Education and frustration.

Year in, year out, we hear the same laments from people who have put some distance between themselves and high school. 

"WHY DID I HAVE TO STUDY X? I'VE NEVER USED IT!"

Values for X include science (biology, physics, chemistry), foreign languages, writing, or history, but mostly math (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus).

I have an answer for the question, but people don't like it. That answer is:

It wasn't for your benefit, stupid; it was to find the kids who would do well in it and go on to make great contributions to society -- and lots of money. 

I absolutely count myself in with the stupids on this. For all the good higher mathematics has done me, I might as well have spent those hours in school playing miniature golf or watching game shows. So I am not without sympathy to their complaint. And they are not really stupid, although they are complaining out of ignorance here.  

They need to understand that this is a downside of universal public education -- the kids all get tossed into the various subject pools, and the ones with the interest and aptitude -- and support at home -- will swim. Everyone has to take algebra, biology, etc. so we can find the future engineers, mathematicians, doctors, chemists, and so on. 

A tailor-made system where every child is eased into what he knows and likes best might seem ideal, but like most ideals it is impossible in practice. What the kvetchers would prefer in fact is to have never had to study these things, but we need people who understand them -- and how else will we produce them? 

It doesn't mean that the kids who struggle in math or English are useless dummies. Hardly. They may feel like way when they struggle, and I sure as hell did in trigonometry. It doesn't mean that they have nothing to offer. It just means that they don't have a knack for that kind of subject. Even most smart kids if pressed to study higher mathematics to its limits will reach a level where it becomes a fight. 

Schools used to know this. They used to have plenty of vocational training for kids who really weren't interested in college but could make a good, even great living doing other things. Then we all got buffaloed into thinking everyone had to go to college except for the hopelessly stupid. Those people we could look down on.

This has led to the sidelining of vocational classes and the ballooning of college costs and college debt. It also has led to the foolish disregard of occupations that once held esteem in our culture, jobs that required knowledge and skill but not a degree. 

So when I call someone who complains about having had to study algebra in high school stupid, I don't mean they were stupid about math. I mean they're being stupid about this particular question. 

You can pick your friends…

… but can you picnic?

Maybe where you live, you can barely enjoy the five remaining weeks of summer because of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the youths who have already started school. It doesn't start here until the day after Labor Day, but the school supplies have been featured prominently at stores since July 5, so the misery is growing here as well. 

Nevertheless, let us not forget that we're only halfway through August and, despite the Halloween candy in the stores, there's still a lot of summer left. In the socialization department, there's still Labor Day weekend, which means another shot at having a decent backyard party. Maybe it won't rain this time. Maybe Uncle Al won't throw a fist at Uncle Lou this time. Maybe that kid with the purple hair with the snot ring will stay home instead of moping in the corner and grumbling about Trump. Who knows? It could be the party of the year. 

And I am here to offer you a terrific idea for your gathering. 

Barbecues usually have great food, but unlike indoor holiday dining, there's no centerpiece item to make the guests ooh and ah, like a beautiful ham or prime rib or Norman Rockwell-esque turkey, or, for that purple-hair kid, lump of tofu. Well, there wasn't -- until now! Simply follow this recipe for a real show-stopping fruit salad.

Take two (2) blueberries. Cut a slit in two (2) strawberries and insert a blueberry into each. Take two (2) ripe peaches and cut into them halfway; work the pits out. Insert strawberries. Take two (2) mangoes and do the same thing to them, inserting the peaches when the pits are out. Take two (2) honeydew melons; cut in half and scoop out the seeds. Put a mango in each and reassemble melons. Take one (1) very large watermelon. Cut in half lengthwise and scoop out enough to fit the honeydews inside. Put watermelon back together and serve on enormous platter. 

Ladies and gentlemen, you have just presented the Wahonmangpeastrawblu. Slice firmly but carefully and serve in buckets.

I'd much prefer this to a Turducken. Does anyone really like those? They have "turd" right in the name.

So make sure to sling up a Wahonmangpeastrawblu at your Labor Day party! It will get the guests talking, that's for sure. ("What the hell is wrong with Jeff?") You may even help them feel glad that summer is coming to an end. And isn't that what it's all about? Helping?

Markers.

So it's back to school time, even if, like me, you live in a place where public schools won't reopen until after Labor Day. After all, college students have to get shipped off. Kids have to load up with the stuff the school says they will need. And remember, Labor Day is really early this year -- September 2. That means very little September will be available here in New York for kids to enjoy school-free. Then there will be pencils. There will be books. And yes indeed, there will be teacher's dirty looks. 

I used to love going with my mom to get school supplies, even though I dreaded the start of school. But I swear, everyone has gotten more grumpy since Dri Mark stopped selling these. 

I was an inveterate doodler in school -- actually, still am -- and when I saw that picture I got to wondering what happened to Dri Mark since my school days. The company is still around, and while they don't sell colored markers on the store shelves anymore, they do custom orders for these kinds of supplies. But that's not where they get the bulk of their money. If you don't know what Dri Mark makes now, you probably wouldn't guess. 

So I'll just tell you. In 1991, "Dri Mark became the original patent holder and only domestic manufacturer of the iconic Counterfeit Detector Pen. Over the next 25 years, the Detector Pen rose to be the highest-selling, and most success­ful counterfeit detection product in the industry." That's right -- most of the Long Island, New York-based company's dough comes from markers and other products that detect and expose counterfeit money. I would not have expected that. 

When I was in college I had a job for a year that involved handling cash, but I never got one of those pens. I'm pretty sure they were around, because I knew a grumpy old man who ran a soda shop when I was in high school, and I'd occasionally see him run a pen over a large bill to make sure it was real. 

I was taught to check bills for their color, design elements, and most of all feel -- US money is printed on a blend of linen and cotton, not commercially available, and most counterfeiters would spend too much money faking the paper to make money with their fake money. The one counterfeit bill I did find, a C-note, was caught because it didn't feel like currency. Dri Mark's pen takes away the guesswork, leaving a mark if the note is not genuine currency paper. Now the company offers products that can verify modern cash in up to five ways, and even be used on foreign moolah.

I congratulate Dri Mark for staying afloat, manufacturing a desirable product in the United States -- in New York, no less! But I still miss your smiling marker man. His enthusiasm was a little bananas, but infectious all the same. That's a lot of doodling for $1.98. 

I like me too.

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," then presumably coughed a little and raised his eyebrows, looking around with a smile.

I'm not sure that poets have the clout anymore to make statements like that. But that's just fine -- there are plenty of other vocations in which the practitioners have a self-regard that would make Caligula seem like a shy, modest type. 

"Little ol' me? I'm just a kindly 
emperor, trying to help the people."

Journalists seem to have an enormous self-regard. Maybe they always did, feeling that with the power of their words they were able to assume an authority that required neither education nor invention, just the vote of the public when it purchased the newspaper. Since Watergate, their self-regard as truthtellers in a corrupt world has inflated as respect for the profession and evidence of its independence has cratered. Reporters on the whole seem to be happy lapdogs for the people they like, covering up things here and attacking on command there, whose mistrust by the public grows daily. (Was anyone surprised when the Newseum closed?) And yet if you read a book by a reporter on reporting, he'll tell you that he's not important, the story is, and also, ME ME ME. It's a tour de force of the author's humblebrag, with a few lectures on his Journalistic Ethics tossed in. 

Saints never tell you they're saints. 

Perhaps this egotism is purposeful puffery for journalists, designed to dispel the creeping fear that they really are useless loudmouths. Could be. 

Teachers have really gotten out in front of their skis on this one as well. Yes, they are important for the education of our children (when they do it), and most teachers I know are great people who love what they do. But when did some of them begin to think they were more important than the children's own families? While it's true that a bad family can turn out a bad kid, one bad teacher can corrupt a whole passel of them. Ironically, a little humility goes a long way to earning respect and trust. 

Sometimes I get the feeling too many of them took Plato's Republic seriously, thinking that philosophers ought to be the monarchs and children should be taken from their parents for education. They ought to remember that it might be a nice place to visit, but they wouldn't want to live there. 

Money handlers as a class do not consider their large sums of money adequate recompense for their work. They also demand the respect of the public for the genius that they possess. If you were smart, you'd be rich too! seems to be the thought. They needn't worry -- rich people will always get their tuchuses polished by those who want to know their secrets. They never have to see the disdain of those who find their egoism tiresome, their methods dubious, their gospel damaging. They never have to hear the moans of those who despise how they use their cash for charitable purposes and have to live with the consequences. 

Politicians are and have always been the worst of the lot, able to convince themselves of the good they are doing while stuffing their pockets and crushing the lives of citizens they are meant to serve. I'll give them this -- if people were always coming to my door and begging me for special favors, I'd begin to think less of humanity as a whole. Perhaps that's the best argument for term limits -- as a means of preventing cynicism and hatred among the ruling class.

Successful actors and other performers are perhaps the most revolting of them all. The love of the fans ought to be enough, but the appetite of the ego grows with the feeding. They must be world-changers as well and loved for it. It usually makes them pretty tools for the faddish fanatism of the day. This would be harmless, but it inevitably requires telling us little people what we ought to be doing. Yeah, we all just love that.  

And what of the humble novelist, who sweats away in his little garret, chipping away at his stories like a sculptor trying to draw the angel from the coarse stone? Like moi, in other words? Do we not think that we are hot stuff, and expect to be respected for it? 

Meh -- not me. As with poets, maybe there was a time when the novelist was a person of some societal rank. A million lousy novels and a million good but forgotten books since, those days are gone. Now only a pinpoint of wildly successful and wealthy authors would expect that kind of obsequiousness, and they fall into the money handlers category. The rest of us prefer love to respect. (Although a little money is nice, too.) 

Earthworm jimmied.

Today's post is a bit of a rebuttal to my own post on warning labels from the other day, as you shall see.

🔬 🔬 🔬

You learn a lot of lessons in school, many of which are not the ones you're specifically taught. 

My wife was telling the story of Frog Dissection Day in her high-school biology class, where her lab partner actually fainted, leaving her to face the frog alone. The bio teacher filled in as her "partner," but of course he was not going to do any of the work. I think the frog had a better day than my wife did. 

The year I took biology in high school, the school system was too broke for the Fetal Pig. There was a well-known progression in bio lab over the course of the school year: Earthworm, Frog, Fetal Pig. It had been that way through history, right up through the year before mine. But New York City was in the midst of one of its financial crises, and so we were down to the worm and the frog. 

I actually missed frog day; I don't think I was too skeeved out to go, so I suspect I was actually sick that day, not playing hooky. But I do remember Earthworm Dissection Day. Vividly.

Unlike my wife's bio class, we got four lab partners to each worm. I must confess that this was no advanced science class; it was just the required class. It was not a smarty pants nerd class full of Future Physicians and Amateur Golfers of America. So the studentry was real mixed bag. 

Speaking for myself, I had no idea what was going on. What's inside an earthworm, anyway? Earth? Gray pudding? They can't really have organs, can they? I dreaded finding out. 

Nevertheless, the day came, and the four of us at my table were staring down at the largest earthworm I had ever seen, dead and stretched out on a board. 

The girls on our team didn't want to touch it. They were of the classic Brooklyn F--- that I ain't touchin no f——- worm variety. I certainly didn't want to do anything to make myself look stupid in front of these kids -- being a A/B student was the only thing I had over them. And the other boy was a tall galoot who could have been a jock but had instead chosen a career as a stoner, the kind of guy that could flunk a course in breathing. So things looked pretty grim.

Then, as the worm turns, so too came the most unexpected turn of events.

The dumb guy picked up the tools, looked at the diagram, and with no words, started in gently. With no help from the rest of the team, he did an absolutely gorgeous job on the worm. He sliced it to the right millimeter, then peeled and pinned back the skin as gently as a breath of spring, leaving the deceased annelid's organs on display like an exhibit in a museum. At other tables the students were descending into chaos, their worms looking like they'd been sat on. Our worm's innards were so clearly delineated you could have taken a photo of it for a textbook. Out of nowhere this teenage boy made us all look like we knew what we were doing.

Had this been a hobby of his? Or could this have been a life-changing moment, the moment this guy decided to smarten up and become a doctor, a pathologist, a coroner, or a serial killer? I have no idea who he was or what became of him, so I cannot hazard a guess. But as he pulled forth the worm organs, so too he pulled our fat out of the fire, and I have always been grateful. 

It's a reminder that you really can't judge someone's insides entirely by their outsides.

And I certainly never have looked at earthworms the same way again.

I salute you, worm dissection guy. I'm sorry I missed what was probably a virtuoso performance on the frog. I only hope that you went on to use your amazing surgical prowess productively, and for good, not for evil. 

Easy childing, hard adulting.

I hear them young whippersnappers complain about the problems of adulting, how they should have been taught to do their taxes and change tires in school instead of learning algebra or cartography. 

I'm actually not going to come down on them too hard. I know they're being flippant, and we all know that the reason we learn a little about a lot of subjects in school is because we have to find the kids who like algebra and cartography and all the other subjects that will not be so useful for the rest of us later on, because someone has to know how to do these things. Also, learning a lot of things in a stressful environment is a great way to learn how to learn, and it's good exercise for the mind. Still, it would be helpful if kids got more practical life lessons in school -- or at home.

And there's the rub. There are strong disadvantages for kids who are not required to do things at home. In the suburban area where I live, no kids are ever seen pushing lawnmowers, regardless of the income level at which they live. Dad rides the mower or they leave it to the pros. I never see kids raking leaves or painting the house or any of the things I used to do with my dad that I hated. 

Further, there are not that many jobs for youngsters, and probably fewer youngsters who would want to do them anyway. Why should they? To save for college? To work all summer and pile up a pittance that won't even pay for three credits in the way-overpriced universities of the present day?

The real loss shows later down the road, in the failure to go through all those miserable jobs and learn how to "adult." 

Do not think that I'm saying kids have it too easy. Actually, in a lot of very crucial ways, they have it worse now. They may have greater material goods than generations past, but they are much less likely to be raised in a solid home with some kind of moral and spiritual foundation. That makes them more susceptible to all kinds of social ills, especially nihilism. 

I get on the anti-nihilism soapbox a lot. It's the main reason we have not vanquished so many other of those social ills. If nothing matters, why do anything? Why achieve anything, except for the most base, egomaniacal reasons? If nothing matters, who cares what you do? Why, really, does it matter if I hurt someone if I want to? Nothing matters means exactly what it says. 

And this too is a product of "bad childing." Kids shielded from all kinds of tough truths become teenagers who are shocked and dismayed to discover the facts of life. They realize they have literally been lied to by everyone about everything -- not just about the Tooth Fairy! They were lied to about how perfect and special they were! (Everyone is special and unique -- only not in the ways egotism tells us. That's a hard concept to grasp when you are thirteen. Or maybe even thirty.) 

It becomes a race to the bottom -- the kids need to eject any hopeful or meaningful ideals before those too are exposed as lies. Nihilism feels true because they now expect the worst. It's a protection against further disappointment. Nihilism is also enticing because promises it freedom and pokes fun at everything. If nothing matters, you can do whatever you want! But in the end, the menu is always the same. 

 

So put them to work around the house. Encourage them to find jobs. Tell them they must commit to extracurriculars, and not bail out when the going gets tough. Establish rules. You can't "give them a sense of pride," pace Whitney Houston, but you can help them earn it. If there's the slightest glimmer of faith in the parents, they should commit to some kind of churchgoing. And by all means, protect the kids from not from the knowledge of harsh realities but from being the victim of harsh realities. 

Coaches say things like "Easy training, hard game. Hard training, easy game." The truth of that is simple to grasp. Well, childhood needs to be a training ground for adulthood, and it does kids no favors to treat it any other way. 

Apples and eyes.

There are some weird ways to express affection. Of course there are all the silly pet names we give each other, like punkin and babycakes and honeybunch and, as one girlfriend liked to call me, turkey (it didn't last long). 

More archaic terms might include the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas, Jazz Age phrases that seem to have, like jazz itself. just come to be out of a love for rhythm and rhyme over sense. Mental Floss couldn't find any known logic to them, anyway. P.G. Wodehouse preferred the lodestar of my existence and variations, which at least makes sense -- a lodestar being a star by which one navigates. Webster notes that the literal sense of a lodestar as a guide to a happy destination didn't outlast the 17th century, but the figurative sense lives on. 

The one I always disliked was the apple of my eye. The idiom comes from the Bible, where it appears in several places. By its use, the apple is a metaphor for the pupil, in that it is something in the center of the eye, and thus the beloved is always in the center of one's vision. 

He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.

(Deuteronomy 32:10)

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.

(Psalm 17:8)

There's something weird going on here regarding the word pupil. Apparently there was no English word for the little black spot in the center of the iris until the 15th century, can you believe it? And why is the word for student the same as the word for the aperture of the eyeball? Coincidence? Nope! Here's the story: 

If you look into another person's eye, you can see a small reflection of yourself. That small image made the ancient Romans think of a doll. Thus, they called the part of the eye in which it appears the pupilla. This word literally meant "little doll." The English word for that part of the eye, pupil, can be traced to the Latin pupilla. Pupilla also had another meaning. A little girl who was an orphan and was in the care of a guardian was called a pupilla. A little boy in the same situation was called a pupillus. From these two Latin words we get the other English pupil, meaning "a young student in the care of a tutor or in school."

It's appropriate in an upside-down way to think of the image of yourself as a little doll in someone's eye, because the image does register on the retina -- upside down, along with everything around you. 

I just don't dig eyeball-related metaphors, I guess. When I was a kid Keep your eyes peeled grossed me out; I was thinking not of peeling back the eyelid, but of Mom's apple-peeler going to work on the eyeballs. Yeesh! 

So I'll just stick with my favorite terms of endearment and leave the biblical apples of eyes alone. Terms like Hey you and Bozo and What's your name again? They always work.

Entering the workfarce.

Hello, young graduates. I congratulate you on surviving whatever school you have just or are about to just be ejected from, to find yourself spreadeagle in the center of the road of your new career. 

You may be tempted to just take a little time off, figure out what you want to do, before you commit. This is the first time you had nothing expected of you since preschool, right? Why not relax, hang out this summer, play videogames, and freeload some more off Mom and Dad? 

DON'T DO IT! It's a trap! I understand that you don't want to start a whole new grind right now, but do you really want to punch your ticket to Loserville? Trust me: Loserville has a high population, but it's still the loneliest place on earth. If you get cozy being a lump all summer, you'll still be cozy being a lump in the fall. It gets harder the longer you hang around. Have you earned the right to live off someone else's effort as an adult? Of course not. 

Now, don't fret; it's not as awful as it may seem. Your first job may be horrible, but you know what? It's not like your grammar school. You can leave. You can find a different job. You're young; your skillset is growing. You're not cast into a highly specialized role. Just don't go back to the sofa. 

There are a few other things I think you should keep in mind, some of which maybe no one had to think about decades ago because they were not an issue. But for your career health and mental health I recommend the following bits of wisdom.

🛠 If work was fun, they'd call it play.

🛠 Do your best even if the job is lousy. It's good for your self-respect to establish good habits. 

🛠 Your workplace is not like family, no matter what they tell you. This is important. Startup companies can have that feel, but it's illusory. Say you join software startup TwoGuysAndAParakeet.com, working long hours to develop some damn business software (we don't make things anymore in America, we make software to help other people make things, usually somewhere else). At first it's exciting, and you feel very close-knit. Trust me: The rounds of fund-raising will end and PyroQEET.com will be launched, and the first time quarterly earnings projections fail, your "family" will have no problem divesting itself of you.

🛠 It gets worse than that. You know the people in high school who always kept score, who never forgot a thing you did and would use it against you? They're out there working too now, and they have not changed. Pettiness and backbiting are fun ways for some people to liven up the day. 

🛠 When it's really bad, remember that rampant workplace politics are the sign of a sick organization. Get out!

🛠 Don't be too impressed by so-called serial entrepreneurs. It's not that they fail a lot -- most new businesses fail -- it's that they chase that excitement of a new venture like some people chase new love, and like those people they cannot be trusted in the long haul. Plus, when they do fail, it's usually on someone else's dime. And you're the one who's out of a job.

🛠 Do not expect to or even desire to want to bring your "whole self" to the job. If the company tells you that it wants to engage your "whole self," they're wholly full of crap. No one wants to deal with anyone else's detritus at work, and everyone's "whole self" includes sacks of detritus. No one cares, and that's okay. We were never meant to find personal fulfillment at work, unless the work itself is that fulfilling, and even then, leave the personal stuff at home where it belongs. 

🛠 And on that note, there is a very good chance that you will have to pick between the personal fulfillment of a great job and the actual fulfillment of your bank account. The really satisfying jobs don't pay as well as the others by and large for the simple reason that people will do them for free. I'm not advising you which to pick if you find yourself at that crossroad. Either choice is all right. 

So there you go, my young friend. You can take my advice or leave it. I'm not wealthy, and no one is asking me to do any TED Talks, but I can assure you that part of the reason is that I did not adhere to these tips for my own rambling path in life. 

Do you want to have a good career or not? Then you must learn not only from the successful but from the rest of us as well. We know a lot, believe me. 

The straight poop.

Most people around here are pretty good about cleaning up after their dogs. 

Not all. 

There's one house in our walk that seems to attract all the dogs to want to go there, and all the dog owners to want to leave it. I don't know what the problem is. I have my theories. 

To set the scene: This house -- a nice one on a corner lot, but no better than its neighbors -- is almost completely enveloped by an eight-foot-tall PVC fence. Part of it is a legal requirement, as they have a swimming pool. Also, they have a couple of dogs of their own -- small ones, I think. I'm not sure. I've never seen them. I've never seen anything. I'm going just by sound.

The thing is, their having dogs who can't be seen or reasoned with by passing dogs may be enticing the latter to leave a little telegram from Western Poopion. Dogs have their motivations. But why don't the dogs' owners perform their cleaning duty?

I believe it's that stupid fence. Not only is it twice as high as the law requires, but they built it right up against the sidewalk. You feel like it's shoving you to the curb. I assume it's perfectly legal, as you need a permit to construct these things, but it just feels rude. It didn't have to be that close to the sidewalk; it's like they were going to be damned if they let more one square inch be outside their yard than they absolutely had to. It inevitably makes one feel like they think they're too good for the plebes out on the street.

I've heard of jalousie windows, but this is a jealousy fence. 

I don't blame them for the high fence. If I had a pool, I wouldn't want people looking in on me while I was using it. But I do wish they'd left a little breathing room on the sidewalk. 

So there may be resentment involved. More important, however, there's anonymity involved. Since we can't see them, they can't see us, and less conscientious dog owners might be taking advantage of that. 

Not that the homeowners are unaware of the situation. They have taken steps. 

Four of these signs, spaced about fifteen feet apart along the sidewalk. That'll turn the tide.

To show you how well it works, yesterday morning in the dim early hours, pup Izzy and I almost ran right into a huge pile of crap square in the middle of the sidewalk. I don't want to punch the dog owner in the nose for leaving that there, but someone ought to. 

I knew that Monday morning would come soon enough, and that corner is a school bus stop for kids of all grades. Easy to anticipate some kid booking for the bus and -- yeesh. What a great way to start the day. 

Many years ago I knew a kid (not me) who was bullied regularly at school, but when the bullies found some dog crap and nailed him on his pants with it, that was the last straw. The kid actually refused to go to school after it. It caused more trouble for him and his family that I even know about. It was years before he started school on a normal schedule again, and he had to catch up. Being that this was a New York City public school, I unconditionally guarantee that no punishment was ever dealt out to the bullies. That was the environment in which I learned you can neither rely on nor trust in authority in this world.

Bottom line today: You can't leave land mines like that dog poop around. 

So what could I do? I used a waste bag to pick it up. Then I threw it over the fence toward where I think the pool is. 

Nah, just kidding. I brought it all the way home and put it in our outdoor repository, and will dispose of it on trash day. I wasn't being nice. I was remembering what it was like to be a kid having to go to school on Monday, and what happened to that one boy whose life was nearly ruined by one cruel act too many. 

The moral of the story: If we'd all clean up after ourselves, and stop grabbing every inch we can, the world would be a better place.

Robo Fred.

After I reported on the rise of artificial intelligence used by students to write papers and the reaction by the New York City Board of Ed last month, the problem may have temporarily solved itself. So many people are trying to use Open AI's AI writer that the servers are completely tied up. I get results! 

However, I wanted to get through myself. I wanted to see if I could retire from this exhausting work of blogging every day to have a robot write my blog for me. So I waited my turn to use ChatGPT and asked it to write a blog entry in my style. Herewith the results:

Good morning. This is Fred and I have more updates for you. The weather is all right. The dog is being very crazy today. I am not sure what the problem is. I wouldn't mind so much but the book I am editing is a real crowd-loser. It's called Eat Pond Scum, Live Forever!. I get sick looking at it. It's totally put me off my twinkies. If I have to eat pond scum to live forever, I'm A-OK with dying.

I wanted to buy a cartoon to run in this space with some Fredcoin, which is the world's greatest cryptocurrency, but it turns out the exchange rate is a little lower than I had expected. I needed an electron microscope to see how many Fredcoin fit in a regular dollar. Some people would say only a moron wouldn't find this depressing, but I don't! 

Meanwhile, I am recommending books, which you can find elsewhere, especially the ones I have written. Check them out! Or I will make more bad jokes. Or make you watch the Beloved Mets.

Come back tomorrow -- could be memes, could be cake. It could be memecake. It may be more complaints about the dog. Probably that.

💻💻💻💻

Okay, I was just joshing. After waiting to use ChatGPT for a couple of days, I did what I hope all the students are doing, and just wrote my own piece. 

However, to keep you from being disappointed by lack of AI blogging, I asked one of the AI image generators, Fotor, for a picture of Fred going off to war on a horse, wielding a pen. I didn't say whether it was I or the horse who would be holding the pen. This is what I got:

Doesn't look like me at all. Neither does the guy, for that matter. At least the horse doesn't have a teeny little face.

SNOW!!!!

So we finally got a for-real snow event yesterday. 

OR DID WE?

Six to eight inches of snow were expected. The district decided to close the schools as of Tuesday night. At ten in the morning Wednesday, not a flake had fallen. At eleven, birds were chirping. At one p.m. my Windows system software said "Snowing now," but my actual windows told a different story. It was starting to look like a non-event. Not that our local bloated school administration cared. They hadn't had a snow day off yet this winter, and by God they were going to get one. 

We northerners like to make fun of how southerners panic when a little bitty snow squall shows up, but aren't we a lot wimpier than we used to be? I know it's our inner Yorkshiremen that make us look back and say how we trekked through five feet of snow during a storm that made the Children's Blizzard of 1888 look like a gentle dusting -- but when I was a kid I'm pretty sure the schools didn't close before the snow even started. 

There may be reasons for this. More children live in single-parent households now, and in houses where both parents work, and if there's no adult home to fetch the kid because the weather got bad fast, what can the school do? Better to leave them home in the first place. 

Also, at least in theory, weather forecasting is better now than it was when we were tots, what with the News 10 Dopplercast 5000 or whatever your local station advertises. So sure, it may be sunny and warm now, but you wait -- Dopplercast 5000 says blizzard by lunchtime, and blizzard it shall be. 

Well, at last, at 2:30: 

An hour or so later it had turned to rain. Some of the neighbors' kids got some sledding in:

And this morning:

It rained all night and the temperature got up over forty. In other words, not only was there barely any snow in this snow event, but the weather wiped out the snow we already had.

I can live with it. My back didn't have to brave the shovel, I didn't have to pay Piers Plowman who does the driveway, and the children got their vacation day. But I can't remember the last time a forecast was this far off. 

There's a local guy who does weather forecasting on Facebook, and I don't know what his story is, but he's good. He uses data from weather services all over the hemisphere, and knows how to do the math. Even he got rooked on this one. At three in the afternoon he wrote: 

This one I did not see coming. We are experiencing warm air advection which is warm air approaching and over riding the cold dense air in place. Typically this produces moisture in the midlevel atmosphere and would produce precipitation with upward forcing motion. In our case snowfall.

However, at this point it has plateaued and has created a dry slot bubble in the midlevel of the atmosphere as wintry precipitation is in the process of transforming to rainfall. I am not sure how long before the dry slot bubble fills back in with precipitation.

The end result is we may experience this dry slot in the weather for a couple of hours. Precipitation likely returns as a mix or rainfall.... Weather can be fickle.

You can say that again, brother!

Catch as catch catechism.

This will probably be of no interest to you non-Catholics, so I'll be as brief as I can. The topic says something about the Church, yes, but also about yours truly and his ability to commit. 

On January 1, Ascension Presents started a new podcast/video series called Catechism in a Year. Last year they did a Bible in a Year series, which I had wanted to follow but never did. This year I am all in. 

Everyone knows what the Bible is; the catechism is more easily dismissed as the Catholic Church list of do's and don'ts. Since I was not Catholic growing up and did not have to spend my days being beaten by nuns (we just beat one another up instead), I don't have the dismissiveness toward the catechism that a lot of cradle Catholics I know do. The word catechism comes from late Latin (duh) via the Greek word katēchēsis, or oral teaching. So, the catechism of the Catholic church is a little light reading, 900+ pages of who we are, how we got this way, and what it all means. 

This series is a much deeper dive into the faith than I've ever done, and I sponsored people through the Rites of Catholic Initiation for Adults program for a few years. 

The Ascension series is hosted by Fr. Mike Schmitz, a campus priest with the University of Minnesota in Duluth and what my Catholic school wife and her schoolmates used to call a Father What a Waste. Meaning, he's way too cute to choose a life of celibacy. 

Before getting involved in Catechism in a Year, I'd followed Fr. Mike's own weekly podcast series for a while, and during the Chinese Death Lockdown we would watch his Sunday Mass online. He is a charismatic, enthusiastic priest, who was once on track marry a female person and become an actor. In fact, he was up for the part of Robin in Batman Forever, which means he would have been contracted to play Robin in Batman & Robin with George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which means God took mercy on him and gave him the calling. (I don't know what Chris O'Donnell ever did to deserve that.)

Fr. Mike is a dedicated guy. When he says he's doing these series in one year, he means it -- one 15-20+ minute podcast a day, every single day of the year. He reads and comments on a small portion of the catechism in each episode, and a new one appears to subscribers (all free) every morning. 

I don't know how he recorded all that. I'm finding it hard to keep up. Ideas like listening to the podcast while walking the dog -- something I do daily anyhow -- were rejected, because the topic is complex and requires focus. Best that I sit at the computer, have a copy of the catechism out, and pay attention!!!! Which, as I have the attention span of a toddler, has never been easy. Worse, I rely on caffeine now, which I did not as a toddler, so I may be even more scattered as an adult.

Nevertheless, I am enjoying the education. People may think that the Church does things for cruel or arbitrary reasons, but that's never been the case. It's interesting to learn more about why we believe this and that and where we differ from other faiths and denominations. 

The commitment thing is tough. I've already missed a couple of days and had to double up to get back on track. No idea if I can make it through the whole month, let alone the whole year, but I'll keep trying. I'm much better about staying on mission than trying to regroup and restart later. Wish me luck! 

Homeworkinator.

The Guardian (because we have to go outside New York for important news about New York) reports that New York City has banned students from using artificial intelligence for schoolwork:

New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.

According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.

The first indication that artificial intelligence was being used was that some actual intelligence was being shown by the students. 

Meanwhile, in artificial intelligence news reported by the New York Post, a group using AI to make dirty pictures has been booted from Kickstarter and Patreon. This was interesting to me, because I thought Kickstarter and Patreon only booted fund-raisers from conservatives. 

But getting back to the school situation. This has gone much differently from what I was expecting as a kid. Take, for example, the kids' book Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, from the series of science fiction books by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams. This 1958 book was still in the library when I was a kid, and it was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The hero, Danny, and his pals are given access to a new supercomputer, which they proceed to use to write their homework for them. But (spoiler alert!) in the end they find that since they had to enter the data for the computer themselves, they wound up learning anyway. Darn you, computer! Making us learn!

The book's authors could not foresee an Internet, a place with so much information so easily within reach. There is still a catch -- a kid who used a computer to retrieve data from the Internet and write his papers would find that his papers contained a lot of garbage information. However, considering its probable nature and the positions of teachers ("January 6 was worse than the Civil War! Herbal supplements can cure cancer! Men can menstruate!"), the kid would probably still get good grades. 

I guess if kids want to get through school and be as ignorant on the other end as they were going in, that's becoming more likely, and for a variety of reasons. I would have warned against that in the past, but as Tommy Grey once wrote, “Where ignorance is bliss, Tis folly to be wise.” Good ol' Tommy, always making with the epigrams. 

Science and the self.

My wife and I were wondering about a friend who does actual science work in an actual lab with actual mice. I thought he might have a doctorate, but we'd never asked him and he's not the kind to brag. She said maybe not. Maybe a BS?

"You can't just let any old undergraduate go playing with the mice!" I said. 

"It doesn't take a master's degree to play with mice!" she recounted.

"No, but it has to be someone with an actual career! A bachelor's might think the mice are cute and take one home, and then what? Lab leak! Like COVID! You need someone who's really invested in his career, someone whose career, when you have to destroy it, means something!"

I have a lot of jumbled thoughts this morning connected to these things. For example:

1) Our friend is a thoroughly competent guy. He's not omnicompetent like Batman, but he knows what he knows and he acquits himself properly, be it grilling or fantasy football or judging craft beer. He does not know electrical work, for example, so he hires someone who does when a project involves that. So I have to believe he's not the type to let a disease leak from the lab. (Don't worry; he doesn't work in a virology lab anyway.)

2) Anyone who still holds to the ideal that scientists are Vulcans, purely motivated by logic and the greater good, needs to talk to our friend and others like him. The lab is run by scientists, but that doesn't help. There is still plenty of ego, squabbling, and poor administration. 

People are people, and one of the things most people are poor at is being in charge of other people. That's why teaching leadership is a huge industry in itself -- although from what I've seen, the rules of leadership taught usually veer wildly between the obvious and the chest-pounding rah-rah. I've met a few really good supervisors and have come to suspect management is a talent rather than a skill. You can build on a talent by teaching skill, but without the talent there's not that much to go on. Take a bad and tone-deaf singer, give him lots of singing lessons, and you may get a passably competent karaoke-night hero. Think of that as your average manager. 

3) And think of that when you hear about the growth of the administrative state. An organization is not improved by stuffing it to the gills with managers. Despite that, stuff away we do: 

And this is before the COVID cash started to roll in. 

I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. 

As schools continue to release more troubled snowflakes into the world, confused by the simplest things, short on actual firm knowledge, covered in degrees and debt, large on self-esteem but no genuine self-respect, I expect we will have more regrettable incidents caused by workers with tons of managers but no actual management. 

I hope the next "lab leak" incident will be nothing worse than a common cold. That may be the best we can hope for. 

Snow day.

It wasn't much of a snow day. I was running around like a maniac, partly hoping to accomplish things before the First Snowfall of the Winter hit, which didn't hit in winter but in the last ten days of autumn, but let's not be picky. 

The problem with snow is that it can cause trouble in several different ways. It can be thick and hard to move through; it can be light and extremely slippery. We were expecting 2-5 inches of snow, "with possible lollipops of deeper stuff."

Lollipops?

So, I learned something -- "lollipops" to weather buffs are small areas of snow a good deal deeper than the surrounding total. It's not a new term but it was new to me. If you know more about it, please educate me. It doesn't seem to refer to drifts, just weird spots of deep snow. Well, I've been in a lot of weird spots, so I can handle that.

As it turned out, the worst of the snow avoided us and worked its way to Connecticut. They have more money; they can pay the plows. I doubt we got more than two inches of snow here -- puffy stuff but still slippery. The schools are only closed for two hours this morning. Sorry, kids!

Baby Maple's first snow ever

Upshot: I had another busy day and that's all I got. I hope you got something out of today's post, even if it's just that sometimes a lollipop can be deep. 

Meme Thursday?

Sure, why not? Work's pretty busy, but there's always time for memes! Just ask anyone! 

And yet here I am, killin' it

Not one of mine but I love it. Wife says "He looks so happy!"

Those who can do, can't teach.

The old George Bernard Shaw line is "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." More cranky Shavian wisdom, dumping his usual load of, uh, Shaw on the heads on lesser humans. 

Nevertheless, the fact that that line survives in common wisdom while many of his other pithy remarks do not shows there's some truth to it. Actors who are rolling in offers to perform don't have time to teach acting classes, but others who struggle do, and need the money. That's just one example, and I hope it isn't actually universally applicable. Do you want a brain surgeon who was educated entirely by people incapable of doing brain surgery? Do we want mathematicians on space programs who have been taught by those who can't calculate? 

Maybe it only applies to the arts. And, I'll say other skilled work, like sports. But there is a flip side, as the title of this blog entry makes clear -- many who can do actually can't teach. 

Aaron Judge may be challenging Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, but the Bambino is still the greatest home run hitter who ever lived; if he played entirely in the live-ball era with today's relatively dinky ballparks he'd have probably hit a thousand dingers. But could he teach someone to hit?

Apparently not, and the baseball people knew it. Ruth had hoped he would be selected as a manager for the Yankees, but he only got to be a first-base coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers. And that didn't go too well, according to the site DodgerBlue:  

Ruth made his coaching debut with a doubleheader but his overall time with the Dodgers was largely unassuming. Anecdotes detail Ruth’s interest in relaying signs as non-existent. He was ejected from an August game due to arguing a call with a first-base umpire.

     Ruth’s arrival did improve attendance but the team’s play largely remained the same. They went 47-49 after he joined the coaching staff and finished 11 games below .500. Brooklyn went 16-13 in July, which was just one of two winning months that season.

What about Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, the last man to hit over .400? He was a proud and clever man, a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea. Surely he had some wisdom to impart that would make his team better. 

Nope. Williams's stint as manager of the Senators/Rangers from 1969 to 1972 left him with a record of 273-364, and that was it for his managing career. 

How about the brilliant-hitting Cardinal, Stan the Man Musial? He had some sophisticated advice for the aspiring hitter: "You wait for a strike, then you knock the shit out of it." 

So basically we can see that not everyone is cut out to impart practical knowledge to the next generation. The reason I was thinking about this was that my dad was like that. He could fix anything, but he was incapable of teaching anything. It wasn't his fault. Good teachers really are a gift in any field, and not everyone has the knack. 

I hate the way our nation is expected to slaver over professional educators as a class. Forget it. As we've been discovering, a lot of them suck at teaching (we may have remembered that from our own schooling) and some should not be allowed near children. But if you or your kids had a truly good teacher, be grateful for that. Knowledge alone isn't enough, and theory probably does nothing but get in the way. You have to have the knack. 

Voting test.

Friend and pest Mr. Philbin asks (I'm paraphrasing), "Why did you post that screed yesterday about efforts to get morons to vote without providing a solution?"

Well, I suppose he's right -- we can't stop Rock the Vote from trying to help idiots to go vote, let alone Google. They have a right of speech and assembly, although they and others like them would be happy to deny those rights to those who oppose them.

Aside from are commonsense fraud-prevention measures, like voter ID and requiring states to maintain updated voter rolls (and other racist! stuff like that, I know), I would suggest an exceptionally modest citizenship test for anyone who wants to vote. It would require no more than the broadest knowledge that could be gained from watching the "America Rock" section of the classic children's education series Schoolhouse Rock!, which was targeted at children of grammar-school age. Each episode is three minutes long, and there are twelve altogether (expanded from the original nine), and they explain some of our history and the reason for the structure of the government outlined in the Constitution. 

All I want is a test that would show that the voter has the slightest grasp of what the country is all about. Multiple-choice questions include things like:

1) Which document makes us a "nation of laws," meaning we have no monarch who can do whatever he wants?

a) Monroe Doctrine

b) Gettysburg Address

c) The Constitution

d) Hardee's Menu

2) What are the three co-equal branches of government?

a) Active, Passive, Aggressive

b) Executive, Legislative, Judiciary

c) Commons, Lords, Crown

d) Rich, Poor, Middle

3) In what century did adult American women win the right to vote?

a) 21st

b) 20th

c) 19th

d) 12th

4) Which is one purpose for the Electoral College as a means of choosing a president? 

a) To allow the Judiciary a voice in government.

b) To steal elections.

c) To give New Hampshire the first presidential primary.

d) To give smaller states a better chance of expressing their needs to the nation.

5) Who was the author of the Declaration of Independence?

a) Thomas Jefferson

b) B.B. King

c) Abraham Lincoln

d) Betsy Ross

Anyone who can't answer these really has no business voting,

The problem with a lot of modern elections is that our current tribalism is shattering us the way it did at the Civil War, only it's not just along state lines. We have no sense that the nation itself is important; only a demand that we get what we want from it. 

If you want to get biological about it, the orbitofrontal cortex of our brains is where we store our relative values, and if we have no ingrained sense of the "cool" values, the "hot" ones will win every time. Such as:

Cool value                                   Hot value

I want to lose weight.                   I want that doughnut!

I want to save money.                  I want to SHOP!

I want to be sober.                        Bad day and time to get my DRINK ON!

I want a strong nation.                 I want government to FIX MY [fill in blank] NOW!

I want my rights protected.         I want government to FIX MY [fill in blank] NOW!

The cool values were always taught to children and young adults by mature society; that ship has not entirely sailed, but it's down the river and heading out to sea. And young people and others who don't know all that much show it in their voting. Plus, they're being told in school that America is a big lump of crap anyway, so why not just get what you want from it?

"America Rock" could help fix this, in just twelve three-minute lessons. Then voters who pass the test can vote legally for the rest of their lives. And maybe they'd think a little better about the sacrifices and character of their ancestors as well. 

Get out the dopes.

I see Google is getting into its usual act, trying to make it easier for people who are too dumb to vote to get out and vote. 

The company would deny that it's trying to get only one particular kind of voter -- Leftist -- just as it would deny that its search results skew toward liberal media sources on any topic. But we know. 

Leftists, who think they are smarter than us idiots, somehow always do things to try to get the least-informed people to notch a ballot, and do it as many times as possible. This has been going on since the big Democrat machines of the Boss Tweed era, but has been institutionalized since Bill Clinton's Motor Voter Act of 1993. The idea then was to latch on to dumdums who wouldn't cross the street to vote but had to go to the Motor Vehicles department in their state, and get them to register to vote. It was opposed at the time by Rightists, but not very strongly, because no one wants to say that people who couldn't care less about voting should be discouraged from doing so. 

Well, I'll say it. 

MTV got on the bandwagon back when its M stood for Music (I think now it stands for Moron). Back in 1990 the station promoted the Rock the Vote nonprofit to get know-nothings off the sofa and into the voting booths. It was nominally nonpartisan, but we all know the way dummies who think the government exists to rob from the rich and give to everyone else will vote -- "Robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul," as Kipling put it. Back then it was assumed that all the rich people were white-shoed Thurston Howell IIIs, who would be made to pony up so college students and dropouts alike could have a cornucopia of free stuff. 

Things look rather different now. The rich people are all into radical chic and the nation is a lot farther in debt -- and the welfare state has expanded far beyond the fever dreams of FDR. 

An uninformed -- or worse, misinformed -- population is not fit for representative government, and this was a key reason public education was accepted nationally. But now we find that public education is becoming a large source of misinformation for youth. Some things voters ought to know but don't include:

✅ How government spending and debt affects the value of money itself;

✅ How rich people hide their money to keep it safe from taxation in ways the middle class cannot do;

✅ How the middle class is the only thing that keeps serfdom at bay, by having the wherewithal to stand up for itself;

✅ How the rotten history of any other country on this earth compares to that of the United States;

✅ How bills really become laws in the current degraded state of Congress (see for example the monstrosity called Obamacare)*;

✅ How much harder life is for the ignorant;

✅ How stable marriage is the best defense against poverty for men and women;

✅ How education has been directed toward frivolous tribalism and away from important facts -- facts of life that continue to operate whether we are aware of them or not.

Unfortunately, the more our stupid citizens (and others), educated in terrible schools, get out there and vote, the more stupid government we are likely to have. The basics of civilized society are not that hard to master, and yet somehow people can get through graduate school and know nothing about them. Alas!

*For example, how Charles Rangel introduced a spending bill in the House (where all spending bills must originate) with the friendly and anodyne title of "Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009"; the bill got to the Senate where it was completely stripped of its title and all its innards, stuffed as full of pork and socialism as a Thanksgiving turkey, then reconciled with the House under its new monstrous form -- a Trojan House virus, if you will -- to pretend that the spending bill originated in the people's House as demanded by the Constitution. It should have been thrown out by the Supreme Court just for that. 

Midvale's world.

One of the most famous -- maybe the most famous -- of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons is the Midvale School for the Gifted. 

I must have seen this a thousand times and it's still funny. 

What's not funny is that we now live in Midvale's world. We live in an era in which our elites are stuffed with self-confidence but are demonstrably incompetent. They seem to think that all their problems can be solved if they just believe in themselves, and when they fail anyway, it was all the fault of those bastards on the other side, just as the Soviet Union blamed masses of saboteurs and hoarders when their miserable plans came to nothing. The idea that our elites know nothing but charge in like blundering clowns anyway never occurs to them. How could they fail? They always did so well in school!

As Nathanael Blake wrote in January: 

The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us.

You can say that again, brother. Also: 

This combination of arrogance, incompetence, and malice undermines the legitimacy of elite power. A prudent ruling class would be self-aware enough to realize this vulnerability. It would be wise for them to be less culturally aggressive, economically greedy, and politically domineering, but our elites lack the coherence and self-restraint to do so.

There's that word: Incompetence. Since the Kennedy Administration's "best and brightest" led us into a war in Vietnam that by structure and fear of World War III we could not win, our country has been led by dumbbells who have the utmost confidence in their mental superiority. It was bad enough in the sixties; later, the institutionalization of these morons in permanent government agencies made them completely unaccountable. They can perform like idiots, completely screw up their assignments, lie, lash out at the little people, break the law, deny everything when their policies ruin and kill people, and pay no price -- even be hailed as heroes by their companions in the inner circle. Nothing matters to them as long as they remain in the inner circle. 

C.S. Lewis learned about what he called the "inner ring" at boarding school and beyond. He knew how hard it was to be an outsider, but also the horrible and perilous temptation to be an insider. As he wrote: "Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things." He considered it one of the most deadly temptations: 

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.

But this is Midvale's world, where it's even worse, because not only are those in the inner circle flirting with damnation, but also their stupidity and entirely unearned confidence is killing the rest of us. 

We shouldn't send these dummies to the Pull door. We should send them to the Exit door, and fast.