The Vow
So it is with good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they might just die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.
My knitting blog is now located at the Needle Exchange!
Damn you, Transmit 3.5.6!!
My FTP program has somehow kicked the bucket. I can’t login to my server for some reason, so I’ve been having to use a crappy web-based java applet to transfer files. Never again! I’m positive that it’s a problem with Transmit (a mac FTP program) because it I upgrade to 3.5.6 then the problem goes away. But then it yells at me that I’m pirating software! Stupid Transmit. Anyhoo, suggestions are welcome for a better / equally nice freeware Mac FTP program.
Side note: Is Fugu any good?
Former Editor Can’t Believe Shit College Newspaper Is Printing
Former Editor Can’t Believe Shit College Newspaper Is Printing
NEW YORK—Troy Bartell, 22, former editor-in-chief of Boston University’s student newspaper The Daily Free Press, said Monday that his once-prestigious paper is in “free-fall,” and is now printing only “ridiculous, brutally incompetent shit.”
“This is lousy, lousy journalism,” said Bartell, who still scours the paper’s online edition for typos despite graduating in May 2006. “The way they covered the School of Management’s Casino Night this year was a slap in the face. Complete and utter fluff. Don’t tell me what the people were wearing, damn it—tell me who won the raffle at the end of the night, and what the prizes were.”
This is what I’ve been saying all along
“Manufacturing Dissent”: Turning the lens on Michael Moore
By John Anderson
Published: February 26, 2007
Michael Moore, who carries around controversy the way Paul Bunyan toted an ax, has won legions of fans for being a ballcap-wearing fly in the ointment of Republican politics. For tweaking the documentary form. Even for making millions of dollars in the traditionally poverty-stricken genre of nonfiction film.
Many despise him for the same reasons.
The Toronto-based documentary filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk started out in the first camp. But during the course of making an unauthorized film about Moore, they wound up somewhere in between. In the process, their experience has added a twist to the long-running story of an abrasive social critic who has frequently been criticized from the right, but far less often, as is the case with Melnyk and Caine, from his own end of the political spectrum.
“We just wanted to take a look at Michael Moore and his films. It was only by talking to people that we found out this other stuff.”
In part the “stuff” amounts to a catalogue of alleged errors — both of omission and commission — in Moore’s films, beginning with his 1989 debut, “Roger & Me.” That film largely revolved around Moore’s fruitless attempts to interview Roger Smith, then the chairman of General Motors, after his company closed plants in Moore’s birthplace, Flint, Michigan: an interview that occurred, Melnyk and Caine said, although Moore left it on the cutting-room floor.
Calling the Melnyk-Caine film “unbelievably fair,” Pierson said it asks what really matters in nonfiction filmmaking: Should all documentary-making be considered subjective and ultimately manipulative, or should the viewer be able to believe what he or she sees? “I found it encouraging,” he said, “that my students were dumbstruck.”
I really loved Roger & Me, and then Bowling for Columbine. When I found out how many of Bowling for Columbine’s scenes for constructed (a large part of the Charlton Heston interview, where they insinuated that the same man who marched with MLKJ in 1963 was a racist, was fudged), I was really… disillusioned. I didn’t have the heart to watch Fahrenheit 9/11. Documentaries are supposed to expose lies, not tell them.
I’ll be watching this movie.
The other side of the coin: really really really awful teachers
Because the teacher’s union in Ontario has become so powerful, it is nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. The process of firing a teacher can take years, at which point unions will complain of harassment and request the teacher be moved to a new school, and the process begins all over again. Certain tactics have henceforth become commonplace to deal with problem teachers. If a teacher is truly abysmal, he or she will be shuffled around the school system or moved to higher grades where they are less likely to do damage to younger children’s education. In some cases, teachers will be split between two or three schools at the same time. These are attempts to dilute the bad influence of the particular individual, as well as putting pressure on the teacher to retire or quit.
I know this unofficially, so I’m afraid to use it in my essay without corroboration. If anyone’s willing to testify to any of this, let me know.
The best things to happen on Oscar Night®
- Melissa Etheridge thanking her wife while accepting the award for Best Original Song (in An Inconvenient Truth), thereby making at least 11 Republican senator’s heads explode
- Clint Eastwood’s response of “…ok.” to hearing Ennio Morricone unleash a stream of Italian and realizing he’s going to have to translate all of it. That and “I should have worn my glasses.”
- Ellen asking Steven Spielberg to “make [his picture of her and Clint] more even on both sides”
- Forest Whitaker’s Oscar
BTW, I just checked IMDB and it seems Forest Whitaker has won the following awards for his role in the Last King of Scotland:
Academy Award
BAFTA Film Award
Black Reel Award
Boston Society of Film Critics Award
Broadcast Film Critics Association Award
Chicago Film Critics Association Award
Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award
Florida Film Critics Circle Award
Golden Globe
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award
National Board of Review Award
National Society of Film Critics Award
New York Film Critics Circle Award
Online Film Critics Society Award
Satellite Award
Screen Actors Guild Award
Southeastern Film Critics Association Award
Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Award
He also won actor of the year at the Hollywood Film Festival. The only two awards for which he has been nominated and has not won are the British Independent Film Awards and the Image Awards, and that’s because the Image Awards haven’t happened yet.
The four sides to the education debate
There are four types of people fighting about education. They are:
- Teachers. Most of them know what they’re talking about, because they’re the ones on the front line. They can be divided into dumb teachers and smart teachers. The dumb teachers are the reason for the debate. The smart teachers aren’t paid enough.
- Administrators, principals, etc. Once again, these people know what they’re talking about because they were once teachers. Some of them were once bad teachers and are bad administrators, but they just sit around and let the paychecks roll in, so their effect on the debate is minimal.
- Parents. They can be divided into negligent parents, good parents and outspoken parents. The negligent parents are not heard from, and the good parents nurture their kids and only get in the way of teachers if those teachers aren’t doing a good job. The outspoken parents are never satisfied, are usually jerks, and blame everything on the teachers. They usually don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t understand how education research can distort facts, so they usually end up supporting dumb educational models or just yell a lot.
- Education researchers. Some researchers (like Isabel Beck) were once teachers and so they focus on the practical applications of education research. The others don’t know what they’re talking about because they’ve spent 25 years in academia and have never seen a 9-year-old before. The latter group is full of assholes.
The first two groups are constantly being chided for accepting “unproven” models for teaching reading by the third group. The fourth group (excepting the Beck-lead subgroup) put out unrealistic or ineffective models that power the third group. And these last two groups are the bane of my existence. That is all.