Read Me In Other Places!

…That sounds a bit dirty…

I’ve got a new post at Vernacular!

Enjoy!

It’s The Internet!

…In-yer-Vette!

Ok, astonishingly awesome puns aside, it’s true; soon you’ll have blazingly fast internet in your car. (Please insert Xhibit “we just put a [blank] in your [blank] so you can [blank] while you [blank] joke here)

Of course, this article has me all riled up, for a few reasons:

1. I don’t have an iPhone. This means I don’t have blazingly fast internet at my fingertips all the time. Hell, I barely have that at home. So to think that I might be able to ride in a car and jack in my laptop makes me very happy.

2. Car apps. This will usher in a new age of GPS/accelerometer/ohmygodyou’reonI90causeI’monI90too! applications for your computer. Even hardware will get a bump as car companies seek to make the passenger seats of every vehicle a portable office/gamer’s paradise.

3. The Japanese have had this for almost 12 years. Seriously? We suck. And it always fills me with an awkward combo of elated/pissed when we finally (FINALLY!) catch up to our neighbors to the future. I figure this means we’re only a few years from sleeping in drawers.

4. Live human interaction is dead! The car ride was one of the last forms of forced live human interaction left for the American family. I for one am glad to know that come next road trip/grocery run/grandma visit I’ll be safe in the backseat listening to Pandora, watching Youtube, and Facebook chatting with my mom and sister, both of whom will be in the car with me. I just feel bad for my step-dad, stuck there in the driver’s seat with nothing but the GPS to talk to.

High School!

…Preparing you for…well…something.

Stumbling through the internets today, I came across this article, from the Chicago Tribune. Apparently, Stevenson High School administrators have a problem with students writing articles about topics that aren’t cute and cuddly; teen pregnancy and drug and alcohol usage among high school students, particularly honor roll kids and student mentors.

I find this brand of censorship especially angering, because it seems to be part of an overall trend regarding high school and education in general, namely, a disconnect from the real world. I’ve heard that school is supposed to prepare you for the outside world, yet high school was, for me, the least real experience of my life. On a purely superficial level, I was spending several hours a day inside a building in a rich suburb of Chicago, nowhere near the real world, which is filled with poverty, ignorance, food that isn’t served on styrofoam trays, and music that isn’t dumbed down so it can be played by 18-year-olds. I spent most of my day being told how to think and how to act, by people whose higher education was focused on teaching people how to think and how to act, rather than on a particular subject on which I was supposed to be thinking or acting. Our internet was regulated and filtered, and our books were cue cards for our teachers, simply walking us through exercises and experiments that were meant to instill a rote memory of facts or processes, with no time spent on understanding what these facts and processes meant to the other 300-some-odd million people outside. We even had a protocol in the event that something bad happened on the outside, something we were unable to deal with as high school students and teachers. We would lock the doors, turn out the lights, and hide until it was over. Safe? Possibly. Applicable to the real world? Not in the slightest.

Most memorable of my high school moments? September 11, 2001. I was in auto class, which met in a building separate from the rest of the high school. Word had just started spreading that something was happening in NYC, and that all the news networks were covering it. We were only working out of an exercise book (of course) and so were allowed by the auto teacher (a hip twenty-something) to turn to the news and see what was happening. At that moment, one of the World Trade Towers was burning, a plane having flown into it, and there was speculation as to how such an accident could have happened. Now, all the buildings were wired for tv (channels approved by the administration, of course), but the auto shop was on a network that was controlled separately from the rest of the campus. So, when the administration made the announcement that the TVs would be turned off and locked off, the auto shop was unaffected by the decision, and the TV there remained on. It remained on long enough for us, those of us who skipped our next class and stayed where the information was free-flowing, to watch, live, a second airplane fly into the second tower and both towers collapse to the ground. I suppose I was one of maybe thirty to fifty students in my high school to see that happen. The administration was content to let the others sit inside the bubble and remain ignorant to the events that have, more than any others in my or my parent’s generations, shaped this world. The lie continued.

And now, at Stevenson, we have more of the same. Not content to simply omit the outside world, to merely refuse to inform us of the problems that face us today, to continue to operate as though our textbooks provide us with all we need to survive out there, the Stevenson administration has moved on to flat-out denying that the real world exists. They do not believe that students get pregnant, or that such a thing is anything more than a tragedy akin to death. They do not believe that good students will drink or smoke, or that drinking or smoking does not necessarily mean that someone is a bad student, or a bad person. Rather than admit that these things happen, and allow the students to work out an understanding of the situations, of how those situations arise, the administration says that such things don’t happen, and when they do, they are “bad” and should be ignored so that they go away.

This is unforgivable. The last thing a student needs is less information. We continually find out that our students are less and less prepared for the world after school, and yet we never think that it might be the institutional nature of education that is to blame. We shelter more, rather than less, and things get worse, yet we wonder why? It is because we refuse to let our students deal with the outside world on their own terms. I do not think we should dump them in the proverbial deep end, to sink or swim. That would be even worse than never letting them near the pool. But our current practice of showing them videos and reading to them from text books, while never actually doing anything in the natural environment, is akin to teaching them how to swim with diagrams only, then dropping them. Some may mimic the diagrams well enough to survive, but they will never develop their own technique, one which will be comfortable, possibly even better than what has been taught. Yes, some will survive, but far too many, having never touched the water before, will drown.

Headlines!

…Where Everything is Gay…

Today we’ve got a six-degrees-of-gay-Kevin-Bacon thing going on, in that all of the stories are in some way about gay people. Fabulous! Ok, all stereotypes aside, let’s queer up a few things.

Starting with drugs, the other kind of college experimentation:

Obama’s gonna let medicinal marijuana suppliers get their grow on!

When asked why he was willing to fight Conservatives on the drug front and yet continue to ignore gay rights issues, Obama said, “Hey, if gays wanted civil rights they would throw some kind of rally or protest here in Washington, and it would be covered on all the major news networks, right?”

Moving on to events that happened but didn’t really happen:

Gay rights activists threw a major rally in DC and no body watched!

The difference between tea party rallies and gay rights rallies, aside from one being a product of Conservative leaders’ desire to artificially imitate the grassroots movements of the left and one being a product of the country’s legitimate desire for equality among its citizens? Fashion sense.

And finally, in other gays-getting-the-shaft-but-not-in-a-good-way news:

Blacks continue to be oblivious to the irony of their homophobia.

Dr. William Bynum, vice-president of Student Services, went on to say, “If these queers don’t like the way we force them to dress in a manner inconsistent with their own gender identification, then they can go back to Gay Africa.” I assume he means Australia.

Don’t Panic!

…The Real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide is Here.

Remember how awesome the Guide was in Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic? Remember wanting one? Remember thinking, If I had one of those I would essentially know everything? Remember when they said the Kindle brought the Guide to life?

Remember when they were wrong?

The WikiReader is the real Guide, bringing the entirety of Wikipedia to a hand-held device no bigger than your wallet. Only $100 down, no monthly fee, 12 months of battery at a time, and updates via the interwebs or snail mail (they send you an SD card with the updates); this is it, folks, the real deal.

The only downside: it’s ugly. I really wish they’d jammed the tech into an iPod body or something. Hell, even the Freerunner is better looking (Openmoko, creators of the WikiReader, contracts with that device).

I Go A Walking…

…With some zombies…

It's close to miiiiiidnight, and something evil's lurking in the dark.

Wanna take a walk? I do. In fact, I want to take a walk so bad I could die. And that’s ok, because even once I’m dead I can still take part in the Boston Zombie Walk 2009, on October 17, 2009 at 3pm.

The undead will be taking their marks at Copley Plaza (Boylston and Dartmouth) around 3pm and will walk until their rotting corpses can carry them no more. Or until the CD of Thriller looped over and over melts.

See you there!

On Being Nobel

Many others have already weighed in on Barack Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize early this morning, so I’ll only be making a short statement (since I know you all are wondering what I think about it).

Does he deserve it? No. Why? Two reasons.

Reason One: Norman Borlaug
This man has saved more lives than any other single individual in history, through his application of science to agriculture deployed in nations across the planet. ‘Nuff said.

Reason Two: 1948
In 1948 Mahatma Ghandi was nominated for the fifth time, having gone 0 for 4 in his previous nominations, but died before the winner was announced. Since the Nobel isn’t awarded posthumously, Ghandi was slighted for the final time. But, rather than giving the award to someone who was less deserving, to someone who may have been the best candidate of that year but would not have been, in the grand scheme of things, Nobel Peace Prize material, the committee did the best thing it could have done and awarded the prize to nobody. They issued a statement, saying, “…[T]here was no suitable living candidate,” and it was true.

So, does Obama deserve this award? No; he is not of the caliber of Norman Borlaug–yes, the bar should be set that high–and even if Obama was the most qualified nominee this year, the committee should have acknowledged that that was not enough, and withheld the award.

From The Office Of Things I Need Badly.

…The Mini Couper…get it?

DO WANT DO WANT DO WANT!

Some have blanched at the look, but I think it’s wonderful. They took a tiny, efficient, and fun-as-hell car and made it tinier, more efficient, and more fun-as-hell. Improvements all around, I’d say. Now all they have to do is put it into production.

More Headlines!

…All the news that’s fit to blog.

From across the pond,

Americans are leaving London in light of higher taxes.

Scientists predict a similar exodus of American Werewolves in London, citing a waning food source.

In homeless criminal news,

A man huffing aerosol fumes bursts into flames after being Tasered.

Police are excited about this new feature, and will be offering an empty spray-paint can exchange this weekend.

And finally, in the “I think I’ll pass” category,

Scientists have designed a filtration system that allows you to drink your used shower water.

This was considered slightly less disturbing than drinking your own toilet water and drinking your own nuclear power plant waste water. Slightly.

Ripped From Today’s Headlines!

…Where they should probably be put right back.

I’m taking a page from my friend Andrew and giving you today’s headlines, complete with snark!
First up,

Colorado Springs police want to sell confiscated guns to drum up extra cash.

You get a discount if it was your gun first!

Next,

Stimulus funds are set to go to sex research projects.

I’m not surprised; this isn’t the first time our government or its members have paid for sex.

From across the pond,

Organizations in the UK are cutting out “racist” phrases such as “black mark” and “black sheep”.

Sadly, this means no more Black and Tans to pass the time if a blackout interrupts reruns of Blackadder in Blackburn, Lancashire.

And finally, a little closer to home,

Senator Kennedy uses the “But I’m dying!” card to push a repeal of succession law he supported in 2004.

I’d say we should run him out of town, but I’m worried he might try to drive and end up killing a former secretary.

That’s all folks!