The Gospel Of Puf

09:40 pm

Shiiiiiiit.

The car broke.

It had been making a noise at the left front wheel while running that went crnk crnk crnk crnk crnk crnk crnk, with said crnks rhythmically correlated to the speed.
Then it stopped making that noise.
Then that wheel started going cwap cwap cwap whenever I made long right turns- turns that mean the weight of the car leans towards the left side.

Then I parked it and went in to teach.

Then I came out and in the parking lot it went cwap cwap cwap groooooooan wump RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Decibels to make a low-class person proud of their stereo system.

I looked underneath it. See this?

See the bit called "lower control arm"? It was resting directly on the lower wheel rim, 'bout three or four inches low. It was resting on it, suspended solely by the wheel rim and the tire pressure. So the RRRRR sound is the sound of the wheel rim grinding against my suspension, pressed upon by the pressure of at least the front left quadrant of my car.

When I started it and tried to go it went RRRRRRR rundgrundgrundgrundgrundgrund. So I parked.

I sighed. I don't have money to repair the car's suspension. I'm working a volunteer job. I did not plan for this.

I went inside. I don't have a telephone because mine was lost soon after coming to Austin, so I had to use the school's phone to call triple-A. The woman who answered was very colorful. She spoke in a tired prozac monotone and said phrases like, "let's try it, life is a journey."
"the computer, as computers do, is giving us more information than we need."
And was generally strange. But she sent the truck there. She told me that the truck would not go to pick up Kellie.

Kellie was waiting for me at her school, which is some distance from my school, and her phone is in our old area code. We share a car, because my car died long ago and I spent $1500 and it still doesn't work. The school's phone wouldn't call her. It wouldn't call outside the Austin area code.
I asked the janitor if she would let me in the main office, as it was well after hours. She told me to use the phone I had access to. I explained that it wouldn't call outside the Austin area code. I showed her. She let me in the office, and I tried the office phone. The office phone wouldn't call outside the Austin area code.
The phone book also did not have the listing of the garage I wanted to take the car to. I'm fortunate that earlier today- this very morning- we'd had to take the car to fix a flat tire, and found a good mechanic. Otherwise I'd have had no idea to whom in the city I could turn. The triple-A man would have said, "where are you towing it to?" and I would have said, "I don't know."
I tried making a collect call and it said "this user cannot accept collect calls."

I tried the office phone that said "authorized users only," and it said "you must have an authorization code to make this call." I looked around the desk and tried the numbers that looked like codes, but none of them worked.

And I was waiting for the tow truck to get there, but Kellie was waiting for me to pick her up and would have no idea why I was over an hour late. Nobody was left at the school who knew me. There were several kids still left, being watched by an older couple. I didn't want to beg for a phone, but I didn't see any other way. I went across the room to the older man and said, "Excuse me sir, but could I borrow your cellular phone?" From the first words of the conversation, his (I assume) wife, an ugly, sour hispanic woman with a frizzy red perm and expansive dress, was looking the other direction- away from me- and shaking her head emphatically. Not the head-shake of resignation or disapproval, but rather, telling her husband "tell this guy to go away." He spoke mostly Spanish, and suggested as did the Janitor that I use the other phone. I explained that it was a long-distance call, and her number was for a different area code. I offered to pay. The woman shook her head more, he looked at her uncertainly.
He gave me his phone, and nodded. I

I hate that woman. Right now it's a simmering, low-key sort of hate. Right now all of my emotions are that way, because I'm so tired, so worn out. But what a wicked way to be, what a pinched and tiny little disposition, to by default... to have your default answer be "no".
The opposite of my own grandmother. My own grandmother who taught me how to be.
That woman accomplished nothing but to make him feel uncertain, and to make me feel... degraded. For begging. It could have been straightforward, hell, I had the money to make it a transaction. She made it shameful. I hope that one day her selfishness humiliates her. I don't hope for her to suffer, but for her to be laid low and to grow from it.
How can people be so old, and yet so... small?
It would be satisfying to see her punched in the face. Just to... just to try and fuck it up. For no reason other than an innate ornery selfishness. Fuck you, old woman. You humiliated me. Why?
But I have no fire in my anger. I'm all burned out right now.

The man let me use his phone, maybe in rebellion, maybe in solidarity, maybe out of the goodness of his heart. Maybe all three. I made the call, showed him the number, left Kellie a message, thanked him and gave it back. I'm grateful to that man.
The whole exchange took maybe sixty seconds.

I waited outside, and sighed. Time passed quickly, and a man drove up with a truck. I told him that we needed to pick her up. He was uncertain, even though the triple-A plan covers me for one hundred free towing miles. But he didn't have to go the three miles out of his way. I told him I could pay him extra, and his eyes lit up. "You'll make it worth my while?"
"Yeah," I said resignedly. "Twenty bucks cover it?"
"That'll do."
I got in. He had a song playing on the radio with a man saying "I want to lick you baby, I want to lick you right."

I picked up Kellie. She was really strong about it. She didn't have a negative word. I said, "This sucks, doesn't it?"
She said, "We'll get through it."
She's right, you know.

The tow driver was complaining about driving around. We got to the garage, and knocked, and walked around the shop looking for a drop box for the keys. We came up with an idea to make some extra money- we've got all this tutoring and teaching experience, and we haven't done that gig since leaving Beaumont. Time to try and start that up again.

We came around, and the owner answered the door. He was in late doing finances, he invited us in and bought us each a soda from the machine. He said he'd take care of us. I told him our story, and that we didn't have much money, but I'd be happy to work it off, or do an installment program. It grinds at me to kneel like that, but it was what I had to do.
Really grinds at me.
He said no, politely. Said they work through creditors and would give us a good fair estimate and help us find something. He said, "But we work through it, we persevere!"
He was a republican, you could tell, but he was a cool guy to us. We left the key with him.
I paid the driver his $20 and we left.

The driver complained when he drove us home. Turned out he had been off-shift fifteen minutes before he arrived to pick me up, but the other driver wanted to go to his daughter's birthday party, so the driver took the call for him. He'd been working an hour and a half after he was supposed to go home, when he dropped us off. He'd taken the call because where he picked me up- on the other side of town from where he was dropping me off- was close to his mother's house, where he wanted to go.
So he was a good guy, too. Sort of.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't have this much money, and we need the car to get to work.
I'm going to... I want to make up fliers and put them around, advertising tutoring for biology, chemistry, mathematics. I want to call up the high schools in the area, particularly the private schools, and tell the principals to send struggling students to me. I will charge $25/hour, maybe less if I need to stay competitive- there are more intellectuals, and thus more tutors, in Austin than in Beaumont.
But I'm tired right now. I don't have the energy to do that. I don't want to depend on people. But I'm getting a ride to work tomorrow.

I need to find a way to make money.

It's just been a really trying day. Just so damn tired right now.

Current Mood: tired

07:33 pm - End of the line.

Woo, y'all. Lookin at the news.google.com, it's lookin an awful lot like the end times.


Pope Says World's Financial System 'Built On Sand'
And I'm inclined to agree with him. Watching all these pundits and the hearings on Fuld going on right now, I'm struck, again, that there is no damn reason I should listen to Financial Industry Experts about anything. Seriously there are these people saying "god you all just listen to an economist already," but the most intuitive and obvious thing said so far in all of this was said by the old-ass pope, when he stood up and said, if you'll permit a paraphrase, "Global finance is bullshit."

US Stocks Decline, Dow Falls Below 10,000
It's down 568 with no slowing in sight, so far today. This shit is voodoo, y'all. The people who congratulate themselves so much on having it all figured out are just fooling themselves, the finance markets are so big and complex and with so many factors that what you're looking at is not a rational and predictable machine, it's a force of nature. And sometimes you get hurricanes.

Quarter of World's Wild Animal Species at Risk of Extinction
And while we're worrying about all this, the Holocene Extinction Event keeps flying forward. And the elephants are dying, and the rhinos are dying, and the megatheriums and mammoths and glyptodons all died out ten thousand years ago anyway so why are we acting like this is new?

The only time I ever saw somebody bring this up, on a stage, with a mic, in a forum to be listened to, was two years ago when Eric Pianka gave his "Book of Life" speech and Forrest Mims wrote up a libel saying he (and the rest of us in the Texas Academy of Sciences) all want to kill everyone on earth. It's like as soon as somebody says, "Hey maybe we should look honestly at the way we're burning through this planet, killing everything, forgetting what we've killed, never looking back, and try to consciously control ourselves, whatcha say guys?" somebody else has to say "YOU HERETIC BURN!".
I know why. It's because the thought that we're destroying the planet, the thought that we in our short tenure on this planet, represent a hellified extinction event paralleled only five times in the last HALF BILLION YEARS, that is to say in the entire history of life (look it up), is a hell of a thought. And a person's sense of value and self-worth really takes a nose-dive if that person stops seeing themselves as a beautiful and complex creature and starts seeing themselves as an ecological plague vector.
And I know why people want to be creationists, and why people want to believe in an impending Rapture. Because it's so big and scary at this point that it's easier to stick your head in the sand and say "this is the way it's always been," and it's easier to stick your head in the sand and say, "this is all in God's Plan, and neither we nor anyone else will ever have to live with the consequences," and it's easier to stick your head in the sand than to look at it and look at the other six billion people on the planet and start trying to figure out a way to get them to stop it.

It's not a fun thing to think about. I'd rather read about King Arthur too, no doubt.

But the world is empty now, even compared to how it was a thousand years ago, and it's more empty every day.

And the other day, reading about the financial crisis, I happened across this article written by this economist, and he was saying that the housing bubble was the fault of urban planning, and wrote that, "It's meant to control urban sprawl, which isn't a real problem."
And I thought, isn't a real problem to whom?
It isn't a real problem to him, because he sees lots of land to be gobbled up and no reason not to, because it's terribly efficient, from an economist's perspective, to do so. Because an economist's perspective, it seems, doesn't last 65 million years. And an economist's perspective doesn't put a price on living in a world with diverse and beautiful fauna.
We're a unique kinda creature, because what we do is expand our biome. Everywhere humans go, stops being Desert, or Forest, or Tundra, or Plain, and becomes Town. And as such those wise few species with the luck to have adapted to the Town biome- rats, cockroaches, dogs, cats, pigeons, lice, and all sorts of diseases- expand, and kick out anything that goes ahead of them.
And so we have more rats and cockroaches and pigeons than ever before, but we're starting to run low on elephants.

And people are unhappy about that, but nobody's willing to just stop expanding. Just stop growing. We keep expanding and expanding and growing and growing, and Wall Street panics if your company doesn't show growth for a year, and the government panics if your GDP isn't growing, and everyone calls it a Fertility Crisis if your population stops growing. But dammit, guys, those are good things. We need all these things to stop growing, in a manner that's controlled and intentional, because if we don't, we will keep expanding and rutting and breeding and we'll end up in a world entirely populated by high-rises, power plants, smog, cockroaches, and pigeons.
And that world will suck.
It's inevitable. Either we stop growing or we don't. If we don't we'll rape the whole planet and then we'll stop- with nothing left to burn- and there'll be no recovering.

People always flip out if you talk about this, call it classist or communist or whatever their bugaboo is, but nobody wants to admit that it basically comes down to that- we can stop growing, or we can keep growing until we collapse.
I don't know about you but I'd much rather live in a world with regulated fecundity, than in a world with NO FUCKING FOOD.

I don't see why this isn't obvious to everyone.

There are limits. We can't just keep expanding. Hell, if you look at us as having a certain rate of expansion per certain amount of time, whatever that rate is, we'll end up, after sufficient iterations, exceeding the room on the planet. And hell if we keep expanding into space we'll end up, after sufficient iterations, having an expansion rate greater than light speed, and the crash occurs then.

Sustainability. Constant growth is not a viable long-term option, and as long as it goes on we keep burning the world. We have to stop growing, as a species.
We have to limit the expansion if we want to preserve a world where we can think and observe and have leisure and write and make art, because if we fuck it all up we'll end up scratching to survive. Give that a couple million years of selection pressure, and you won't have big-brained poets and philosophers, you'll have post-human apes.

We need to set limits. We need to stop expanding.

10:09 pm - Wot district

Hey guys can anyone point me to a map that shows which parts of Austin fall in which US Congressional Districts?
I think that, being south of the river and east of I-35, that puts me in District 10, which puts me in Mike McCaul's district. This is disappointing as apparently his constituency includes the farms 'twixt here and Houston, and apparently he's one of the post-gerrymandering-implants put here to minimize the blue effect of Austin voters.
Or so my rookie political mind concludes. Then again that's how the other guy, Lamar Smith, looks too. Maybe I'm just biased.

Anyway I want to call/email and tell my congressperson that I damn well won't be supporting them if they vote for this new extra-crappy $810 billion bailout, but I'm unsure who my congressperson is. Lamar Smith voted for it, Mike McCaul voted against it, in case you're wondering.

So anyways the question is, which district am I? (I moved here six weeks ago, see)

11:33 pm - Good. Fuck those guys.

The stock market just crashed and I feel great.

The most hideously overpaid, evil, unsympathetic bastards in the country just got told "no"!



Let me tell you a story:

The evil President (who I will consider to be roughly synonymous with the Republican Party, thus, here I refer to the President as an institution, rather than the wetbrained goober puppet who actually holds office) spent five of his eight years in office giving exorbitant amounts of government money to contractors to do nothing in Iraq (except hang onto that money for when he's out of office and wants it back).

During that time he encouraged every financial institution in the country to de-regulate. I loan you $500,000, then write down in my books that I have $500,000 worth of assets in the debt you owe me, then you write down in your books that you have $500,000 worth of assets in the money you have, then you loan that out, and so on and so forth. Imaginary fake money.
Then the retards who own the financial markets all spend a lot of time giving out loans for tons of money to people who aren't good for it, then selling that debt to debt collectors and so on, all based on the assumption that the government (the Republicans) will bail them out if they get in trouble.
"Predatory Lending," right? Following the tale?

And now, with two months of his presidency left to go, the secretary of the treasury (appointed by the President) said "GOSH YOU GUYS THE ECONOMY'S ALL BAD WE HAVE TO GIVE THEM .7 TRILLION DOLLARS WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED OR ELSE YOU'RE ALL FUCKED"
And the President came on the TV and said, "GOSH YOU GUYS THE ECONOMY'S ALL BAD WE HAVE TO GIVE THEM .7 TRILLION DOLLARS WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED OR ELSE YOU'RE ALL FUCKED"
And then Fox News, who supported him every day of his presidency, had a lot of pundits say YEP YOU'RE ALL FUCKED IF YOU DON'T GIVE THEM .7 TRILLION DOLLARS WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED.

It sounded a whole lot like when, five years ago, the President had come on and told everybody that it was SUPER HUGE CRISIS TIME and EVERYBODY PANIC WE GOTTA GO TO WAR WITH IRAQ.
Why Iraq?
BECAUSE OMG DISASTER CRISIS EVERYBODY PANIC.
Nobody can really pin down the reasons, but the President's saying it, and the guys on the news are saying it, so there must be some reason why we should go to war with Iraq, right?
There must be some reason why we should give up .7 trillion dollars to the most evil fucks in the country, no strings attached, right?

Bizarrely, half the country seemed ready to fall for it again. But then a bunch of heroic congressmen and -women, listening to the people around the country saying OMG ARE YOU SERIOUS, voted against giving .7 trillion dollars to the most evil fucks in the country.

And then the Dow, (which is owned by the same guy who owns Fox News btw), dropped a bunch and lots of rich people lost lots of money, and kept insisting, YOU GUYS YOU'RE ALL FUCKED.

And somehow, somehow, I ain't too worried.

Listen, President Bush running his mouth about a big impending vague crisis, accompanied by a media blitz and a big huge amount of money to be given away? Why is that not setting off huge red flags for everybody? Why is everybody acting like they haven't seen this show before? Why is everybody suddenly trusting this evil little turd of a president?

I don't have a 401k, I don't own a home, I don't have a mortgage, I'm not in trouble. You say "The Economy"- whatever the fuck that means- is going to go bad?
First, I say, "how?"
Second, I say, "Why should I care?"
I know how to do an honest day's work, and I know how to budget in a crisis, and I have a wide set of skills and am adaptable to change. I'm gonna be just fine, and if you know how to do an honest day's work, so are you. There will always be a job open for someone who can work.

But the more the stock market crashes, the less money there is to go around, the less fat there is for the fat cats to hog. Imagine, if you will, a scenario- suddenly, CEOs around the country have to stop making ten million dollar salaries,, because they have to pay that money to keep their companies running.
Wild idea, I know. Mind-blowing, I know. But just think about it.

You say there'll be less money for government programs, I say there'll be more once President Obama raises taxes on the rich.
You say there'll be economic problems when the troops come back, I say we can afford to pay everyone in the country a full-time salary to sit on their ass for the price we pay to keep Iraq running a month.
You say credit and lending will be restricted, I say, good, maybe people will start repairing things and we can make a step towards solving this "throw-away lifestyle" of waste everyone decries but never stops.
You say we're about to be broke, I say we're about to lose all the pretend-money that the rich people have been throwing around, and be no more broke than we were last year, except that now we'll have a realistic appraisal of it.

I'm going to be fine, with this "crisis," and so are you. The problems will be had by those sorts that Ayn Rand called "parasites," the guys who provide nothing but preying on honest working people. They'll try to pass on those problems. They tried to pass them on today.

But the congress said "no".

'Bout goddamn time.

Current Mood: schadenfreude

06:25 pm - more adventures in electricity

It was one of those ideas where if it fails, I'm a doofus, but if it works, I'm a genius.

My laptop wasn't working :(
Because my power cord wasn't powering it anymore. For days I'd been having to push it into the socket at funny angles and strange pressures to keep it in contact, and finally it'd given up altogether and I'd been computerless for a few days.
So I took laptop and computer to Best Buy and said "tell me what is wrong," they told me the cord was broke, not the laptop. Good news, right?
"What's a new cord cost?"
"About a hundred dollars."

This is ridiculous, offensive, bananas. I say so, verbatim. They say that I might be able to get one for $65. I make it clear that the price I consider acceptable for a freaking power cord is more like $10. They tell me I'll need to look elsewhere, but one recommends the Goodwill Computer Store (for y'all non-Americans, Goodwill is a shop that people give things to to be sold cheap to poor people, so their overhead is just rent, electricity, and minimum wage). I go there.
I dig through their laptop power supplies, and while there are some with the right volts and amps (Dear Diary: today I learned to look for volts and amps ratings on the backs of power supplies), none had the right head.

I sigh.

I am struck with an idea: I know that my power cord has been able to work just fine for a long time, as long as I push it in at funny angles. That tells me that it's delivering power through the converter, just not through the head/contact thingie. So I figure, I'll just take the power supply for some totally other device, clip off the head and use it to replace the head of my existing power cord, right?

Does that sound potentially suicidal? Damaging to my computer?
Or does that sound like thinking outside the box?

I find a power supply for some little unknown widget, with a perfectly matching head, but with wayyyy too low volts and ampage (needs 18.5V and 3.5A, has 15V and 1A). I can plug it into my computer and my computer will work, but at 0% power and in general the computer is confused about whether anything is plugged into it, right? Not enough amps to charge the thing up, not enough current.

I buy it ($5). I take it home. I take a deep breath, and clip the heads off both. I deal with some difficulty (the laptop power cord is what I understand is called a "coaxial cable, so it's got one wire wrapped around another wire- I have to unwrap the outside wire and roll it up into a prong for me to attach to), I strip the wires, I separate them, I connect head to cord, do some creative work with electrical tape, and then...

I have a perfectly functional laptop cord. My computer works again. I am a genius.

Today, I learned that the value of ingenuity, skill, and the balls to do things that technicians cringe at, is $95.

09:24 pm - Debate

They're just defending themselves from one another, trying to hold back, be conservative.
Neither of them is really leading or being proactive, they're just solidly reactive.

10:14 pm - Fuck those motherfuckers.

A Sense Of Resentment Among The For Sale Signs

He recounts a conversation with a new neighbor who moved into a deluxe home:

"How did you afford that house?" Bejtlich asked.

"I don't know. I just signed," the neighbor said.

Paulsen and congressional Republicans, or the few that will actually vote for this (most will be unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of their policies), have said that there can't be any "add ons," or addition provisions. Fuck that. I don't really want to trigger a world wide depression (that's not hyperbole, that's a distinct possibility), but I'm not voting for a blank check for $700 billion for those mother fuckers.

Current Mood: angry

11:31 am - Paper, concreteness, bureacracy.

Susan Schaller has spent twenty years traveling and researching language-less people completely on her own. The experts she tried to get help from when she first started out were dismissive, uncooperative or hostile. She even got yelled at by one researcher who shouted, "Who are you?" A graduate student told her,"Nobody's interested in that subject anymore- that was popular last century."

Susan became interested in language-less people when she volunteered to teach Ildefonso, a deaf mute Mexican immigrant who was raised in a town that had no education for deaf children. A Man Without Words is the story of her work with him. Susan discovered that Ildefonso had no concept of language at all. Later she learned he had a deaf brother, and that the two of them had figured out some simple ways to communicate as children. But he had absolutely no idea that spoken or written language existed. He understood that the other children did something important with their schoolbooks, but he did not know what that was.

It took Ildefonso ony six days with Susan to grasp the idea of language. In the book, he has a revelation that's a lot like the water pump scene in The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller suddenly understands what language is.

Although he got the i>idea</i> of language quickly, it took much longer for him to be able to learn and use the language Susan was trying tot each him. One of the most powerful parts of the book, for me, is the day when Susan tries to teach him the words for color. Susan is teaching him the names for colors, like red, yellow, and green, but when they get to "green" suddenly he becomes highly agigtated and mimes running and hiding while signing, "Green! Green!!"

Susan couldn't understand why he was so frantic, until she learned that green was the most important concept in Ildefonso's life. Ildefonso was an illegal immigrant who supported himself working harvesting crops and picking apples. All the good things in life and all the bad things in life were green. Green money and picing green crops let him feed his family in Mexico. Border Patrol agents wearing green uniforms and driving green trucs were the bad people who would grab him and take him back to Mexico, to the place where there was less work and food was scarce.

The most important thing in life was the Green Card that magically repelled the bad green men.

Susan writes that it was impossible for her to imagine Ildefonso's world. I expect she knows a ot more about the world of language-less people now that she's spent to decades searching them out, and I'm looking forward to her next book. She did perceive differences in Ildefonso that I think directly aply to animals, as well as to people with autism.

The main difference between Ildefonso and people who have language is that he was missing a layer of abstract thinking. For instance, he didn't have the categories of real and fake. He just new that some Green Cards worked to keep the green men from taking you back to Mexico, and some Green Cards didn't. He didn't know why.

He also didn't have just and unjust as abstract categories. It's not that he didn't have mroals or a conscience. Susand oesn't say a lot about this, but she writes that Ildefonso became upset one day when she kept insisting on paying for his lunch after he had signed that he wanted to pay. Ildefonso got more and more angry until finally he signed, "God. Friend. Burrito buy I."

"He connected God andfriend and placed them above burrito buying," Susan writes. "His anger was that of a religious instructor. I was properly rebuked for my concern for the material world. Who had more money was trivial." Later on he asked her what "God" meant, but he had already figured it out on his own. Susan writes that he had guessed that the word "God" stood for "unseen greatness, apart form and more important than the tangible stuff in front of us."

"For my animal welfare audit, I came up with five key measurements inspectors need to take to ensure animals receive humane treatment at a meatpacking plant:

*Percentage of animals stunned, or killed, correctly on the first attempt (this has to be at least 95 percent of the animals).
*Percentage of animals who remain unconscious after stunning (This must be 100 percent).
*Percentage of animals who vocalize (squal, bellow, or moo, meaning "ouch!" or "you're scaring me!") during handling and stunning. Handling includes walking through the alleys and being held in the restraining device for stunning (no more than 3 cattle out of 100).
*Percentage of animals who fall down (animals are terrified of falling down, and this should be no more than 1 out of 100, which is still more than would fall down under good ocnditions, since animals never fall down if the floor is sound and dry).
*Electric prod usage (no more than 25 percent of the animals).

I also have a list of five acts of abuse that are an automatic failure:

*Dragging a live animal with a chain.
*Running cattle on top of each other on purpose.
*Sticking prods and other objects into sensitive parts of animals.
*Slamming gates on animals on purpose.
*Losing control and beating an animal.

This is al you need to know to rate animal welfare at a meatpacking plant. Just these ten details. You don't need to know if the floor is slippery, something regulators always want to measure. For some reason whenever you start talking about auditing the plants everybody turns into an expert on flooring. I don't need to know anything about the flooring. I just need to know if any of the cattle fell down. If cattle are falling down, there's a problem with the floor, and the plant fails the audit. It's that simple.

The plants lvoe it, because they can do it. The audit is totally based on things an auditor can directly observe that have objective outcomes. A steer either moos during handling or he does not.

Another important feature of my audit: people can remember two sets of five items. That level of detail is what normal working memory is built to hold on to.

But I find that people in academia and often in government just don't get it. Most language-based thnkers find it difficult to believe that such a simple audit really works. They're like the people in the lever-pressing experiments; they think simple means wrong. They don't see that each one of the five critical control points measures anywhere from three to ten others that all result in the same bad outcome for the animals.

When highly verbal people get control of the audit process, they tend to make five critical mistakes:

*They write verbal auditing standards that are too subjective and vague, with requirements like "minimal use of electric prod" and "non-slip flooring." Individual inspectors have to figure out for themselves what "minimal use" means. A good audit checklist has objective standards that anyone can see have or have not been met.
*For some reason, highly verbal people have a tendency to measure inputs, such as maintenance schedules, employee training records, and equipment design problems, instead of outputs, which is how the animals are actually doing. A good animal welfare audit has to measure the animals, not the plant.
*Highly verbal people almost always want to make the audit way too complicated. A 100-item chekclist doesn't work nearly as well as a 10-item chekcclist, and I can prove it.
*Verbal people drift into paper audits, in which they audit a plant's records instead of its animals. A good animal welfare audit has to audit the animals, not the paper and not the plant.
*Verbal people tend to lose sight of what's important and end up treating small problems the way they treat big problems.

05:03 pm - LEVEL UP

Who is the cleverest little monkey?
I am the cleverest little monkey!

The horn on the car was broken, it would just stay beeping, just perpetually, until it blew the Horn fuse and then would not honk, right?
So Kellie looked it up and that means the Clock Spring is broken. The Clock Spring is in the steering column and apparently it's supposed to let the steering wheel rotate while keeping electrical contact. Right? Claro? Because you can't otherwise rotate while keeping a circuit intact, this is why there are no wheels in biological organisms, you'd have the blood flow all getting cut off all the time.

So anyway apparently the clock spring done got sprung and is keeping itself in contact all the time. I infer that it's just an ordinary ol' clock spring, and of course to be springy it can't be insulated, and of course that means if it's gotten a kink in it that it's short circuiting and bypassing the horn button in the steering wheel, right? So what can we do?
There's this thing where you install a Horn Button, and it's basically just a button with wires, so it basically just lets you close a circuit, right? And everyone says "Run the wire from the battery to the button and then from the other post of the button to the horn (to the actual electric device, the horn, not the button)," thus bypassing the usual horn button, the one in the steering wheel. Right?

But we can't find the horn! It's somewhere up under the manifold and behind the heads, in the engine compartment, and it's basically totally impossible to get to and don't even talk to me about trying to run some POS ad-hoc wire, attached to safe sites and not getting cut apart, all through the moving parts of the engine, I mean come on that's bananas just in concept, not to mention in execution, all having to get the damn car lifted up in the air so I can root around underneath it and get it dropped on me because all I'm using is cinder blocks, right?

Anyway so that's out, and Kellie says, jokingly, "Well I can leave the fuse in the socket and just tap it and that's kind of like having a horn, right?"
And then this is where I'm the cleverest, because I said "aha!":
I'm thinking, that fuse box with the busted fuse is right here next to the steering wheel. Why don't I just hook the wires of the horn button to that?
And I do!
I measure, cut and strip, tape and screw, tape the button to the dash (I wanted to bolt it in place but I don't have a drill handy and Kellie doesn't particularly want me drilling in there anyway), and in what I assume to be complete and hideous violation of good electrician practice, I just shove the naked wire ends into the sockets of the fuse.
Oh my god so dangerous, so bad. I thought, "Surely this is the sort of thing that every good electrician everywhere would throw rocks at me for." Then I thought "Surely this is the sort of thing that you haven't really become an electrician until you've confidently done something that's superficially dangerous and stupid yet in effect bypasses a horrible problem and saves a bunch of work."

And it works perfectly. Tap the little button, and that perpetually-closed circuit closes across the button and it beeps just like it was meant to. Bypassing the steering wheel's horn button and taking advantage of that existing short-circuit across the clock spring!
Finding the solution in the very nature of the problem! Brilliant! Aikido!

I'm so excited because I've never done any electrical work at all before, and I just looked at this, bought a wire stripper (knew what it was because I saw it sitting in dad's workshop once, as a kid, and brought it to him mistakenly thinking it was pliers), some spade contacts, wire, and electrical tape, and just said, "I will figure this thing out."

It's like when I hand-made my big huge bookshelf- I knew I had it in me to figure out how to do carpentry, but had never had any opportunity to do so. So I say, "I will take some lumber, some measuring tape, some power tools, and I will figure this thing out."
And now even with no real experience, I think of myself as being a competent carpenter. And now even with no real experience, I think of myself as a competent electrician. Testing circuits? Wiring up a house? These things would be huge challenges, but they're no longer in the vast field of Magical Things That Only Other People Can Do. They're within my potential purview, I just have to sit down with the tools and figure it out.

So exciting! So rewarding! And the horn beeps now when you tap the button, so neat!

I did that. I didn't pay someone to do it, I did that. I just figured that out all by myself. I am so dang proud.

This post probably doesn't make any sense but don't worry about it the punchline is I did electrical work myself with no instructions, planned and executed, and I've never done anything like that before and now my horizons are widened.

02:25 am

http://view.break.com/487616 - Watch more free videos

04:36 pm - I Am Rolling My Eyes At Hurricane Ike.

Man don't fall for the whole OMG A HURRICANE IT'S CATEGORY 1 IT'S THE END TIMES spiel.
Hurricanes are the media's new celebrity disaster bugaboo. We went my whole life without hearing about any of the multifarious hurricanes that hit every year, and now after Katrina and the administrative clusterfuck that represented, it's all EVERY HURRICANE IS A DISASTER. Katrina was bad because New Orleans got rid of their wetlands and because every politician was looking out for his/her self rather than getting their jobs done.

They let us out of work three hours early today, for Hurricane Prep I have been hearing people fuss and moan about it, "oh no is it gonna hit us?". Austin is 160 miles/260 kilometers inland.
Austin is 160 miles inland. I grew up in Lumberton, which is 40 miles inland, and spent last year in Nederland, which is like 17 miles inland. We only ever had to evac twice. Hurricanes every year, rain, storms, power outage, school closed. We call it "Hurricane Season" around here. And now suddenly after decades of living here, all the people who sit around watching Fox News all day have gotten it in their heads that we need to evacuate. They have called a mandatory evacuation, and I am proud to say that my family, back home in Lumberton, has elected to disregard it.

I ain't worried, neither are my folks- they've moved the perishables to the mini-fridge in the shed, hooked up the generator, and got out the can opener, and they're sticking around. We've been living with this all our lives, and this hurricane ain't shit- it's just a little bit stouter than the one I slept through a few months ago.
Expect mild flooding and wind damage, just like every time. Boggy Creek's going to overflow, cutting my folks off from the city, for a day or seven. It was twenty-three years before I met a hurricane worth worrying about, and that wasn't Katrina, it was Rita (the one a month later that nobody heard about because they were so engaged by NOLA's pathos). I recall fondly the days of my youth spent playing in the cold floodwaters, watching the landscape transformed.

This happens every year, multiple times. The media's just crossing their fingers that there's a nice juicy disaster, but I'm not worried. I have had to calm down friends up here who have family in places like Houston, (50 miles inland), who were wailing and squalling about how everything's going to end.

People.

This is the way things are in Texas. We know this. What are we freaking out about? Why is it newsworthy for somebody to stand around and get rained on?

P.S.- on the other hand, Galveston is probably pretty fucked, I ain't gonna lie about that one. But hey, that's the inevitable result of building your city on a barrier island: details here.

09:15 pm - Raisin Goats

Well, come Saturday I'll have been in Austin, Texas, live music capital of the world, for a whole month.
Nice.

I
am
.
.
.
tired.

I just thought I'd check in, oh LJ. I still read it, I just don't write so much.

The status of things: I'm paying $420/month for an apartment in a great big Student Housing complex (off of east Riverside on the south side). This place is awesome. It's on the third floor, which means we have a big vaulted roof that's like 14 foot high, and nobody making noise on our ceiling. It has a single big huge room, with a kitchen (that came fully furnished with stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors and new cabinets). The room is maybe 15 foot wide, 30 foot long, big open space with our TV/couch zone at the other end. The TV/couch zone is right next to the big huge natural-lighting window, which opens onto our spacious third-story patio. The patio, regrettably, opens over what is basically a parking lot, but it provides a good view of our rambunctious college-kid neighbors acting foolish.
We have the big room minimally furnished, so that there's tons of living and walking-around space. Very feng-shui.
My room is furnished with My Stuff. My big giant bookshelf (the one that was too tall to fit in any normal house, when I made it, so I sliced off the top shelf and turned it into a perfect coffee table, three-foot-by-one-foot-by-one-foot, sturdy, utilitarian, efficiently built) that I made (my carpentry pride-and-joy) holds every book I deemed necessary-to-bring in like its bottom four shelves, so I've got all this extra storage. Plus I stole one of the furnished bed frames and put it under my mattresses, so that leaves a huge storage area there, and I have my own bathroom, and guys basically what I'm getting at is
$420
ALL BILLS PAID
including a swimming pool not fifty feet from my door
including cable with HBO and internet
including a gym, basketball courts
in Austin, Texas.

Everybody was all OMG AUSTIN'S SO ESPENSIVE YALL ARE GONNA GET ATE ALIVE AND RENT A CLOSET FOR $6,000 A MONTH.
Everybody please. Have a lil faith. Things go great, they just do. I roll twenties.

10:09 am - On the practice of killing each other

So I was reading about this guy Radovan Karadzic, The Butcher of Bosnia. Who played a starring role in the Balkan Wars. I don't have much recollection of those wars, beyond having read a passing reference to them in a Bloom County strip when I was a kid. So I'm sure ms_daisy_cutter won't be offended if I steal her Radovan Karadzic's Greatest Hits rundown:

In summer and fall 1992, during his presidency of the Bosnian Serb Republic, the Bosnian Serb army and Serb paramilitary groups occupied about 70% of Bosnia and systematically drove Muslims out of towns they captured — or killed them. Their loathsome euphemism for this soon entered the English language: "ethnic cleansing."
Another aspect of "ethnic cleansing" was the rape camps instituted by Karadzic, in which tens of thousands of Bosnian women were sexually brutalized and otherwise tortured. The goal was to destroy Bosnian Muslim families by attacking their "honor," and to force Bosnian women to bear half-Serbian children (which the Serbs called "ethnic pollution"). The "silver lining," if you will, was that the world finally began to take systematic rape during war seriously as a war crime.
Karadzic was also instrumental in the three-year siege of Sarajevo, which killed upwards of 12,000 people. (Nine-minute BBC video from 1992, early on in the siege, here.)
In July 1995, his Serb forces occupied the city of Srebrenica, which the United Nations had declared a "safe haven" and which was supposed to be protected by UN "peacekeepers." The Serbs rounded up about 8,000 men and boys and slaughtered them.

03:53 pm

Guys, my specialty is not world geography. Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes I get confused about where places are, and I know that the middle east can be confusing. I can sympathize with people who make such mistakes.

But I'm not running for POTUS. And even if I was, I would not say something like this:


For reference, I have included a map of the Iraq/Pakistan border which Senator McCain mentions:

Gaffe, or implicit campaign promise? You decide. Me, I'm thinking he's taking this whole "ape the Bush legacy" thing too far.

Obama needs to put that clip, just the "The Iraq/Pakistan Border" part of it, in a campaign commercial, cut with a map of the Middle East. And then edit that in with some quote from John McCain being all "Barack Obama can't be a good military leader" or whatever. Ya know. Just let the irony sink in. Do you think America would catch the drift?
I'm not certain. But it'd at least give everybody repeated exposure to an actual map of the Middle East, and that'd be handy.

List of McCain Gaffes, just from this week. I like the "I'm gonna cut taxes and increase military spending and eliminate the deficit" one. I suppose that's the "with magic money from out of my ass" school of economics. There's a famous economist who had a book titled that, right?

'Course the real favorite of this week is when Prime Minister Maliki said "Basically we like Obama's plan" and, you know, there's no coming back from that. "No, we in Iraq think it's best that the Americans go ahead on home."
"But but but flabbergasted!"

I think McCain's probably a good and stand-up guy in person, and I know he's got this long record of breaking the Republican party lines. It's disappointing to see him sell his principles out for votes (coughflipflopcough), it's disappointing to see him flounder like a doofus in this election, but I suppose he's really just reaping the benefits of what was going to be an impending Republican disaster, anyway. And all I can say is thank goodness the other half of the country has finally, finally, eight years later, started to figure out that we should all hate Bush. I heard a conservative talk radio host this morning struggling to say something good about him, and thought, "Okay. Excellent. Eight years behind the curve but at least you're starting to see the difficulty in this proposition."


Seriously. I know people are trying to be all disaffected and disinterested and cool and above the messianic Obamahype, but come on. I'm ecstatic about Obama because he generally says honest and wise and good things. I will be happy with his presidency- not disappointed- if he just honestly tries to do good. He does not have to wave his hands and raise Lazarus from the dead.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In other news, I saw Aliens last night, finally. Why is it that nobody wore face masks? When they knew there were face-hugger aliens there, why did they not pass out face-masks to every marine?
Also fuck that "give up all your bullets" noise. And if I'm ever leading a squad of space marines into a techno-organic alien lair, I'm definitely not gonna have us all bunch up in the middle of a big room with no plan for a retreat.

Shee-it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, have you seen Batman: The Dark Knight? Oh I did. It was excellent.
Now I find myself wondering how and if they can fit the Harley Quinne character into that Joker. And who they're gonna have play that Joker next.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I suppose the biggest news is that, come August 18th, I will be moving to Austin. No more Southeast Texas, no more carcinogens in the air. No more buddies, no more trips on the bayou with my dad. No more being surrounded by rednecks. No more roads that I know by heart.

I'm homesick already. But I'm looking forward to a change.
I'll be working for Americorps, teaching 4H in at-risk middle schools, teaching biology. Being poor, poor, poor as heck, making roughly half what I'm making even on a public schoolteacher's meager salary. But it looks great on your CV, right? And it's a good thing to do. And it's a ready made role to act as a bridge to get out. This town has the people I love in it, but I know it has a way of sucking people back in. And I'd like to see the world outside.

02:46 am - completely pointless post

The cat has curled up on my lap and fallen asleep. I don't wanna be mean and disturb it, so I can't shift position, so I can't go to bed.

sigh.

In other news, I am such a wimp about needles that I just saw a picture, black-and-white cartoon, of the chamber of the syringe receiving blood from a vein, and started hyperventilating. It's giving me the shivers just to write that.
I wish I knew how to get over that. I have an easy time keeping a cool head about basically everything else.

01:44 pm - Not doing a thing, Wagons West come autumn.

Woo, haven't been posting much. I've been in a sort of hibernation, basically all summer. Bills go a little late- not because of a lack of money or anything, but because my motivation is set on Extra-Low. I've got the free paychecks coming in from the school district over the course of summer vacation, and... well basically I'm living not unlike an aristocrat. I literally have no responsibilities.

Except, of course, for paying those bills. And I think, "Man, I need to get on the phone and pay that bill via phone, which takes two minutes of work... but I'll do that in a couple hours. Right now I'm lookin at the ceiling." And then I go awhile without paying.

It really is something like hibernation, though not exactly. I recall reading about the little ice age in France, between 1560 and 1850, and when winter came basically the whole family would bundle up in the kitchen, with the cows and the dogs and the chickens and presumably the lice, and just drop their metabolisms through the floor. Somebody gets up for a couple minutes a day to get some water, maybe pee. Other than that it's just shutting down. I'd never realized humans could hibernate, but I suppose it's just that. And I suppose it makes sense, particularly since it's not that full on, deep, reptilian hibernation that the frogs do, that lets them freeze and then thaw and then hop around. It's that mammalian style that requires you keep the metabolic furnace burning, wherein some of the arctic burrowing types can go all winter, but most of us aren't adapted to it. Just a general slow-down of the metabolism, with a concomitant dialing down of... whatever bits of the brain motivate one to go do things.
I suppose it's some neurotransmitter that acts to generally increase arousal- norepinephrine- that's getting produced less. I suppose that with all the primary motivators fulfilled, food and shelter, and all those secondary motivators- MONEY- taken care of, and with no responsibilities, there's no big drives on which any of my little drives might piggyback. And so the days are whiled away idly hanging out with friends, video games, reading, listening to music, going boating down the bayou, walking around the town.

Ya know, that's not so bad, not so bad at all. That really is, believe it or not, just getting back to the halcyon days of summer vacations in childhood. Nice. I'm not doing a damn thing, and there's not a damn thing wrong with that. Why should I feel compelled to be working all the time? Why do I feel guilty for spending my days doing... what I want?

I applied to jobs for the fall. I learned a lot about who I am and what I want, last year. Just like I'd planned.
I worked for a car dealership, and learned that I don't like the crass materialism and status contest that people throw their lives away for, as crystallized by the eight-year payment plan for a truck. You're signing yourself into eight years of slavery, dude.
I worked for a meaningless desk job, and learned that I don't like doing meaningless work.
I worked for ExxonMobil, and learned that as much as the guy directly above me was screwing me, the CEO was making $220 million for four months of work, and fuck being a part of that. I also learned that the science isn't even cool there.
I worked teaching special ed, and learned that I like doing things that matter, I like improving the world a little bit. I've already written about that here.

So I applied for jobs that let me do that. No working in a lab, no working in an office. I wanna work outside, and I wanna do biology, and it'd be nice to teach while I'm at it because that's very satisfying, and I wanna live in a place that's not Southeast Texas. And while we're at it let's give me a hand with these gas prices, yeah?
You'll notice that what I don't exceptionally want is big money. I've already got an XBOX360, a computer, a car*, a TV, food and clothes, more books than you can pack in a suitcase. What do I need big money for?
All my life, my dad quoted his brother to me, saying: "In life you have two choices, you can either find a job that pays well, and use that to do what you want to do in your free time. Or you can find a job doing what you want, but don't expect to get paid so well for it."
He's right! It is, indeed, a choice. And I'm choosing, at least today, the latter. Money can't buy me love, right? Money can't buy me happiness, either, just the things that are marketed as representing said happiness, and then the counseling when I'm baffled as to why those things don't make me happy.

So far I've been accepted at the Pathfinder Ranch in California, in a naturalist position. Basically an outdoor biology instructor, teaching mostly lower-income kids from the Valley (it's about an hour east of The Valley, which I have learned is a giant never-ending metropolis surrounding L.A. and Hollywood in sunny southern California). Up in the mountains, which is neat. The other one is working for Americorps in northern Nevada.

Did you know northern Nevada doesn't get hot? At least, not by my standards. Highs in Winnemucca are like 92 degrees. I was thinking I'd have to learn to deal with the 120-in-the-shade of the West Texas desert. Sheee-yit, 92 degrees with no humidity, that's no problems at all. And the temp doesn't even hit freezing, so it sounds pretty temperate. The job there would be "docent coordinator," sort of running a program doing tour guides out to this Native American site there, Water Canyon. I haven't researched the area nearly so much as I should- owing to that "not doing a thing" bit I was talking about earlier- but I'll be training the new tour guides, giving tours, and BEST PART I'll be actually designing and writing new stuff. Fleshing out the program. That is cool.

The downside is that they only pay you $1000 a month so you have to get food stamps and live in the projects. Conversely Pathfinder pays nearly twice that while providing room and board. But there's no place for Kellie at the Pathfinder, and that means I'm pretty disinclined to go there. Which is too bad, because I really liked the Pathfinder job.

So that's the news. I'm in the garden of eden, relaxing and eating fruit, and soon I head West, one way or another. Oh also we have a cat, and she loves me. The cat comes and sits on my lap and says I LOVE YOU JOHN in the language of purr. It's great.
And Lorenzo went and shit me into coming to his gym with him and so we did a leg workout and I spent two days bedridden, but then, two weeks later/yesterday, we did it again, and apparently my legs spent the intervening two weeks saying GO TIME and growing strong, because the same workout didn't wear me out at all.

Man, has it only been a month since I've been on summer vacation? It feels like a year. A good year.
Everyone should only work eight months out of the year. We'd all be much better off.

01:27 pm - On Third Parties:

I'll start voting Green Party when the Republican Party is a distant and sad memory of a bygone and stupid era. 'Til then, there's bigger fish to fry than the dems.

Hm.
Arguably that means that the dems have it in their best interests to keep the R's around. Keep a boogabear who'll scare people into supporting them, like Goldberg in 1984.

But it's inarguable that if the republicans get into power (for instance if the D vote gets split) the country gets just completely shit all over.

Hmm.

I'd been thinking for awhile that now was the time for a rise of a third party- a more left party, with the D's as the moderates. But I can also see a more right party rising with the splitting off of the people for whom McCain isn't bibley enough. Except they're probably going to not do so until the Democratic party is a distant and sad memory of a bygone and secular era.

Problem seems insoluble.

03:37 pm - Crime, insanity. Redemption and long odds. The banality of evil.

In Chilling Detail, NYC Coed Recounts Horrifying Rape, Torture
This'll tear you up if you're sensitive to this sort of thing. Bleach, mutilation... shit.

How do you get there, to where you do that? How do you get to that point, where you'll treat someone like that? It's like... it's like he's half-assing it, like in his head he plans The Cold Necessities of what he's been told a Truly Hard Criminal needs to do, but then he's incapable of actually pulling it off. Like there's this little slice of humanity holding him back, so he drags it way, way out...

"I asked him, 'How does this end?' and he said, 'You know how this ends,'" she testified. "I took that to mean he was going to kill me."

08:44 pm - Tribalism

Hmm.

At what point does it become bigotry, to judge another person for adhering to what they were taught?

I don't judge my friend Raja (native Indian) for his total ineptitude with regards to women, nor for his caveman/patriarch attitudes towards them, because his culture totally doesn't prepare him for "women as self-determining equals". He's expressing a naive sexuality, because he's got no guidance whatsoever as to what's appropriate (except frat guys and MTV). Understanding this makes it so that if I hated or rejected him for it, I'd really just be punishing him for having the bad form to be born in the wrong culture.

But I do judge the Honor Killing types. And Raja's arguably just a cultural-context away from doing that. If he were over there, in Baghdad*, he could fall right in. He'd probably be congratulated for it. And he's a nice, giving, generous guy.
How can I judge those people as evil, for just responding to the pressures around them?
How can I not?

And what got me thinking about this, was thinking about this article I read.
Where have all the rednecks gone?
Which is an article saying, basically, "The Earthfirst! organization is a useless shadow of its former self, because we ideologically purged everyone who wasn't super-nice to transsexuals."
And I read that and think of my students, my kids. Particularly Billy from the farm- nice, generous, hardworking. Brought me a sack of turnips today, fresh-grown and hand-picked, believe it or not. Wants to be a park ranger, likes ecology. If he were to join Earthfirst! or a like organization, and were presented with at transsexual, he would be caught off guard, uncomfortable, and probably judgemental. A defense mechanism, or just following what his daddy taught him.
And I imagine the scene folding out, a bunch of rich white kids going to school majoring in Something Useless,
ganging up on the redneck. Sure, they're ganging up on him in the context of rallying around a socially laudable goal. But isn't it really just good ol' "Us vs. Them" classism? Isn't it really just the Cool Kids kicking out the Nerd?

And this is not the only case. I can think of several others, with myself, even, as a perpetrator, where a bunch of people said "Hey, we don't approve of [this attitude you hold], and so we're ostracizing you!" and to me it seems really little different whether it's a bunch of Born-Again types saying "Hey we don't approve of you being a homo" or a bunch of xxx-treme lefty types saying "Hey we don't approve of you not approving of homos."

Might be that the guiding factor oughtta be "Are you hurting anyone other than yourself?"
Might be that the guiding factor oughtta be, "Are you rejecting them because they're hurtful, or are you rejecting them because they're different, and this is just your politically correct excuse for a cultural xenophobia?"

Then again... the only judgemental people I met in the UK were fellow Texans. So maybe it's not just universal tribalism, after all.

*where the honor killings on my mind happened. I'd appreciate it if you'd not infer from this that I think Baghdad is in India.

05:47 pm - My first death threat, plus Pig Juice, plus ruminations on special ed kids.

So the kids already took the No Child Left Behind test, so they're all "Well school's out, right?" Senioritis writ large, and applying to the Juniors, and the Sophomores, and the Freshmen. And I'm teaching Freshmen, and they're just tragically artless, impulsive, no self-control. So they're expressing their desire for spring break to get here (two weeks from now, and on the other side of final exams) by acting like retards.

Seriously. I won't go into the details, just imagine "general foolishness," and that pretty much gets across the idea. They seem to have lost, altogether, the capacity to stop running their mouths.

This morning they were doing so, and Deb was teaching 'em. Deb is the senior teacher- I'm kind of an adjunct to her, we share the same classroom, she's been here longer, she decides what we do in a given day, but I'm very obviously the disciplinarian. Arguably that makes me doubly the loser in that relationship, but I think it's just that we complement one another- I have a much easier time controlling the boys than she does, particularly ever since I figured out the Secrets Of The Human Mind messing with these kids.
But that's a post for another day. The relationship is that we technically have two separate classes, but my kids are special ed, and less numerous, and sitting in on her lectures.

They were being just apocalyptically goofy, as usual, and this was exacerbated by the kids having re-seated themselves into the worst possible pairings- two loud buddies at a table, just all over the room. So I start moving them back into the Ideal Seating Arrangement we'd made earlier in the semester, and some of em grump about it, but it's sort of like a landslide- once a couple break and start doing it, more and more go. The trick is to tell eight kids, personally, to do a thing that not one wants to do. Then one at least will do it, then another two will follow them, and then the whole rest.

Except this one kid, Joel. Joel's really conflicted- he's not sure whether he wants to follow his natural aptitudes and be a good student (a very clever kid, honestly) or to follow his natural sociopathology and be a little shit. One day he'll be a good student, but he's got to offset the potential nerd aura by wearing his Bad Boy FUBU Pants. Kid's got a serious case of Whigger. The next he'll get kicked into In-School-Suspension for a week behind acting like an ass. Then he'll come back, be confused and say "Gosh, math is hard!"(well yeah kid you keep missing weeks), get it with a little help, and be a model student until he gets a case of the Stupid again.
Pale, blue-eyed, red hair, wears FUBU.

So anyway he decides to be the one who all hardassedly refused to swap seats.

Me, speaking over the general susurrus of an unruly classroom that hasn't started lecture yet: "Joel, go ahead and move up to the front."
Joel, slouching in the back where he'd meant to spent the class playing with his friends: "I ain't sittin with her, I don't like her."
Me: "Well go on anyway."
Deb: "Joel you're not going to sit there in the back, that's just not going to work,"
Joel, sulking, smirking: "I'm serious, we'll get in a fight. I don't like her."
Me, finding something else to look at so he can't try a little Stare Down: "Look Joel just dry your tears and move ahead to the front."
Class: Giggles.
Joel walks up to the front, angry pouty rapper manchild face, shoves a chair, makes a loud noise.
I look at Deb, say quietly "You oughtta kick him out."
Deb: "And you're about to get kicked out of here, you've only been back three days."
Joel: angry pouty rapper manchild face.
[insert five minutes of lecture]
Joel, sitting next to my student Billy, who is bigger than him, goofy, and wouldn't hurt a fly: Noisy angry noises!
Deb: "What?"
Joel: "I'm serious, I'm about to throw him outta his chair."
Me: "Alright that's it, get outta here."
Joel, victimized: "What for!?"
Me: "You're threatening another student. Out."
Joel: "That ain't a threat, that's a promise."
Me, snapping fingers: "Out."
Joel, sitting and not getting up to go, muttering to himself: "I ain't no dog."
Me: "Am I gonna have to call somebody to take you out?"
Joel: "I didn't do nothin!"
So I pulled out the cell phone, made a call to the front office, they said they'd send someone down. I bent over the laptop to write Joel up- and a few moments later, realizing that he didn't have my attention and was just fucking himself up more, he beat a hasty retreat- doglike, tail between legs.

Now at this point this is all just a childish little power struggle. I gotta admit, I kind of like it when, in all walks of life, somebody decides to be an asshole with me, because I get to indulge in my natural hostility a little bit. I was doing precisely my job, and the kid was way out of line.

But he comes back- he's been sent to ISS, again, for some amount of time. He gets his work. And- as I'm bent over a desk helping someone else by the door, the kid walks past me and goes "Click click boom, officer down."

Wow, my first death threat. Threw me right off my game for a minute, then I was back to helping my student. Reported him to the relevant authorities. Now he's toast, basically- lives in AEP (alternate education plan) for the rest of the semester, will be going to summer school, et cetera.

I'm assured that the confused little gangster wannabe is no threat, and I believe it. He's just trying to figure out who he is- as Kellie put it, he wanted to save face, and was thinking, "What can I say, right now, to make me not feel like so much of a loser?" He backed off of it when confronted by the principal, saying it was just a rap lyric (that sort of claim never works). The principal says he's just talking.

But it still bothers me. I find myself thinking "so do I need to start packing at school, or what?" Scenarios of a gun at school play through my head.
People toss around murder way too easily, whether it's a rapper or a redneck or a rapper-redneck kid or a republican talking about nuking Iran or a terrorist talking about bombing Israel. People just say that stuff, so heedlessly, and... man, think about what you're saying. But they don't.
Suddenly, every murderous politico in the world is re-cast, in my mind, in the light of an angry, confused, directionless little manchild posturing and trying to live up to his macho role-models. Just accidently getting some power and weapons, and horror ensues. Adolph Hitler, Dylan Klebold, Osama Bin Ladin. So much for the conquering heroes of the world.
Damn. Fresh perspective.

Somehow, I see a very goth-gangsta future in store for that kid. Confused, failing in school, already pre-disposed to really awful mainstream hip-hop, and mopey about girls. It'll be a disaster.

...and I'm trying to distract myself from it, but it's still really unsettling me.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway the other story is, today in my free minutes at the school I was helping Laurie, the biology teacher, dissect cats. Specifically trying to get the skull off one, so we could show the kids the brain. So I'm there poking and prodding and sawing, and there are kids going EWWWW GROSS, and one of them asks, "Mr. M, what would happen if you drank some of that stuff?"
"What stuff?"
"That stuff the animals are in."
"Formaldehyde? If you drank formaldehyde?"
"Yeah."
"You'd die. It's really badly toxic. Don't drink it."

It's funny, I'm totally not bugged by the smell at this point. I remember being a freshman cutting the fetal pig, thinking "OH GOD THIS IS THE WORST SMELL EVER," and wondering at how the professors weren't bothered in the least by it. And then I'm sitting there today happily slicing away, while all around me kids wrinkle their noses in horror, and I'm thinking, "what's the big deal? It's just meat."

Anyway about an hour later, the nurse comes and it's Serious Business, and things happen, and as it turned out the reason the girl had asked me that was because one of the kids, first period, had drank the pig juice.
The pig juice. That runny, translucent, brown liquid which is basically sloughed off pig cells in formaldehyde. That horrible smelling concoction which is the opposite of food. Naturally, someone was going to be dared to drink it. Unbelievably, someone did so.

The kid who did so is a smart kid. Like Joel, he's a kid with academic acumen, but is an ass. He gets stuff very quickly, but doesn't pay attention in class, smirks a lot. Generally doesn't cause trouble.
...
Why did he drink the pig juice.

The nurse has to call Poison Control, the cops show up, the kid gets called out, the principal freaks out, things happen. When the principal shows up in the room it must not look good, because he walks in on me wearing an apron over my face (cat chunks gettin on me, bone dust in my nose) working on a cat's head with a rotary grinder. I guess that's an image that goes in his nightmares tonight. Admirably he keeps his cool, but while the nurse is out of commission and the cops show up to talk to him, there's a sudden rush of medical problems (a spider bite, and the girl gets a cortisol rush from it and starts freaking out), including my own, and there are kids not wanting to be in the biology room because it smells like burnt bone and formaldehyde, and then another student of my own goes home with chest pains.
Man, what a clusterfuck it must've been for him. But he never lost his cool. Well done, that's a real leader.

It turns out it wasn't formaldehyde, it was Something Else far less toxic. So he's not going to die or even be hurt, long term. Good. Still, I hope he pukes his guts out, eats charcoal, gets his stomach pumped, and has generally a horrible night. Learn that lesson. Don't drink the pig juice, dumbass.
I look forward to the day that little stinker says, "I need to go get a drink," and I get to respond, "Okay, pig juice is in the bio lab."

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Interestingly, one of my students, Katie, really loved the cat dissection. She's another support for my hypothesis regarding special ed: that these kids are not, like, genetically stupid (usually) or brain damaged (usually), but they A) have an unstable home life that makes them unable to control themselves at school, B) have some undiagnosed medical condition that's making them unable to function at school, C) are spoiled brats who just don't want to work hard. And every blend of the three.
Seriously, C happens. Blame the parents.

I've got two (possibly three) students who are just neurologically incapable, Five A's, and six B's (and one C). The B's are the "good" students, because they know how to act. They've just been progressively falling further and further behind, as they miss too much school, and then miss more, and the holes in their education just keep getting compounded until their performance is "special ed". The A's are harder to work with- they don't know how to act, and all their life their role models have been alcoholics, abusers, criminals.

Katie, impossibly, has got 11 brothers and sisters under a single mom, a couple of her siblings have medical problems (I mean I suppose that's just statistically inevitable), and there's just not even enough attention to go around. This alone qualifies her for A. But Katie has serious hypoglycemia, which causes her to periodically pass out (she calls it "falling asleep" in class), and miss whole chunks of lesson- this puts her squarely as a "B". She's got such a good attitude, but she's been missing class and not knowing why for years. The nurse told me, when I first spoke to her about it, "She's a hypochondriac." Later I said, "Isn't this hypoglycemia?" And the ball started rolling.
And now, finally, Katie's getting some medical attention. Now her mom isn't just writing her off as a hypochondriac. And I'm teaching to her- and to everybody- in a way to reinforce, to build old skills, to go over, every day, what we did yesterday.

But anyway. So she's totally fascinated by the cat- wants to work in forensics, loves CSI. I know these trends come and go when you're a freshman, but that's a level of naturalist morbidity to rival my own. So I encourage her, now, to work hard in biology class, learn and get to where she can go to college. Several of these kids... they've got big college dreams, big potential- and when they've got so much future ahead, that's all you need- but there's just something standing in the way. Billy's dyslexia (untreated), Katie's hypoglycemia (inexplicably undiscovered until I said something about it), Damarcus' COMPLETE BLINDNESS (WHY WON'T THEY BUY HIM SOME FUCKING CONTACT LENSES HE IS A BRILLIANT KID WHO CAN'T SEE THE GODDAMNED BOARD, EVER). So when Katie is the only student in the world interested in the dissection, that's really unique. You gotta promote that.

But anyway, I've rambled on at length. This is getting unreadable, so I'll close it here.

Randy has some mystery stomach illness that's causing him to lose weight... his eyes don't work well, he's greying at 14... I'm worried about that kid, now.