This Is Not News

OK, gotta get the blogging mojo working again. Stayed home with Alex today because she was sick. During that time I read a bunch of stuff. I took another look at DC Entertainment’s new logo, and I still can’t figure out where the company’s going with that. When I was a kid I knew exactly what a DC comic looked like. Now when you type DC logo into Google you get a clothes company.

I read about the overnight line to register kids for kindergarten at Penn Alexander, and I wondered what would happen if the city and state worked to give every school the resources that Penn Alexander has.

The city and state might look more like Finland, where the priority is to give students equal access to education – all schools are publicly funded. I read about that in The Atlantic, and it was a fascinating look at a very different vision of education.

I was on The Atlantic site in part because I was reading about Red Tails, the new movie produced by George Lucas about the Tuskegee Airmen. Definitely going to need to see that film.

And I read a couple of other things that I am going to work on turning into blog posts the rest of this week, so stay tuned. 🙂

Presidential Project Phase 3: On to South Carolina

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/10/145011112/romney-on-glide-path-as-campaign-heads-south
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/10/145006842/romney-enters-danger-zone-in-weeks-ahead

Use these two NPR articles to describe two advantages Mitt Romney has after the New Hampshire primary and two challenges he still faces.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/us/politics/idealogy-and-faith-questions-await-romney-south-carolina-primary.html

What are examples of Mitt Romney’s past record as a moderate Republican?
How might Romney’s religion be an obstacle to success in the South Carolina primary?
In your opinion, is a candidate’s religion (or lack of religion) something that voters should consider? Why/why not?

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/20120110_Marc_Lamont_Hill_GOP_hopefuls_playing_to_usual_racial_divide.html

What examples does the author give of Republican candidates making racially-charged statements?
Why does the author say that the Republicans’ message about welfare programs is not true?
If the message is not true, why does the author say that Republicans use it anyway?

http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/

Use the Issues section of this page. Choose one issue that you think is the most important in this presidential campaign. What do you think is the right way to handle this issue? Does any Republican candidate share your position? Does President Obama?

This is one of those weeks that I wish had a corporeal form so that I could give it a good swift kick in the behind on its way out the door.

I’m in a place where I’m having a hard time seeing the positives around me, and it’s making me not entirely pleasant to be around.

Certainly there are enough negatives in the world right now, but I don’t need to dwell on them. So, time to pull back and try to recharge. Til tomorrow, I hope that something better comes along.

A quick list:

• Not quite a Nee Year’s resolution, but a resolution times to the new year: After several years of not closely tracking my spending, I bought a new budgeting program and I’m going to try to observe exactly where my money goes. I expect I will soon be alarmed by what I spend on food in various forms.
• I do hope that I resist the urge to make some purchases simply because I don’t want to have to do the data entry.
• I had to break up a trip to the grocery store into three different categories. Someone needs to create financial tracking software for obsessive-compulsive philosophers. “Is the essential nature of these paper towels that of ‘groceries’ or ‘household items’?”
• We decided to celebrate the last day of break with a trip to the movies. We were not the only ones. The theater was more crowded than I have seen it at any point since we watched the last Harry Potter movie.
• We got Alex a set of DVDs from the first five Potter movies for Christmas. We should have all the special features memorized very soon.
• Today we saw The Adventures of Tintin, which I think was a very nice combination of animation and motion capture. A nice adventure story with good action and good humor.
• Doesn’t look like I’m gonna have much luck getting Alex to the theater to see Star Wars Episode I when it gets re-released. As she pointed out, we already own it, so we’d be paying money to see something we already have.
• I’m going to remember this conversation if she ever wants to see a Potter re-release.
• With the Iowa caucuses tomorrow, I’m trying to think of ways that my ethics class can spend the time between Iowa and New Hampshire analyzing the candidates and their positions to try to see what that says about American society. Haven’t quite cracked the nut yet, but hey, I still have 24 hours.
• Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s make it a good one.

There are a lot of angles to the Penn State case, but one thing that keeps coming into my head is how almost no one saw this particular ending coming. I wonder, did Joe Paterno, at any point in the last decade, think about what his final game as head coach of Penn State would be like? Did he imagine that moment as a final recognition and culmination of his career? Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t want that final moment. Maybe he wanted to keep going until he dropped, so he would never have to think “This is my last moment as coach.” I don’t know. But whatever he thought, whatever he hoped for . . . I wonder how many times in the last ten years (at least) he’s known how quickly that vision would fall apart if the truth ever came out. I wonder if he ever thought about what it would take to truly go out on his own terms with his reputation and integrity intact.

Couple of quick notes while I try to de-sludge my brain and the rest of my body from this cold:

• Remember that last city council spot I mentioned in yesterday’s piece about the election day turnout? We’re still waiting for a couple of precincts to report, but right now the margin between the guy who would get the job and the guy who be almost-but-not-quite-there is 76 votes.
• Joe Posnanski has become one of my favorite sportswriters. He has been living in State College working on a book about Joe Paterno. Um, get me rewrite?
• My current Facebook status: The Penn State story continues to be a tragedy, but now it’s adding farce. The “Blue Out” T shirts that are supposed to send an anti-child abuse message this weekend say “Stop child abuse, Blue out Nebraska.” Really? It’s really a good idea to add a sports slogan to the “Stop chid abuse” message? And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall Nebraska employing, giving facilities access to, or covering up the actions of an alleged child abuser. Pretty sure it was a different school that did that.
• Now that Alton Brown has retired Good Eats I should probably do a retrospective of the things he’s taught me to cook. This week we’re getting a lot of mileage out of his recipe for Perfect Popcorn. I use safflower oil instead of peanut oil because I do not like peanut oil. And I take the melted butter (2 tablespoons) and drizzle it over the kernels right as they start popping. Gotta be careful not to burn it but it saves me from having to drizzle it over the popped kernels.
• Mike Mills and Michael Stipe are doing lots of promotion for the upcoming retrospective. NPR will stream the double album until it comes out. I have two major thoughts right now: 1) I will finish the next part of my own retrospective this week; 2) With all the talk that Mike Mills in particular has done about leaving on their own terms, I desperately hope that there is no reason to fear a revelation that would tarnish everything that the band has meant to its fans for three decades. Not that there are any contrasting stories in the news or anything.
• Did I mention I really hate being sick?
• Before I go, if you’re not reading Autodizactic, here’s the kind of post you’re missing.

Election Day in Philadelphia came with pretty sparse turnout on a beautiful day. I was home sick from work, which kind of made me miss the days when my house was the polling place. On the other hand, I didn’t have to clean my garage.

On the one hand the sparse turnout is no surprise, since there was very little chance that Michael Nutter was going to lose his re-election bid. After the Philadelphia Republican Party couldn’t beat John Street in two tries, it’s kind of given up on the mayor’s races.

On the flip side, I’m checking out election results at Philadelphia’s unofficial reporting site, and it looks like the last City Council at-large race is going to be decided by about 1000-1500 votes. In a city of a million people, that’s a pretty tiny margin, and if a determined group had wanted to they might have been able to control who won that last seat. (On a side note, I’ve spent most of the last 25 years trying to remember that Brian O’Neill is my councilman and Denny O’Brien is my state representative. Now they’re both my councilman because O’Brien gave up the state House for an at-large council seat.)

There was also a race for the City Commissioners’ office. The City Commissioners are officially in charge of running elections in the city, and it looks like two of the three members have been voted out this year – one in the primary, and one tonight. A small but significant number of people voted for mayor – an election that was high profile but never really in doubt – but not for commissioner – a race that got much less attention but was much closer, at least for the third and final seat on the board. And since that position will influence elections for the next four years, there was a lot of bang for the buck to be had in that election.

On the other hand, some people make the argument that we should have voters select lower-profile officials like that – the nominations get swept up in party politics because no one is really paying attention, and it costs the city money to go through the election process anyway. Maybe, at least for now, we would be better off with fewer offices to vote for so we could pay more attention to each one.

I’ve been shopping for a new computer for a while, so I’ve been reading a lot of tech sites. Even still, it took a while for information about Thailand to penetrate my consciousness. The country is experiencing an extremely significant amount of flooding, which has shut down many of its factories. The humanitarian disaster is bad enough, but there’s a significant technological ripple effect. Many of the world’s computer hard drive manufacturers have factories in Thailand, and those factories are out of commission right now. I’ve already seen the price of hard drives for PCs go up in the last few weeks, and supplies have not yet run out. This doesn’t just affect home computers – it affects all the companies that depend on storing large amounts of data. With so many companies relying on the cloud, this story is not likely to be over any time soon. It’s another reminder that our technological world still depends on the stability of the natural world, and nature doesn’t always cooperate with our plans.

It’s Not News’ 11th birthday, and my 36th. I brought candy in for my students, and many of them sang Happy Birthday for me. I spent a couple of ours talking with a former colleague about teaching and how we get better at it and do it in a way that makes us happy. I came home to my awesome wife and amazing daughter, who had not only forgiven me for accidentally taking Alex’s sandwich instead of mine this morning, but they had gotten me a nifty chocolate cake. And all night I’ve been getting great messages from friends and family on Facebook. (Along with emails from message boards I never visit any more – it’s like the ghost of Internet birthdays past.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’d love to be getting about four more hours of sleep a night, but I really have a wonderful life. I’m gonna go spend some time enjoying it.

In World History we’re currently studying the Roman Empire, and today we began the section of the chapter that deals with the fall of the (western) empire. In trying to lay out the problems that plagues Rome, the textbook spends a fair amount of time on the idea of inflation. (Side note: of course, given the circumstances, “a fair amount of time” amounts to about a paragraph.) We spent some time talking through the concept. Everyone in the class could relate to the idea that things used to be cheaper than they are today. We all have older relatives or neighbors to tell us about that, after all. As we talked about the idea that coins containing less of a precious metal might be worth less, one student asked a very good question:

Why should it matter what the coin has in it? If the coin says it’s worth a certain amount, it should be worth that amount.

I can’t tell you how happy I was to get that question. I loved the thought that went into it, and the refusal to just take what I was saying for granted (or just tune it out). But I also loved that it raised a topic that my philosophical side has pondered for a long time: What the heck is money, anyway?

I mean, I have a rough understanding of the difference between the gold standard vs. a fiat currency, for example. When I was a teenager, I used to think of money as congealed time. “It took me three hours to earn this 20 dollars,” I would say to myself. “Is this CD going to be worth 2 ½ hours of my time?” Even with this thought process, I did not always make sound financial decisions. But it helped. But I put aside the more fundamental question: why was I willing to trade my time and labor for pieces of paper with numbers on them, and why was the record store willing to trade me a CD for those pieces of paper?

Well, I was willing to do the former because I believed that the latter was true, and events justified my conclusion. But when you get right down to it, those pieces of paper are only usable in trades because we believe in them. And human history is full of pretty irrational examples of such beliefs. From tulips to Pets.com shares, people are capable of changing their mind pretty quickly about what certain things are worth. Indeed, we don’t even need the pieces of paper anymore – we’ll take numbers on a computer screen. It’s an amazing example of human beings creating a reality just by believing in it. So it fascinates me, and I keep looking for better ways to conceive of this magic thing we call money.