From an article in today's Times, about a new offensive on the part of the Somali government to retake the capital, Mogadishu, and ideally impose some order on that anarchic nation:
"There seems to be a qualitative difference, too [between this and earlier attempts to retake the capital]. Somalia's forces are now led by General Gelle, a colonel in Somalia's army decades ago who most recently was an assistant manager at a McDonald's in Germany."
Sounds like the perfect resume to us.
General Gelle actually graduated from the Ronald McDonald Management Training and Counterinsurgency Insititute.
The manager of Gelle's McDonald's is now the Prime Minister of Djibouti.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
Why We Won't Be Winning "Teacher of the Year" Any Time Soon
After a lesson on the different types of sentence (simple, compound, complex) and an explanation of the way clauses can be joined, we distributed a short news article and asked the class to identify each sentence's "type," as well as which clause-connecting rule (if any) was being employed.
(Grumble, grumble.)
Solipsist: All right, how about we raise the stakes?
(Grumble, grumble. . . mmmm?)
Solipsist: You can work alone or in groups, and anyone who does this perfectly--correctly identifies each sentence and rule--will be exempt from next week's grammar quiz.
(Oh! Yeah! OK! Let's do this.)
The class went to work for the remainder of the period, at the end of which we collected their efforts.
Solipsist: OK, so for homework, make sure you study for the quiz.
Student: But we may not have to TAKE the quiz.
Sol: You'll have to take the quiz.
Student: But some of us may have gotten everything right!
Sol: Not likely.
Student: But you don't know.
Sol: True, but do you think we would have made that offer if we thought there was the slightest chance someone would actually get 100%.
Student: You don't believe in us!
Sol: We believe in you.
Student: (As if reading off a billboard) You don't have "faith in our abilities."
Sol: We have ABSOLUTE faith in your abilities! We just don't think your abilities are very good.
----
Would anyone in Solipsist Nation like to be an apple-taster?
(Grumble, grumble.)
Solipsist: All right, how about we raise the stakes?
(Grumble, grumble. . . mmmm?)
Solipsist: You can work alone or in groups, and anyone who does this perfectly--correctly identifies each sentence and rule--will be exempt from next week's grammar quiz.
(Oh! Yeah! OK! Let's do this.)
The class went to work for the remainder of the period, at the end of which we collected their efforts.
Solipsist: OK, so for homework, make sure you study for the quiz.
Student: But we may not have to TAKE the quiz.
Sol: You'll have to take the quiz.
Student: But some of us may have gotten everything right!
Sol: Not likely.
Student: But you don't know.
Sol: True, but do you think we would have made that offer if we thought there was the slightest chance someone would actually get 100%.
Student: You don't believe in us!
Sol: We believe in you.
Student: (As if reading off a billboard) You don't have "faith in our abilities."
Sol: We have ABSOLUTE faith in your abilities! We just don't think your abilities are very good.
----
Would anyone in Solipsist Nation like to be an apple-taster?
Thursday, March 4, 2010
A Wing and a Pwayer
Did you hear about this? In an incident that may set take-your-child-to-work days back a ways, an air-traffic controller at JFK let his young child (we're not sure if it was a boy or girl) "direct" traffic a handful of times. The Federal Aviation Administration and the air traffic controllers' union are predictably not amused. But they seem to be the only ones. If the reactions of the pilots involved are any indication, most of the main players were downright tickled by the whole thing, with one of the pilots even remarking that the kid did an "awesome job."
Look, we're all for airplane safety, and, yeah, what this ATC guy did was, shall we say, ill-advised. But anyone who's getting into high dudgeon--or even low dudgeon--needs to relax. It's not as if the father handed his five-year-old a headset, plopped him into a much-too-big chair, and told him to keep an eye on things while he, the father, went out for a cigarette. The dad--and the dad's supervisor, we should note--were standing right there. And when you hear an obviously extremely young child say something like, "AMX 403, contact departure. Adios amigos," you can safely assume that the father has been listening to the conversation and telling the kid exactly what to say--either that or the kid is some kind of air-traffic savant--either way, the planes were in capable hands.
Now, if we can only interest some kindergartners in teaching composition. . . .
Look, we're all for airplane safety, and, yeah, what this ATC guy did was, shall we say, ill-advised. But anyone who's getting into high dudgeon--or even low dudgeon--needs to relax. It's not as if the father handed his five-year-old a headset, plopped him into a much-too-big chair, and told him to keep an eye on things while he, the father, went out for a cigarette. The dad--and the dad's supervisor, we should note--were standing right there. And when you hear an obviously extremely young child say something like, "AMX 403, contact departure. Adios amigos," you can safely assume that the father has been listening to the conversation and telling the kid exactly what to say--either that or the kid is some kind of air-traffic savant--either way, the planes were in capable hands.
Now, if we can only interest some kindergartners in teaching composition. . . .
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Unnecessary Deceptions
According to the latest actuarial tables of the National Insurance Institute (let's just say there is such a thing), the highest-risk demographics are as follows (in ascending order of likelihood of death within the next five minutes):
3. EOD specialists in Iraq (see "The Hurt Locker"--no, really, see it.)
2. New York City cabbies.
And, coming in at number one by a wide margin. . .
1. Grandparent of a community college student.
Seriously, in the nine years or so that we've been a full-time faculty member, we've witnessed the demise of scores of grandparents, particularly around the time papers are due or exams are administered.
We're sure that some--perhaps most--of these deaths were real. We hope they were. Not that we want to see Nanas and Pop-pops dropping like flies, but just because we'd hate for kids to be lying about this. And, again, not because it bothers us to be lied to, but because it's just so unnecessary! Students don't need to justify their absences--we don't care! That's the wonderful thing about college: As a student, you can come and go as you please, and, as an instructor, YNSHC doesn't have to give a crap about whether you come at all. Whether your great-uncle Helmut has recently passed away or you just forgot to set your alarm clock--it doesn't matter!!! Show up, don't show up, do what you will--just get the work done!
And please, keep the Grim Reaper away from Grandma.
3. EOD specialists in Iraq (see "The Hurt Locker"--no, really, see it.)
2. New York City cabbies.
And, coming in at number one by a wide margin. . .
1. Grandparent of a community college student.
Seriously, in the nine years or so that we've been a full-time faculty member, we've witnessed the demise of scores of grandparents, particularly around the time papers are due or exams are administered.
We're sure that some--perhaps most--of these deaths were real. We hope they were. Not that we want to see Nanas and Pop-pops dropping like flies, but just because we'd hate for kids to be lying about this. And, again, not because it bothers us to be lied to, but because it's just so unnecessary! Students don't need to justify their absences--we don't care! That's the wonderful thing about college: As a student, you can come and go as you please, and, as an instructor, YNSHC doesn't have to give a crap about whether you come at all. Whether your great-uncle Helmut has recently passed away or you just forgot to set your alarm clock--it doesn't matter!!! Show up, don't show up, do what you will--just get the work done!
And please, keep the Grim Reaper away from Grandma.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Clip Show
Nobody likes clip shows, those pointless non-episodes of our favorite TV programs--especially sitcoms--that consist of a hodgepodge of great and not-so-great moments from the series. Yet they persist.
In the early days of TV, a clip show had a sort of rationale: Before the advent of syndication and dozens of channels with hundreds of hours to fill, before the word 'rerun' became a part of the vernacular, producers saw a clip show as a way to get an audience caught up with the characters and storylines. Some shows still do this. "Lost," for example, presents a clip show before the season premiere in order to remind viewers of what they may have missed (or, more likely, misunderstood). More commonly, though, a clip show is develoiped if a series needs a show shot in a hurry and/or to save some money on production and writing costs.
Understanding the rationale, though, doesn't really make the shows any more palatable. One thing that's particularly grating about clip shows is the "frame": the device the writers employ to give the clip show a semblance of plot. The most obvious and blatant type of frame consists of the characters sitting around reminiscing, these reminiscences serving as the precursor of a blurry screen and a harp glissando, which transitions the audience into THE PAST. And whaddya know, we get to see the very event the characters were just reminiscing about.
Were we to be involved in the production of a clip show, we would strive to find a more subtle, organic way to move into the clips.
At any rate, to change the subject, just a little while ago, WOS began randomly barking out numbers between 1 and 438, Fearing that she may be suffering from possession or a particularly non-potty-mouthed strain of Tourette's, we went delving into the solipsistic archives to see if, perhaps, some clue could be unearthed in the posts corresponding to those numbers. Looking at the highlights of those posts may just offer some clues. . . .
44: "Americans are all 5-year-olds. We need our special mug, or we get cranky. We also have our favorite blankets, t-shirts, socks, chairs. Maybe this is not a sign of five-year-oldness, Maybe it's just part of human nature to find comfort in objects."
87: "Technology has been described as a double-edged sword.
"(Digression: This is true. After all, double-edged swords ARE technology. Agriculture, interestingly, is a single-edged sword. Animal husbandry is a trebuchet. Marine biology is a blowgun. . . .)
198: [A summary of a baseball game] "[The Washington] Nationals won the game behind a pitcher who is no longer with the team, and the winning run was scored by someone who isn't on the official game-day roster.
"If you followed all that, children, you're ready to unravel the mysteries of the infield-fly rule."
224: "[Today] what's on our mind is found poetry: little nuggets of linguistic widom that just pop up from time to time. Years ago, when the Solipsist was a writing tutor in New York, he helped an Asian student who was struggling mightily with the English tongue. She was writing a paper about coming to the United States. The paper was rife with grammatical errors, and YNSHC was having difficulty even figuring out the gist of the paper. All of a sudden, stuck almost randomly in the middle of a paragraph, was this:
"'Being an American is easy. Living in America is hard.'
"We were floored!"
308: "Grammar Girl is one Mignon Fogarty.
"(Digression: When she was introduced, we thought her name was Min Yon Fogarty. Briefly, our loathing and envy was replaced by a grudging admiration that a Korean-American had achieved such heights of English fluency as to become Grammar Girl. Then we found out that her name isn't Korean--it's just stupid. EOD)"
Hmmm. . . .WOS seems much better. It seems that a clip show is just what she needed.
In the early days of TV, a clip show had a sort of rationale: Before the advent of syndication and dozens of channels with hundreds of hours to fill, before the word 'rerun' became a part of the vernacular, producers saw a clip show as a way to get an audience caught up with the characters and storylines. Some shows still do this. "Lost," for example, presents a clip show before the season premiere in order to remind viewers of what they may have missed (or, more likely, misunderstood). More commonly, though, a clip show is develoiped if a series needs a show shot in a hurry and/or to save some money on production and writing costs.
Understanding the rationale, though, doesn't really make the shows any more palatable. One thing that's particularly grating about clip shows is the "frame": the device the writers employ to give the clip show a semblance of plot. The most obvious and blatant type of frame consists of the characters sitting around reminiscing, these reminiscences serving as the precursor of a blurry screen and a harp glissando, which transitions the audience into THE PAST. And whaddya know, we get to see the very event the characters were just reminiscing about.
Were we to be involved in the production of a clip show, we would strive to find a more subtle, organic way to move into the clips.
At any rate, to change the subject, just a little while ago, WOS began randomly barking out numbers between 1 and 438, Fearing that she may be suffering from possession or a particularly non-potty-mouthed strain of Tourette's, we went delving into the solipsistic archives to see if, perhaps, some clue could be unearthed in the posts corresponding to those numbers. Looking at the highlights of those posts may just offer some clues. . . .
44: "Americans are all 5-year-olds. We need our special mug, or we get cranky. We also have our favorite blankets, t-shirts, socks, chairs. Maybe this is not a sign of five-year-oldness, Maybe it's just part of human nature to find comfort in objects."
87: "Technology has been described as a double-edged sword.
"(Digression: This is true. After all, double-edged swords ARE technology. Agriculture, interestingly, is a single-edged sword. Animal husbandry is a trebuchet. Marine biology is a blowgun. . . .)
198: [A summary of a baseball game] "[The Washington] Nationals won the game behind a pitcher who is no longer with the team, and the winning run was scored by someone who isn't on the official game-day roster.
"If you followed all that, children, you're ready to unravel the mysteries of the infield-fly rule."
224: "[Today] what's on our mind is found poetry: little nuggets of linguistic widom that just pop up from time to time. Years ago, when the Solipsist was a writing tutor in New York, he helped an Asian student who was struggling mightily with the English tongue. She was writing a paper about coming to the United States. The paper was rife with grammatical errors, and YNSHC was having difficulty even figuring out the gist of the paper. All of a sudden, stuck almost randomly in the middle of a paragraph, was this:
"'Being an American is easy. Living in America is hard.'
"We were floored!"
308: "Grammar Girl is one Mignon Fogarty.
"(Digression: When she was introduced, we thought her name was Min Yon Fogarty. Briefly, our loathing and envy was replaced by a grudging admiration that a Korean-American had achieved such heights of English fluency as to become Grammar Girl. Then we found out that her name isn't Korean--it's just stupid. EOD)"
Hmmm. . . .WOS seems much better. It seems that a clip show is just what she needed.
Monday, March 1, 2010
TB or Not TB
Sorry.
But that is the question. And the answer is, "Not TB."
It's time, you see, for our quadrennial tuberculosis screening. We're really not sure why the school district makes such a big deal about this. Sure, TB is a scary communicable disease, but is it really that rampant among the general population of community college personnel? It's not as if we just got out of jail or returned from Canada. The worst part is we had to wait nearly an hour just to have a licensed medical professional look at our arm to confirm that we were disease-free.
Waiting that long, we almost wanted to hear we were sick, just to make it worthwhile.
By the way, we are now officially done capping on Canada.
Well, almost.
We're actually a bit worried. Canadians are getting a bit uppity since yesterday's Olympic hockey result:
" . . . Canadians, who consider themselves an understated lot, burst out of their modesty to become a unified, full-throated fan base. For two weeks during the Olympics, the streets of Vancouver were filled deep into the nights with people wearing 'Canada' on their sleeves--and their chests, their faces and any other space that they could fill with expressions of national pride."
Even our FFB, the normally sedate Emi Ha, is engaging in a bit of triumphal chest-thumping!
You may think we're worrying about nothing, but as Father Guido Sarducci once pointed out, Canada--with its tubercular hordes of hockey-maddened Visigoths--is closer to the United States than Texas is to New York.
Think about it.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
At the RIsk of Offending All Our Amish Followers
Eventful Sunday: We went to Target to buy a breadbox. No more rampaging bread at Solipsist HQ. This should also put an end to all those tedious "20 Questions" arguments: "A wombat is NOT bigger than a breadbox! See?!?"
Breadboxes: They're not just for the Amish anymore.
Speaking of which, we've been thinking about converting to Amish. We like to wear black. And we think we could make one of those mustacheless-beards like good. There's something appealing about the thought of trading in the Slopmobile for a horse-drawn carriage and blogging from a simple Pennsylvania farmhouse--you can get a wireless connection there, right? WOS isn't crazy about the idea, but, of course, if we convert, then we figure she becomes our property, so who cares what she thinks.
From the sentences you thought you'd never hear file:
WOS: "I'm going to burn you with my cigarette if you don't shut up about converting to Amish!"
She's going to look adorable in one of those little white bonnets.
Breadboxes: They're not just for the Amish anymore.
Speaking of which, we've been thinking about converting to Amish. We like to wear black. And we think we could make one of those mustacheless-beards like good. There's something appealing about the thought of trading in the Slopmobile for a horse-drawn carriage and blogging from a simple Pennsylvania farmhouse--you can get a wireless connection there, right? WOS isn't crazy about the idea, but, of course, if we convert, then we figure she becomes our property, so who cares what she thinks.
From the sentences you thought you'd never hear file:
WOS: "I'm going to burn you with my cigarette if you don't shut up about converting to Amish!"
She's going to look adorable in one of those little white bonnets.
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