusions as to how to save the children of America from the evils of marketing. They should all join The Boy Scouts. Except maybe the gay kids. Kupelian hates fags.

What's Wrong With Education In America Part 2: College

True story time. I once took an analytical chemistry class at Salem State. There were 24 students in the class. Ten were chemistry students the rest were from the bio department. One of the labs we did was to detect chlorine in various aqueous samples. One way was with a special electrode and a pH meter. The other way was through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. It was in the fall semester and I got an A in the class.

One fine spring day I was sitting around the Chemistry Society office. It was a little closet off the Bio Society office. One of the bio majors who had just taken the class with me came into the chem society office to get help on a project he was doing for a bio class. He wanted to know how he could measure the amount of chlorine in pond water.

Having an audience of chem nerds I started fucking with him. I was thinking he'd recognize that I was fucking with him. I told him he should get some sodium metal and throw it in the pond. Then he should evaporate the water off and the sodium chloride would crystalize like when a tide pool at the beach evaporates in the sun. He could weigh the salt and then use the atomic mass to figure out how much chlorine there was.

He goes off looking for sodium and comes back an hour later to call me an asshole. What I told him was, from an engineering standpoint, a very valid way to solve his problem. From a scientific and environmental standpoint it was fucked up. Unfortunately it took his bio professor to point out to him how he had been had. I reminded him that we did the lab twice with two different ways of detecting chlorine. We could also have used Atomic Absorption and UV/Vis techniques but the easiest way to answer his question would be to go two blocks off campus to that pet store and spend five bucks on aquarium test strips. All you have to do is dunk them in and then look at the color.

What's Wrong With Education In America Part 1:The Students

This is a Periodic Table. Most periodic tables put Hydrogen in the same category as Lithium and Sodium. However metallic hydrogen is very very rare and so I've always felt that H-H really belongs above the Halogens as it bonds more like F-F or I-I. On the other hand HCl dissociates in water much like NaCl and does not form the bond that IBr does.

I have also seen Hydrogen placed in both periods 1 & 17 on the table and also listed alone, detached from the table.

However, placing Hydrogen in period 1 and 17 at the same time seems to throw todays precious little snowflake into fits of despair wondering if there are other repeats in the periodic table but being too lazy to actually read through all 119 elements in sufficient detail to remember anything useful makes that one of the great un-answered mysteries of the Universe.

It's like asking what's the square root of a million. No one will ever know. Well actually the kid who brought his calculator will tell you smugly that it's 1000. That kid is going places. The rest will be lucky to fetch his dry cleaning when they grow up. Calculator Boy will be managing the H1-B's America will need to hire to fill in the knowledge gap left when we realize we shouldn't have spent so much time teaching Snowflake how to have good self esteem instead of how to do calculus. Maybe if Snowflake's little sister is hot she can marry Calculator Boy and talk him into hiring his new Snowflake-in-law to be Vice President of Marketing and Synergy. Of course Snowflake will have to go back to night school and finish that degree in communications first.

I've been watching Doug Stanhope doing standup on cable. He makes a very valid point about why The New York Yankees are what's wrong with America. He tells the story in the context of dumb fucking assholes who will take a day off work to have a parade when their millionaire sports team wins but won't do the same to go to city hall and tell the mayor to let them smoke in bars. If only there was a way to get people to worry more about Paula Abdul than their own future. Whoever comes up with a distraction compelling enough to get my kids to skip their homework is going to become a millionaire. I just wish I could write a test where knowing who America's Next Top Model is going to be is important.

Should Jason Castro cut his hair?
A Yes
B No
C Who the fuck is Jason Castro and what does this have to do with Chemistry?

In regards to answer C, you tell me. Really. Because when I was trying to lecture on oxidation/reduction reactions you were texting your boyfriend in study hall about inane crap.

Good luck explaining to your boss at the hair salon why the EPA and OSHA are going to fine him tens of thousands of dollars because you poured ammonia based color stripper down the same sink you had been pouring chlorate bleach yesterday.

By the way, I had your boyfriend in my other class. If only he got this question right on the final.

A soldier has been assigned to clean up a small mess in one of the ammunition storage bays. The gunpowder spill is not water soluble. It is soluble in kerosene. Give three reasons why this is going to end badly.

I Quit

Well, I did get rehired. The union threw a fit because the administration did not follow contract with my dismissal. I don't want to stick around next year if the principal feels he needs to keep me on a short leash.

I had a couple interviews. The town I grew up in was one. The other is run by one of my Brothers. The ring opened the door but I was really prepared. I floored them. I knew things about their department that they didn't. I was charming. I was 100% full on. I had 3 interviews with 5 people over 3 days. (I was also very aware that I was interviewing with the various secretaries at every door.) My last interview was to talk salary. I knew they pay better. We negotiated by the boxes and I got exactly the box I would have landed in at the old job. I could have gone down a box and still made more.

I have a verbal agreement waiting for a CORI check to clear and in a day I should have a contract. I'm going to one of the top schools in the state and one of the original US News & World Reports top 200 High Schools. I'm also getting an administration that supports the teachers. There is no duty in the first year I just teach. After that there is no lunch duty, just study hall. They pay 3% up to $800 in 403(b). They pay 80% (swamp pays 60%) of the health and 70% (swamp pays 0%) dental. I also got a $5,000 raise (when you take into consideration that 20% difference in the insurance payment.)

I am a happy man but also saddened. The commute is the same amount of time but it takes me even further away from Marblehead and the city. I am also walking away from a bullet proof reputation within the community. And I would float. I wouldn't have my own classroom. But I think I do get a private office. It's still a better deal.

So ultimately I win by losing. I am unwilling to risk my career as a pawn between the union and the principal. I can't stay. The upside is I got a fucking raise.

All I Need Is Some Tasty Waves

I got fired again. This time I don't think I want to go back.

Living The American Dream

You're damn well right that those who are losing complain loudest. They wouldn't be complaining if they weren't losing out. When we were growing up the "Social Contract" we were given promised us comfort, family and emotional fulfillment so long as we didn't get pregnant, did our homework and kept mommy and daddies good name out of the police blotter. In exchange for sitting still when the most boring people in the world yoked us to staggering student loans we expect nothing less than the beach house free pot and sexy college party that leads to a center entrance colonial no more than a 10 minute drive to the commuter rail. You know, the same social contract our hippy parents enjoyed.

In contract law there is a term - unconscionability - which means that a contract one sided or unfair to one party cannot be entered into. When consideration is lacking or inadequate the contract is considered unenforceable. Now unfairness alone isn't enough to break the contract unless one party to the contract exerted undue influence or advantage.

Quick show of hands, who here told their parents to fuck off and refused to join polite society? I didn't think so. Even I don't have the nads to tell mom and dad to go chew while I quit my job thus freeing up my schedule so I can drink beer and play with Legos all day.

We all signed the social contract. Some of us signed up sooner than others but we've all sold out. I just wish I was allowed to see the fine print before that Monteblanc was shoved into my hand. It doesn't matter much to me now though. It's pretty clear that the Boomers are going to default on their obligation to Generation X in favor of giving their Echo crotch fruit a plasma screen for the back of the drivers side headrest.

But this post isn't a bitter rant over getting shafted. This is about survival for the Gen Xers out there. Our parents will bankrupt social security lickety split. The Echos are inept at everything but Grand Theft Auto (the game) and blowing each others body parts off from following bomb instructions they found on the internet which they didn't read carefully.

That's what will save us. Those Echo kids don't read anything carefully and they don't do anything without texting 3 other people to make sure it's socially OK for them to do whatever it is you're asking them to do and then they have to text them back to find out how to use the pointy end of the ruler.

Ruprekt, Don't take the cork off the fork.

Since they're the ones who got chauffeured to school in the back of moms Range Rover they're the ones who should go and fetch the Depends when their helicopter parents finally crash. After all, they're the ones who are going to inherit everything no matter what their older Gen X siblings do.

They won't fetch anything for their parents though. They'll be busy trying to figure out why their Gen X coworkers get things done by themselves when it takes them and their 4 friends all day to start working on that team project. Don't even ask them to swing a hammer, one kid will hold the nail, one will swing the hammer and one will watch the hammer drive the top of that first kids thumb into the wall. This will happen just before the kid who was trying to read the directions realized that the roundish flat thing not the claw end is supposed to hit the nail.

So remember that. Can't get things done on their own. Will be your boss though because when mommy is done writing their college application essay daddy will install them as his replacement on the board of directors. Since they can't read written instructions to do anything and don't watch the YouTube instructions too carefully either they will be dependent on Gen X to care for their parents and run the skill saw.

As long as the fine print in their social contract lets me set the price I should be retired just after the last Baby Boomer dies. Hopefully the devil spawn that the Echo kids inflict on us will know how to use a wrench or nobody will be able to change the oil in their car. I knew oil would lead to the end of civilization.

I'm Torn Between Titles For This One

I want to call it "I'll Give Up My Laser When They Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands" but "My Laser Has Killed Fewer People Than Ted Kennedy's Car" is too tempting to pass up. It's a slippery slope between banning toys that the cat loves and trying to stop Scaramanga and Doctor Evil from building a Chinese Death Ray on the moon and ransoming the Earth for One Million Dollars.

A Student Of Mine Made A Phone Call Today

No give me the phone. Hello. You mean this really is ______'s father. Yes this really is _____'s teacher. No she's feeling sick. You think it's strep throat. Well usually students ask for a pass to see the nurse and I give them one. Then they don't disrupt my class with a cellphone. Well no she certainly doesn't sound like she normally does. I'll send her down, the number of the main office is ########. They'll dismiss her from there.

Well that was awkward.

Etiquette

The rules are that the phone is to be kept off and in the students locker. Otherwise the phone is a constant distraction to the learning process. Either to the student using the phone or the other kid being texted in another class. Every time I take a phone off a kid it's always "a call from my mother." Sorry kid, Mommy needs to learn to call the main office and ask to have you dismissed. It's a system that worked for the 90 years prior to 9/11 and there's no reason it can't work for parents and their kids today.

That being said, if this kid had come to me before class and said he was expecting a possible call from his deployed father. I would let him answer and then take the call quietly out into the hallway.

The story is lacking in details but I'm going to give the school the benefit of the doubt here. The kid probably didn't discuss the possible call before class. The teacher would have no idea why the kid is answering the phone in class and past experience would be that the call is another in a long series of cell phone related disruptions. The teacher, needing to maintain classroom control probably ordered the student to cease their disruptive behavior and relinquish the offending device. The student being a child probably did not reason with the teacher effectively and mearly informed the teacher that they were talking to a parent. The teacher hearing that every time they talk to a child about illegal phone use probably did not assume that the parent was a serviceman and this may have been the last time the (from his own admission) troubled boy may ever hear from his father. Emotions most definitely got out of control. Probably by both the student and teacher. They're probably even more out of control as the kid doesn't sound like an honors student and the teacher probably has had disruptions from the boy before.

You and I know nothing of the past history of discipline issues the school faces with this student and classes in general. You and I don't know anything about the level of student commitment this class has. Today it's the cellphone from this kid. Tomorrow it will be the cellphone from another kid. Next week it will be an iPod.

That this made national news is an indication of how fucked up our priorities as a nation are. Snowflake there isn't going to learn that had he merely cleared the call with the adult in charge of the classroom prior to taking the call that things would have worked out. Instead the lesson is that kids can do whatever they want in the classroom so long as mommy goes to the newspapers to complain. What should have been a lesson in civility is now a public embarrassment for the school. Now every phone call is going to be from someones father in a war zone. Every disruption during instruction time is going to affect every student. The outrage here shouldn't from this one jackass kid and his parents. It should be from the parents of every other kid in the class over the loss of instruction time when these snowflakes lose control.

If the student had answered the call and said to me "This is my dad in Iraq. It's the only time he can call. Can I take this into the hall?" I would say yes even if he hadn't asked for permission before class. I doubt very much that is how the event played out.


(A side note here... If you are accused of disrupting classroom time and go on national TV to defend yourself, clean up. Every judge knows that criminals can borrow a suit but showing up to court in a dirty t-shirt shows either contempt for the seriousness of the charges or a lack of understanding about your end of the social contract. In either case, it's an indication to the judge that you may not belong in polite society. The same case is true here. I'm going to assume trailer trash dumbass and say the kid knows nothing about good manners.)

Beautiful Night

Saw a deer coming home from school tonight. Peeping frogs in the swamp behind the house are peeping away. I'm drinking beer in the back of my truck. That was creepy. The frogs all just stopped peeping like they were on a switch. Now they're back. Coyote must be back there. Pictures of the Coyote in the newspaper taken from around the corner (print not online addition so no linky love.) I'm not the only one who's seen that damn thing. I've been saying it for years and everyone but Lisa who's seen it too say's it's a dog or something.

I gave my kids a test today. They all thought it was an April fools joke. It wasn't. It was a hard spank on the ass for most of them. Now they know I wasn't kidding when I said you need to remember everything in chemistry. What we do in September comes back to haunt you in April. Learning it for the test doesn't cut it. I sent a progress report out to every parent a few weeks ago indicating their kid was doing poorly whether they were actually doing badly or not. It was actually pretty ambigious. It really depended on the relationship the parent had with the kid. Bottom line is that the report cards are always bad 3rd quarter and I didn't want anyone to be surprised. I'm giving several kids their first C ever. I'm also sending one kid back to jail.

Lazy Sunday

Every Sunday morning Lisa and I drink our coffee in bed and watch Saturday Night Live from the night before. The writers strike has made this show infinitely funnier, NOT! Schwing! Every Sunday it's the same thing. Lisa and I wake up. I start the VCR. Lisa asks me to pause it and wait for her to come back. She goes off to do god knows what. I stop the recording and find something on the TV that I'm not going to mind turning off when she comes back. This morning I stopped surfing on something called Beauty and the Geek. It's some low budget reality show that I really liked when it was called Ordinary Joe or some crap like that.

The show seems to be about nerdy guys living with strippers. The most socially inept losers had to pair off with absolute filthy sluts to win prizes or new tits or bragging rights at the next cosplay convention. I wasn't really paying attention. Except to this one girl who was introduced as having $8,000 breast augmentation surgery before they actually announced her name. As if $4,000 a tit was more important than a womans soul. Anyway this not quite fake plaything (she kept her natural hair color, I think) had dreams of being more than just filler during 'Legs n Eggs.' She announced her dream in life was "to be an aspiring Playboy model."

That's where my head asploded. Let me say that again. She wanted to be an ASPIRING Playboy model.

How the fuck do you want to be a Playboy model and not pull it off. (forgive the pun) Most girls just have to show up in Chicago or LA and faster than Sammy Hagar can say 'wango tango' they're knees to the sky with Brett Michaels or Adrian Zmed or that guy from "Full House" that Alanis Morrisette wrote that song about. Especially if you're the recent beneficiary of a boob job that cost more than the average Playboy reader makes in a year after taxes. Full disclosure here. I gave up reading Playboy when I realized the pictures were all girls old enough to be my daughter and BMW motorcycles turned into coffee tables or a Bang & Olufsen stock market ticker tape machine. There wasn't a single thing in that magazine that I could afford. I miss the dirty jokes though. Maybe someone will email me some.

So this poor girl shows every American awake at the ungodly hour of 7AM on Sunday that there are two failures in her life. Her failure to reach the dream of becoming a Playboy model and her fathers failure to offer her some simple dignity.

I want daughters. I hope I can do better.

I haven't had a drink in 7 days.

Hey, Mom. Is That Kid Me?

All Hat No Cattle

OK Wikipedia is not the least bit credible but there's something especially wrong with an encyclopedia that has more to say about a ball player than the man who ripped open physics and made the future possible.

My Windmill Has Killed Fewer People Than Ted Kennedy's Car

Sometimes I forget why I do this. The Commonwealth very desperately needs this electricity. This is particularly important since we no longer have Salem Power online. They're trying to turn it back on but my clean car is proof enough of the filth they spew. I don't expect them to be online for long.

That means we really need more windmills. It's too bad Salem Power is so screwed right now. Too bad for Salem more so. They generate most of the city's operating revenue. With tax receipts falling everywhere and Salem's budget crisis I expect tough times for the city. Maybe this is too little too late.

I really do hope Salem keeps the teachers. I hate to think they're all coming after my job. Especially since we're looking at cash flow problems of our own. I have no idea how much money I can expect to replenish glassware that just didn't stand up to the 15 year olds the town hired to move us last year. We have dozens of expensive items that the movers trashed kicking around the building with no hope of repair or replacement. It's too bad. I hate having to buy things twice but we need these things. Especially the glassware. Prices for specialty glass have shot through the roof since the DEA and Homeland Security have effectively criminalized beakers.

I still have some hope though. No Child Left Behind hasn't totally snuffed out critical thinking. One of my students, during the midyear exams, pointed out that the periodic table she was looking at spelled sulfur wrong. I pointed out that there is the American english spelling and the English english spelling. She was looking at the British spelling which IUPAC has declared to be the wrong spelling.

The periodic table in question was given to the school by The United States Marine Corp. Along with 500 foam fingers, the "we're #1" kind.

Fuck Ted Kennedy!

WHIP!

Hey,

For my two readers, sorry, you're probably too far away to take advantage of this. For the rest of you, BIG FUCKING NEWS!!!!

Maddies is going out of business tonight.

I'll be there around 4.

$2 beers! $4 drinks.

For those of you who live in civilized places, beers are running around $5.25 here and Apple Watermellon Sour Patch Kids Martinis go for $9 bucks.

Maddies is where the infamous "Himmler was right" night started.

Marblehead where the old saying "this place wouldn't survive without me" turns out to be true every time a good bartender quits.