May 2004
Fun games! Thanks to Nagi.
Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
"Not to be fond of children, or let them come near me hardly"
Jonathan Swift, "When I come to be old," Jonathan Swift: Oxford critical Edition
And another!
EXOTIC FOREIGNER ALIAS: (Favorite Spice + Last Foreign Vacation Spot)
Sage Ireland
SOCIALITE ALIAS: (Silliest Childhood Nickname + Town Where You First Partied)
Jinx Augusta
BARFLY ALIAS: (Last Snack Food You Ate + Your Favorite Drink)
Cookie Margarita
SOAP OPERA ALIAS: (Middle Name + Street Where You First Lived)
(Or Middle Name + Elementary School)
Ann Lincoln
PORN STAR ALIAS: (First Pet's Name + Street You Grew Up On)
Destiny Chamberlain
And just because I haven't done one in a bit:
Quiz by buntz
4 May 2004
Yes, I realise that it has once again been some time since my last post. One of my dear readers emailed me to chastise me about this slack in my writing.
Dear Crys,
Since you brough your blog/antiblog to my attention, I have been, successively, a faithful reader, and then a slacker; I stopped looking for your thoughts after the beginning of April, and only today came upon your mid-April lucubrations (look it up, child: this is a valuable and very Swiftian word). You must get more regular, girl! The daily, weekly. occasional rangt is lots of fun.
I'm one of the conservatives who have become a rare species; I am decidedly NOT a neo-conservative, I don't want America to rule the world, or even Iraq; I don't want government prying into sexual matters. The flip side, which liberals find harder to take, is that I would prefer that private agencies rather than any governmental agencies deal with social problems, as a rule. Government just messes things up, whether it is the death penalty or fighting Iraqis, or caring for juvenile offenders. Private agencies aren't ideal, but by and large they would produce less mischief than government-paid civil service social workers. Public school teachers tend to pay more attention to their pension rights than to education (compare the way Catholic schools work, and what they turn out, and you can see that even with a badly-paid workforce, having the right priorities makes a huge difference).
Dr Mahony,
Can you call them lucubrations if I write my posts during the day while I'm at work? I suppose, in the general sense.
Since I usually do most of my writing at work, one of the reasons I've been so slack is that I've been incredibly busy at my boring job. Yes, you can be bored and very busy at the same time. Le sigh. At any rate, I went from being able to peruse four or five different newspapers to barely being able to scan the Washington Post every day. Don't get me started on AJC's registration issues that caused me to be unable to read their paper. After several days of not being able to re-register since they seemed to have lost my original registration, I gave up. At any rate, my inability to read as much news as I used to has caused me to have less to rant about. I almost had a post today about the Iraq prison issue, but ended up dealing with crises at work. I promise that I'll start posting more often now that the semester is winding up, and I actually get to go home after a gruelling day at the office. Also, I was convinced for a while that I only had two readers. That's probably still true, only now I know who the other one is.
Now, to the second half of your email. I only posted it, really, because I actually do like dialogue. It sounds to me like you need to jump on the bandwagon with the rest of us libertarians. Don't worry, there are more conservatives among us than there are liberals. (Please, folks, let's get away from assuming that all liberals are Democrats. We aren't. Some of us don't even really like the Dems.) Anyway, regarding public education. This is where someone in the government needs to make me Education Czar. Actually, I think it would be Czarina. First thing I'd do would be to fire everyone, reorganise what they loosely call their structural model, raise the bar about 20 notches, and then let people reapply. Or rather, they can reapply if their jobs still exist. Of course, you can't just do that, and this is pretty sad, given the sorry state of our education system. I'm a product of a fine public school education, but it's also true that I went to a small school. I knew my teachers, and, for the most part, they actually made the effort to make sure that we were well-prepared for college. One of these days, I should actually thank them.
Unlike most libertarians, I understand that the logistics of moving from government run and operated schools to privitised schooling is an almost impossible feat to do in a short time. Now, I understand that there are some schools somewhere in the northeast (I can't remember where off the top of my head) who were actually testing the idea. Apparently, they gave contracts to four businesses to "take over" four schools. It seems like that was last year, and I haven't heard anything lately on what their progress was. Maybe one of these days, I'll dig around and find out. My problem with the public education system as it stands now is that standards are too low -- starting with the actual teachers. I know that there are probably some very highly qualified folks in the public schools, but they generally aren't the ones who are getting their Education degrees now. It seems like perfectly normal human beings go into Education programmes, and leave missing at least half of their brain cells. Ask my friend Mike. He agrees with me.
I could actually babble some more about this whole privitisation of education issue, but I really do need to finish my Swift paper!