Tastes like piss and flies, don't it?
Apr. 7th, 2008 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 6. High today: 12.
L. and I watched Clerks II yesterday. It has a lot of words. I wonder a) what movie has the most words of any movie ever made, and b) what feature-length movie has the highest word density? "Tastes like piss and flies" is, anyway, the funniest thing I have seen since I first saw Garfield Minus Garfield. Garfield Minus Garfield is the funniest thing I have seen since ever.
There's only snow left on the northeast-facing slopes of the ravine, and on the paths where it's been packed down. A winter's worth of dog-abandoned tennis balls has emerged. The golden-crowned kinglets are back--I think they must be the birds I was never able to identify last fall; it could be that I'm getting a better look at them now because the grass isn't hiding them. And the chipping sparrows, and the red-winged blackbirds, and the woodpeckers are no longer pecking solo but hammering away at each other. It was a good evening for watching the earthlight on the tipped-over moon. The wind was cold today like the wind can only be cold when it's warm. It's not quite the warm season yet, but it's getting there more days than not.
I woke up this morning to a, hmm, discussion, debate, frame-job, concerning the homework issue which has become burning lately for some reason and caught fire this week because somebody at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education released some study saying that kids have too much homework and it's interfering with their family lives and so forth. I saw a blurb in the paper the other day on this; it said that the study's authors said that young children should have as homework to talk with their parents. This probably tells you something about the study's authors. (I guess the way the education wars shape up these days is like this: the parents think everything's the teachers' fault, the teachers think everything's the parents' fault, and the policymakers think we just need to get the teachers and parents to work together.) Anyway, I find this whole homework business remarkable because it turns the picture of the world I grew up with on its head: as a kid, I knew that the way the world worked was that my parents and my teachers were on one side, and I was on the other. (This is not to say that there wasn't plenty of evidence to the contrary; it's just that no amount of evidence could be sufficient to shake this world-foundational belief.) But this homework business indicates that parents--at least, the squeaky wheels who are getting all the grease these days--see themselves on the side of their kids against the teachers. The teachers, I take it, are like the government, and homework is like taxes: no matter how much you have, you should have less.
This afternoon I went to a talk about video surveillance. The speaker was arguing that we (i.e., we leftists) should quit trying to get privacy laws enacted, because The State always gets exempted from privacy laws so privacy laws only restrict what we can do and not what they can do. Instead, we should subvert surveillance by practising sousveillance! Go to your local Wal*Mart and record them! See how they like it!
Part of the homework frame-job was the host getting a guy from Finland on to say how wonderful Finland is despite not having any homework, so that the American "expert" would realize that he is wrong when he says that kids do not have too much homework. But the guy from Finland didn't want to talk about homework, which he obviously thought was not an issue; he wanted to point out that in Finland teachers have master's degrees and are well paid and highly thought of in society, and that in Finland everyone wants kids to be educated for the good of Finland in the world. The host was not interested in or prepared for this diversion, but it was not a diversion. The point is, in Finland, people take themselves to all be on the same side. Here, we are all at war with each other.
I think I said a few years ago, while the hockey lockout was going on, that it had occurred to me that the players by now have the financial werewithal to run the league themselves, but they couldn't do that because they wouldn't be able to agree on how to distribute the money: you can't divide things amongst yourselves in an inegalitarian way without creating conflict amongst yourselves. So they need to have somebody over above them, who they can all hate together, to distribute the money unequally. It occurs to me today that we, at least we North Americans, all need the government for much the same reason. We can all harmlessly hate the government (and everyone who looks like the government, including teachers and bus drivers and Eljay Inc.) together, and blow off most of the hatred we would otherwise harmfully focus on each other.
Speaking of Eljay Inc., the last question in the question period this afternoon was: "What do you think of Facebook?" (The speaker's answer was "I'm too old for Facebook!" I think she was likely younger than me. No more than a couple of years older.) I had been thinking of this myself. I saw another thing in one of the papers yesterday about some kids somewhere making a facebook group devoted to hating their teachers and saying outrageous things about them--and the principal or whoever gets into the group, and a whole production ensues. This is a lot like how the internet makes it easier to get caught plagiarizing. Before kids started stealing googlable stuff from the interweb, it was virtually impossible to catch them plagiarizing. Before facebook, if you wanted to have a discussion group on your teacher's fat ass and how you will remove it and feed it to her, you would have it in the far corner of the schoolyard, or in your basement, and no one would ever know that you, like all the other children, were a psychopath.
What the questioner was actually interested in, though, was the whole exhibitionism thing. Which, you know, I can't really find interesting. Adolescent kids display themselves to strangers, like monkeys showing off their genitals. It's how you get out of the troop that raised you and start your own. The media change, but the basic principle stays the same.
It's the sudden season, spring:
Blooms are bursting from the snow
They've spent the winter pent below,
Growing there impatiently
To save up time for when they're free.
Daffodils three inches tall
Before you know they're up at all.
All around the birds are back
As if there'd never been a lack.
Birds chase down the falling sun
And up again where they'd begun.
Meanwhile, we forget them here
As soon as they're no longer near.
But, around comes life again.
We don't appreciate it then;
Only on some later day
When it's already underway.
It's the sudden season, spring.
L. and I watched Clerks II yesterday. It has a lot of words. I wonder a) what movie has the most words of any movie ever made, and b) what feature-length movie has the highest word density? "Tastes like piss and flies" is, anyway, the funniest thing I have seen since I first saw Garfield Minus Garfield. Garfield Minus Garfield is the funniest thing I have seen since ever.
There's only snow left on the northeast-facing slopes of the ravine, and on the paths where it's been packed down. A winter's worth of dog-abandoned tennis balls has emerged. The golden-crowned kinglets are back--I think they must be the birds I was never able to identify last fall; it could be that I'm getting a better look at them now because the grass isn't hiding them. And the chipping sparrows, and the red-winged blackbirds, and the woodpeckers are no longer pecking solo but hammering away at each other. It was a good evening for watching the earthlight on the tipped-over moon. The wind was cold today like the wind can only be cold when it's warm. It's not quite the warm season yet, but it's getting there more days than not.
I woke up this morning to a, hmm, discussion, debate, frame-job, concerning the homework issue which has become burning lately for some reason and caught fire this week because somebody at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education released some study saying that kids have too much homework and it's interfering with their family lives and so forth. I saw a blurb in the paper the other day on this; it said that the study's authors said that young children should have as homework to talk with their parents. This probably tells you something about the study's authors. (I guess the way the education wars shape up these days is like this: the parents think everything's the teachers' fault, the teachers think everything's the parents' fault, and the policymakers think we just need to get the teachers and parents to work together.) Anyway, I find this whole homework business remarkable because it turns the picture of the world I grew up with on its head: as a kid, I knew that the way the world worked was that my parents and my teachers were on one side, and I was on the other. (This is not to say that there wasn't plenty of evidence to the contrary; it's just that no amount of evidence could be sufficient to shake this world-foundational belief.) But this homework business indicates that parents--at least, the squeaky wheels who are getting all the grease these days--see themselves on the side of their kids against the teachers. The teachers, I take it, are like the government, and homework is like taxes: no matter how much you have, you should have less.
This afternoon I went to a talk about video surveillance. The speaker was arguing that we (i.e., we leftists) should quit trying to get privacy laws enacted, because The State always gets exempted from privacy laws so privacy laws only restrict what we can do and not what they can do. Instead, we should subvert surveillance by practising sousveillance! Go to your local Wal*Mart and record them! See how they like it!
Part of the homework frame-job was the host getting a guy from Finland on to say how wonderful Finland is despite not having any homework, so that the American "expert" would realize that he is wrong when he says that kids do not have too much homework. But the guy from Finland didn't want to talk about homework, which he obviously thought was not an issue; he wanted to point out that in Finland teachers have master's degrees and are well paid and highly thought of in society, and that in Finland everyone wants kids to be educated for the good of Finland in the world. The host was not interested in or prepared for this diversion, but it was not a diversion. The point is, in Finland, people take themselves to all be on the same side. Here, we are all at war with each other.
I think I said a few years ago, while the hockey lockout was going on, that it had occurred to me that the players by now have the financial werewithal to run the league themselves, but they couldn't do that because they wouldn't be able to agree on how to distribute the money: you can't divide things amongst yourselves in an inegalitarian way without creating conflict amongst yourselves. So they need to have somebody over above them, who they can all hate together, to distribute the money unequally. It occurs to me today that we, at least we North Americans, all need the government for much the same reason. We can all harmlessly hate the government (and everyone who looks like the government, including teachers and bus drivers and Eljay Inc.) together, and blow off most of the hatred we would otherwise harmfully focus on each other.
Speaking of Eljay Inc., the last question in the question period this afternoon was: "What do you think of Facebook?" (The speaker's answer was "I'm too old for Facebook!" I think she was likely younger than me. No more than a couple of years older.) I had been thinking of this myself. I saw another thing in one of the papers yesterday about some kids somewhere making a facebook group devoted to hating their teachers and saying outrageous things about them--and the principal or whoever gets into the group, and a whole production ensues. This is a lot like how the internet makes it easier to get caught plagiarizing. Before kids started stealing googlable stuff from the interweb, it was virtually impossible to catch them plagiarizing. Before facebook, if you wanted to have a discussion group on your teacher's fat ass and how you will remove it and feed it to her, you would have it in the far corner of the schoolyard, or in your basement, and no one would ever know that you, like all the other children, were a psychopath.
What the questioner was actually interested in, though, was the whole exhibitionism thing. Which, you know, I can't really find interesting. Adolescent kids display themselves to strangers, like monkeys showing off their genitals. It's how you get out of the troop that raised you and start your own. The media change, but the basic principle stays the same.
It's the sudden season, spring:
Blooms are bursting from the snow
They've spent the winter pent below,
Growing there impatiently
To save up time for when they're free.
Daffodils three inches tall
Before you know they're up at all.
All around the birds are back
As if there'd never been a lack.
Birds chase down the falling sun
And up again where they'd begun.
Meanwhile, we forget them here
As soon as they're no longer near.
But, around comes life again.
We don't appreciate it then;
Only on some later day
When it's already underway.
It's the sudden season, spring.
