Smart Teacher

This is funny!

Idiotic beaurocracy (Associate Superintendent) causes problems and has no solutions, and the smart teacher finds a solution that works out best for everyone, and gets reprimanded for it.

http://www.wral.com/education/10087115/detail.html

My favorite line is:
"Yandle said if the school had been on an actual lockdown and students needed to use the restroom, she would have encouraged them to think about something other than the bathroom and find ways to occupy their minds."

Hurrah to the teacher. I think it's time for a new Associate Superintendent.

New book

I've just started reading "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. I'm just in the first chapter, but so far this has been a fairly shocking book. It's a very though provoking and erudite dialog about religion in the world today. I highly recommend that everyone read this, just based on what I've read already.
I'm really looking forward to getting his latest book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," which has great reviews in the paper, and on Amazon.

Has anyone read much of Sam Harris?

Brian

Here's one of my favorite pics of Brian

Denel

The first week or so, it looked like Denel living with us was going to work out well. I had the smaller bedroom, so I still had the bedroom to myself. Brian had a huge bedroom, and his bed had 2 mattresses on it, (I don’t know why he had 2 mattresses on top of the box spring), so he pulled off one of the mattresses, and they set up half of that bed room for Denel.
Denel spent a few days cleaning up the place and Brian and I bought a bunch of groceries. Since our usual stores of food in the house consisted of milk, soda, taco chips, and Berry Berry Kix, having real food was exciting. Brian got off work at 2 or 3, so he would help Denel to prepare dinner. I’d come home at 6ish, and had a nice clean apartment and a good dinner. This was great.
Unfortunately, this didn’t last very long. After the first few weeks, Denel stopped cleaning, and decided to get a puppy. She got a Scottish Terrier puppy from a breeder in upstate NY. She named the puppy Sambucca, or Bucca, for short. Also, Brian realized that he was doing all the cooking and stopped. Bucca wasn’t really potty trained, and would bark through the night, and loved to shred newspaper. We also found out that Denel had a boyfriend living in Philadelphia who she had kept secret from us. So now, we had a filthy apartment, no meals, and an extra person living with us not paying for anything, who neither one of us was going to date.
We were coming up on Thanksgiving, and I had tickets to fly to NC, and Brian was going to Connecticut to be with his family. Denel decided that she was going to go to her family in Pennsylvania, but not take Bucca. She told us that she was expecting us to pay 2/3 of the kennel costs for her dog. We informed her that this was not going to happen as it was her dog, not ours. Also, by this point, Denel and Brian had used up all his dance lessons at Arthur Murray, but they were in desperate need of female instructors, so she was getting free lessons in exchange for a commitment to teach for at least a year there. Brian had signed up for more lessons on his own.
There was one day when Brian and I came home and found a plate of cookies. They were pretty burnt and misshapen, and not that good, but we appreciated that she had made that effort. However, soon after, Brian found a cookie tin up on the top shelf with a note to her boyfriend taped on it. He opened it, and there were perfect cookies in there, all lovingly packed. She had taken cookie dough from the groceries that Brian and I paid 100% for, and given us the rejects and was sending the good ones off to her boyfriend.
Now, Denel was using my UNIX e-mail account, and, one day, I was checking my mail, when I noticed a dead.letter which comes from being disconnected or canceling when you are e-mailing, or from a bunch of other causes. I opened it up to see what it was, and it was a letter from Denel to her boyfriend. My favorite line was, “I don’t know why I moved in with them at all. I never really liked either one of them.”
This was the final straw for Brian and me. We informed Denel that we were canceling the previous offer of room and board for cooking and cleaning, because she never did either. She could either pay 1/3 rent and utilities, or move out. She got quiet and wouldn’t really talk to us, but the next morning, there was a letter addressed to us on the refrigerator. She basically said that it wasn’t fair that she should pay 1/3 when she didn’t have her own bedroom or privacy (things which Brian had, but lost when she moved in). She claimed that we didn’t seem to want the apartment clean, because it was dirty when she moved in. This was an odd claim given that we were asking her to clean. The reason it was dirty when she moved in was because we were lazy, and cleaning wasn’t our highest priority, not that we didn’t want it clean. We wrote a response to her, and it went back and forth for a while. She tried to bargain to pay less, but we pointed out that this was not a negotiation. We offered her 2 choices. 1/3 or the street. (not exactly, as we were giving her over a month to find alternate housing) She never really told us what her choice was, but it became clear when her brother and father came to move out her stuff.
Ironically, this was great for Brian and my friendship. We were unified against a common enemy. All the petty disagreements went away. We were great roommates until a year or so later, when he moved in with Maria, who later became his wife.

What happened to Denel? She declared bankruptcy and defaulted on the thousands of dollars of credit card debt she had from buying tons of stuff. Her grandmother put her up in a swanky apartment in Manhattan for free. Later, she moved back to Philadelphia, which she loved. She defaulted on her commitment to Arthur Murray, and got a job helping to teach dance at a place in Philly. She fell in love with guy who owned that studio, married him, and now lives outside Philly, doing exactly was she wants: teaching some dance, teaching some aerobics, and living a nice well off life.
I just hate it when people don’t really face consequences for their actions and just kind of skate through life.

Brian - part 2

After I graduated from university in ’92, I finally found a job in NYC. Coincidentally, Brian also got a job there, so we decided to be roommates. He was living in a NYU dorm room, which they rent out over the summer, so we split that for a few months. When the school year started, we moved to a tiny place in alphabet city on the lower east side. There were drug dealers out front, and the fire escape had a metal grate over it, with a few broken bars where someone had broken in before, and a bullet hole in the window. Brian had the tiny bedroom and I had a futon in the living room. After a year in this, we found a much better place in Brooklyn on 12th street, and 5th ave, in Park Slope. That was a big 2 bedroom in a nice safe area, and it still only took me ½ hour to take the subway to work in the morning. We lived there for a couple years, but were starting to have disagreements and getting annoyed with one another, very similar to if you were living with a sibling.
Now the year before, Brian had been dating a girl, Karen, who was into jazz dance, and for something cool for them to do together, he signed up for a package of beginner ballroom dance lessons at Arthur Murray. Unfortunately, he and Karen broke up before they could take more than one or two of those.
That summer (’97, I think), Brian and I took a road trip to Montreal with Caroline and Denel, two friends from university. Brian was looking for someone to use his dance lessons with, so he tried to get Denel to come stay with us and take the dance lessons. Eventually we worked it out where she could come live with us and we would provide room and board, and she would do all the cooking and cleaning. Of course, it helped that she was 3 years younger than us, blonde, pretty, and an aerobics instructor.
So, to avoid friction, Brian and I worked out ahead of time that neither one of us would try to date Denel, because that would cause very bad problems, and a lot of resentment. So of course the moment she moved in that went out the window.
more to follow…

Brian - part 1

Brian:
For the first week of my Sophomore year of University, we noticed one of the Freshmen had his father staying in the dorm with him. The dad also was wearing a winter parka with a fur lined hood. That would be fine, but it was 80-something degrees out. This was our introduction to Brian.
Fortunately for him, his dad soon left and we could really get to know Brian. Kim and Ari and Brian and I became great friends. Brian and I were of roughly the same physical strength, so we’d have great wrestling matches in the dorm, much to the detriment of the walls and doors of the building. Once, we were in his dorm room, and we were practicing flipping each other over our shoulder. I take him by the arm, and throw him over my shoulder into the wall with a great crash, and he’d land on his bed. Then he’d do the same thing with me. After a little bit of this, his next door neighbors, 2 girls we didn’t really get along with, came over screaming. It seemed that all their pictures and anything else on the wall had come crashing down as well. We stopped for 10 or 15 minutes to rest, then did one or two more, and left before we could be yelled at more. Sure, in retrospect, we were being obnoxious, but that’s university for ya.
We’d follow these gladiatorial contests with eating matches of a similar magnitude. Brian was one of the few people who actually got his money’s worth from our very expensive all you could eat dining service. The pizza place and the convenience store next to the dorm got a lot of business from us, as well, that year.
Brian was also a big walker. We walked pretty much everywhere in Philadelphia. One time, we walked over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge on the side with a pedestrian walkway. Then, we got to one of the cross bars with the lights on it to indicate which lanes are open and which are closed. The other ones had a locked gate preventing access, but this one was open, so we crossed over the bridge, the wrong way. That was pretty cool until we tried to get back. Unfortunately, the pedestrian walkway stopped part way back. We had to climb up on some cement traffic barricades to stay out of the busy lane of traffic. After a little bit of this, some police came along. The car at the street down below the bridge got on its megaphone and told us to get off the bridge. We yelled that we were trying to. The police car came up and blocked our lane of traffic, so that we could get to the part where the walkway continued, up ahead. We waved our thank you.
Then, there was the time that we went to NYC with Kim, and we came out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Brian wanted a Snapple, which weren’t that common in those days. He knew a store down in the east village which had it and got us to start walking there. Had we known the city well, we would have taken the subway, but he talked us into it. 4 miles later, we finally got his Snapple.
When Melissa and Brian and I went to London over our spring break, we were down visiting the Tower of London, and we wanted to go to Greenwich, so we asked someone what direction it was to get there. They told us the direction, but suggested that we really should take a cab. We said we were fine and headed off. Every time we asked directions, they told us where to go, but suggested we take a cab. After about an hour, they stopped suggesting we take a cab. And I’m sure we made it in under two hours. We saw some parts of London that no one else would see. We had some great fish and chps wrapped in newspaper. It really turned out to be a great walk. However, we took a cab back.
Greenwich was great. We were happily sitting on the Prime Meridian, with one cheek in one hemisphere, and one in the other, when a middle-aged fellow walked up and started chatting with us. He was joking with us that it wasn’t that sensational a monument for how important it was. He figured that in America, we’d have lasers and a light show around it. He asked where we were from and we said that University of Pennsylvania. It turned out that his son went there as well. It also turned out that he was the curator of the Greenwich Museum, and he gave us a private tour! Very cool!
So Brian’s long walks generally turned out for the best, and helped to keep us nice and healthy. Even our walk to Patsy’s Pizza in Spanish Harlem, from the lower East side, crossing Central Park 4 times, turned out ok in the end…It was good pizza.