Monthly Archives: July 2006

Never Send A Man To The Grocery Store

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Ball Park Franks. Be Big. Be Meaty. Be Frank.

Oh, yes. We had some sort of “agent appreciation” event here at the office, involving the wearing of Cubs shirts and the eating of hot dogs. The team leaders sent of their number – who happened to be male – to Costco to get the supplies.

No one thought to question the cost until at the end of the day, the number of unopened packages was totalled up. The men were told to purchase about 200 dogs, total. At Costco, they bought 5 cases. On the front of each case, it said “32” in large numerals. Below each numeral, it said in small letters “packages containing 8 franks.”

They thought “32 times 6 is 192. That’s about enough.” Yes, they bought 1536 hot dogs. The irony is that both work with math a lot.

Fortunately, the unopened packages can be returned.

The consensus of the team leaders: they will never send the men to the grocery store again.

It’s Not Really A Reversal Of Policy If You Say It’s Not

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U.S. Will Give Detainees Geneva Rights | Chicago Tribune

The policy, described in a memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, appears to reverse the administration’s earlier insistence that the detainees are not prisoners of war and thus not subject to the Geneva protections.

Later on, glam White House Spokesman Tony Snow says ‘ “It’s not really a reversal of policy.” Another spokesman says “The memo that went out, it doesn’t indicate a shift in policy,” he said. “It just announces the decision of the court.” ‘

Uh huh. Sure. I remember in the early days of AAR when Janeane Garofalo used to announce “It’s Opposite Day at the White House.” Apparently, every day is Opposite Day at the White House when discussing news items that don’t go 100% the way they want.

Sports Fen: Attention Excess Disease

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I’m no sports fan, so admittedly I’m no expert on this, but I really have to question a person’s motivation to dress up in some outllandish way in order to show their support for a team. What, really, is the point? Will your team win if you and your friends paint the letters of the team names on your pale, hairless chests and stand throughout the game? Will they lose if you fail to shave your chest hair first (in the case of male fans) and then stand in the wrong order, spelling out “GO SCUB?” It won’t make a
difference, but you might get your picture in the paper, or show up on the evening news.

What then, is the real point? Why, to get attention.

In college, I went to a football game to cheer on my team (the ever-hapless Oregon Ducks). Actually, I went to the game because there was nothing better to do and I might as well sit in a freezing rain with a bunch of other idiots, drinking in the parking lot and attempting to sneak in a few cans of beer down the sleeves of my down parka. This was before stadium officials got wise to young women carrying in the beer, and it didn’t stop the frat boys from sneaking in an entire keg in the papier-mache’ belly of
a Duck “mascot figure.” 

Anyway, during the game there was a heavy-set guy leading cheers from the stands with a big green “O” painted on a white background with yellow highlights on his large belly. He had a heavy beard but not much chest hair, which appeared to be shaved. I ended up talking to him for a while between cheers; he had no name, he was simply known to fans as “Fat Guy With A Beard.” Actually, he did have a name – he gave me a business card and was in radio sales or something slimy like that. His entire personal life revolved
around appearing in any kind of weather clad only in shorts and body paint. He was a true fan, which meant he didn’t care if we won or lost, but he was determined to raise people’s spirits and get them yelling. Starting a group cheer, or getting a wave going, was his measure of a successful game. It was really sad.

Some years later, I was living in Seattle, and an acquaintance had an extra ticket to the Seahawks game against Oakland. As it happened, the perennial-losers and the bad-boys from Baghdad on the Bay were that week’s Monday Night Football pick. So all the special weirdos came out, in addition to the regular weirdos. I spent the entire time not watching the game, but watching a woman sitting a row in front of us who was all decked out in big blond hair, tons of makeup, a torn up Seahawks T-shirt with cleavage bursting
out as if by pneumatic pumps under her harms, and the smallest portable TV I’d ever seen. At the time, there was a fad for feathers that dangled from cords or leather thongs that were clipped to your hat; she was wearing a cheap-looking cowboy hat with dyed ostrich feathers cascading down her back.

She’d positioned herself where she could easily be seen by TV cameras that were on “crowd duty,” looking for interesting fans to put on the screen during the many pauses in the action on the field. She would watch to see if one of the cameras was pointed in her direction, and when she caught sight any landmark near herself, she’d leap up and start shakin’ her pom-poms to try to attract the camera’s attention. She’d also watch where the cameras were pointed; she’d use binoculars to see if a cameraman or one of
the spotters was looking at her. Her sole motivation was  to get herself and her spectacular boobs on national television. Why? I have NO idea. And yes, she wasn’t watching the game at all, and only “cheered” and pumped her boobs up when the camera was on her.

I’ve never been the sort of woman to put myself on display, so I really can’t understand this behavior at all. As a young woman, on my best hair day ever, I’d never have dared such a stunt: I didn’t have the boobs or the self-promotional BS for it. I guess I had neither the frontery or the effrontery for that kind of display, so there was no way for me to understand why other women would do that.

Every now and then I see a picture of a sports fan in some weird get up and wonder just how into the game they can be if they constantly have to be checking if their face paint is on straight, or if the bucket on their head is at precisely the correct jaunty angle (which prevents them from seeing the big play, naturally). For instance, this photo has been on the Trib front page for a couple of days now:

And then there’s World Cup fans – now that is an entire universe of weirdness.

gladiatorfan
spainfan
superfen

Related European weirdness: Tour De France fans aren’t really evil, they just dress that way. Or at least this guy does, for almost ten years now.

Again, it’s all about getting your face, or your bucket, or your horns, out there in the papers. And again… why? Why? Will people have sex with you more often? Unlikely, as body paint is not really that much of a turn-on (sorry, “Fat Guy With A Beard”). Will you become rich? Also very unlikely, although you might get a few free drinks out of it if you’re recognized at a sports bar.  Is this attention whoredom bad? Possibly, if you spend thousands of dollars on airfare, sports tickets, rainbow wigs, and
bail money.

Now, I’m a science-fiction fan, and I’ve been to a convention or two. When someone takes the time to create a really great costume, and they also spend time thinking what character their body type would be the best fit for, it’s a beautiful thing to behold. I once went to a Star Trek convention in Seattle where there were people in extremely impressive and detailed Star Fleet and Klingon costumes; they made me fall back a step
and feel something akin to awe. Rather than mocking these people, I was grateful to them and admired them for giving fantasy a few hours of living, breathing reality. The very best costumed character-enactors completely submerged themselves for the day in their chosen role. One Klingon warrior I saw, for instance, totally embodied ferocity. He was getting noticed, all right, and he was also getting a ton of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

But I can’t apply that same kind of gratefulness or awe to sports fen; I think their passion is not for their sport, but for being noticed.

Whoa – that cool looking roadster is a SATURN?

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I saw a stunning-looking convertible roadster just now on my way back from the mall. At first, I thought it was a heavily modded Corvette, because it had “head bumps” on the rear body, just behind the head rests. Then, I thought it was some European snazzy goodness, similar to the precisely engineered car my niece Holly drives.

Then I glanced at the logoplate above the rear bumper. It was… a… SATURN?

Detroit Auto Show: Saturn Sky – Autoblog

Why, yes, apparently it was. Good looking car, from any angle. Not bad for a chick-magnet machine; this one was being driven by the stereotypical good-looking older male with a younger, DDG female passenger.

Female Bishops In The Future of the C of E?

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As you might have guessed, I’ve been following developments, both grievous and joyous, in the Episcopal Church in the weeks following General Convention 2006.

News today: the Mother Church’s “General Synod approved the concept of women bishops as ‘theologically justified’ by 288 votes to 119.”

BBC NEWS | UK | Church backs female bishops move

Of course, the traditional wing has very strong objections, citing the concept as unBiblical. This wing has close ties to the conservative “Global South,” the area mostly under the influence or control of Nigeria’s Bishop Akinola. Actually, the American traditionalists are believed to be sending a lot of financial support to their allies in the Global South, according to an analysis that came out a while ago, “Follow the Money.”

This move by the British General Synod will be welcomed by the progressives in Canada, the US, and other places like New Zealand that also approve female bishops.

I can’t speak to the issues with any degree of scholarly analysis, only from the heart. And I’m happy with this development, because it shows that a solid majority of British bishops support the idea of having women colleagues.

The irony, of course, is that the minority will continue to have the “whip-hand,” especially if as suggested by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canturbury and titular head of the Anglican Church in England, that there could be some sort of two-tier Covenant option to keep the traditionalists and progressives held together in tension. What if, in the years it will take for this Covenant to be created by ecclesiastic legislation (which can only be done at specified, infrequent convocations), more national
Anglican churches find that there is a majority view in favor of female bishops or gay clergy?

Currently, there are  a total of 38 national Anglican churches “in communion” with Canterbury; 14 of them have female bishops. In the coming years, how many more? Although there seems to be a very committed, almost fundamentalist faction in the Anglican universe, and some areas will always be more conservative than others, is it really only a matter of time that more will come to see the concept of female bishops, at least, as “theologically justified?” And if so, what about the big open secret in the British
church – that gay clergy are a very large subset of the total number of British clergy and bishops, although they are in the “non-confessional” closet at the moment?

Closeted or not, 22 of those national Anglican churches describe their relationship with the US Episcopalian church as “broken, or impaired” because of the majority’s affirmation of Gene V. Robinson’s elevation to the episcopate. Apparently Bishop +Gene’s sexuality will probably always be the first thing they think of, rather than his work or the love the people of the Diocese of New Hampshire have for him. Meanwhile, in those 22 church bodies… how many of the clergy are deep in that ecclesiastical closet?
No telling, because in some countries (most notably, Nigeria) it’s still a crime to be gay.

More stories, resources, and blog entries:

Guardian Unlimited: Synod backs concept of women bishops

NY Daily News: Episcopalians On The Breach

Seattle Times: Episcopal Church’s new head is ready

Newark Diocese adds 2 more bishop candidates

Wayne Besen: Anything But Straight

++Rowan Cantuar: The Body’s Grace

Married sex has, in principle, an openness to the more tangible goals of producing children; its “justification” is more concrete than what I’ve been suggesting as the inner logic and process of the sexual relation itself. If we can set the movement of sexual desire within this larger purpose, we can perhaps more easily accommodate the embarrassment and insecurity of desire: it’s all in a good cause, and a good cause that can be visibly and plainly evaluated in its usefulness and success.

Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process (the peopling of the world); and this immediately brings us up against the possibility not only of pain and humiliation without any clear payoff’, but – just as worryingly – of non-functional joy: or, to put it less starkly, joy whose material “production” is an embodied person aware of grace. It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence
of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. lf the creator were quite so instrumentalist in “his” attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy… ?

A very helpful but long comment from Father Jake Stops The World:

 Well, what I see here might be seen as a matter of Gods…

In our Communion we have people worshiping two different Gods…

One of them is pure love, and cares for all His creation. His message applies to everybody, and He would not deny His salvation to those who have never heard of Him, but still have followed His commandments.

The other is a manichaeistic one, who acts like a chess master. He has created human beings already knowing they will sin and be condemned to hell.

One of them had revealed Himself to some men in the desert. Through these men, He has shown a pathway that leads to His revelation contained in Jesus.

The other has chosen only those men, and later, only the elected. The rest is already condemned.

One of them inspired different people to write books about their perceptions of Him, leaving His innermost principles and His promise of salvation to them. But His word is still revealed to us, through the action of His Holy Spirit. Revelation is not strictly closed. It evolves with the Church.

The other has psychographed a series of books, and doesn’t care for contradictions or misunderstandings in His writings. For Him, differences in ethical and social concepts are not relevant either. He commits people to follow those books strictly and literally. The Holy Spirit is limited to extactic manifestations only.

One of them is still talking to us. We praise Him through new discoveries and advances on science, art and technology. He is happy for us having a deeper and wider knowledge of social and ethical issues.

The other says that anything science discovers that apparently is against His scripture is something heretic and therefore, should be completely ignored and ridicularized.

One of them is beyond logic. So, we believe in Him.

The other has a very twisted logic. Because of that, He needs to scare us, so we will keep believing in Him.

One of them understands that we have to deepen our knowledge on Him through varied theological studies.

The other makes us remain attached only to clobber passages and limited perceptions. We aren’t allowed to research more.

One of them, for reasons we still do not know, has allowed people to have several sexualities. But for Him, much more important than that is that those people live their sexualities in committed, loyal and long-term relationships.

The other likes to act as an asmodeus. He permits people to be gay, just to make them feel they are something filthy. He approves disgusting treatments in order to change someone’s sex desire, that, at the end, don’t work anyway.

One of them commits us to fight against misery, pain, prejudice and social inequality.

The other says that everything that looks like socialist, homophile and humanitarian is part of a revisionist agenda, that tries to menace the Christian world.

One of them allows a wide range of talk and discussions on several subjects related to Christianity.

The other is encapsulated to “isms”: Augustianisms, Pelagianisms, Nestorianisms, Tomisms, Arminianisms, Calvinisms…

One of them says: “love them anyway”.

The other says: “you are a cancer and must be extinguished”.

One of them does not mind being called “mother”.

The other, however, is very outraged with this assumption. Because for this God, women are just “inferior beings”.

One of them has been manifested through Jesus Christ, who commanded us to love God beyond everything and people around us as ourselves.

The other has stimulated (and still stimulates) wars, murders, slavery and prejudice.

This is a mere difference of Gods. Some have chosen one of them. The others have chosen (or were obliged to chose) the other. – Luis Coehlo (website)

 Nice. Anyway, more blogiana on the topic of women bishops in the Church of England:
staring into the distance::as far as our eyes can see

apprentice on the way: Could Jane Hedges be one of England’s first female bishops?
Ruth Gledhill’s Times Online blog: General Synod Day Two

There will be more on this from other blogs in the days to come, of course.

Speaking only for myself, my answer to traditionalists who cite Biblical chapter and verse on the role (or non-role) of women in the Church: how do we know that Jesus DIDN’T appoint or rely on a female religious leader? How do we know whether a woman wasn’t leading one of the earliest churches as a priestess, but her name was suppressed or changed in the texts? How do we know whether there was a significant fraction of people who disagreed with the Pauline assertions that women should be seen, but silent in the
churches, and were shouted down and silenced? Wealthy women certainly were financing the early Church, so possibly they were leading it as well. This might have been ruthlessly put down by the faction that eventually had the last Scriptural word, so to speak.

We don’t know for sure. This is why I can’t ever become a fundamentalist, because I don’t believe that Scripture can possibly be inerrant with we mere humans messing with it through the millennia.  Also, unlike fundamentalists, I figure that if they can ignore the Old Testament passages enjoining us to kill disobedient sons or to keep slaves, I can ignore the passages that tell us that homosexuals are eeeeeevul.

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More Verbena Goodness

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This is one of those portmanteau posts – you know, a fabulous and not-entirely-practical construct used to illustrate a point in a story (often a shaggy dog one).

First off, I've been using ecto for a while, off and on, and while I found it most useful when I had a lot of images to pull into my big Maui post, I haven't been using it much since it upgraded to version 2.0. Mostly because I was struggling with the difference between "Rich Text" and "HTML" mode. It has some handy formatting buttons that only work in Rich Text mode, and some homegrown HTML tags and shortcuts that only work in, right, HTML posting mode.

I hadn't been entirely happy with the new way that Rich Text mode handled "blockquote," because I do some things with CSS to turn give quoted text a different color and indent it, and Rich Text mode adds other styling formats to blockquote that I don't like. And also, I couldn't figure out how to get OUT of blockquote while in Rich Text mode, unless I switched to HTML. And then I'd lose a lot of linebreak formatting.

If you're still reading this, I am most grateful to you. Sorry for the mess

Anyway, ***Dave has also been using ecto and mentioned that he'd been commenting at the support forum recently. Turns out there's a beta version which purportedly fixes some of these problems, which I have downloaded and installed. So let's see how it handles blockquoting now…

The Huffington Post: Peter Laarman: A Canterbury Tale: US Episcopalians in Manufactured Schism  

Whose side is the Archbishop of Canterbury on? That's what some moderate and liberal Episcopalians would like to know in the wake of Rowan Williams' rather chilly response to goings-on at the recently concluded Episcopalian convention in Ohio. Those goings-on included the election of a new Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori.The worldwide Anglican Communion, headed by Williams, certainly appears to be giving American liberals the back-of-the-hand treatment while extending a generous right hand of fellowship to dissident U.S. conservatives. There is some possibility that Williams will not even allow the new Presiding Bishop to participate in the 2008 Lambeth Conference — a global gathering of all Anglican leaders that takes place once each decade. That would be a humiliating rebuke to the U.S. church.

On its face the fight is all about gender and sexuality. According to the Washington Post, Jefferts Schori once dared to use the expression "Mother Jesus" in a sermon; far worse in the eyes of conservatives, she allowed same-sex blessings to take place in the Diocese of Nevada, which she headed prior to her election, and she voted in the House of Bishops to endorse the consecration of openly gay V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.

Ah! this may or may not be an improvement (at least for blogging with ecto). A simple hard return and a "decrease indent" now seems to do the trick, rather than move the whole blockquoted element back over to the left margin as it did in the previous version.

I also wanted to verify that the "drag and drop" image feature has been improved.

Well, so far, not so good. It used to work, but now this post on the "support forum" indicates I have to

Yep, just tested and confirmed it works from Firefox. You'll need to drag the image onto the ecto button in the taskbar to bring the post window into focus first, not directly into the post window.

What? It doesn't work from Picasa or Windows Explore anymore, and it did before… I have to put the image in a browser window??? Drag to a button in the taskbar, which must now remain "always on top?" I don't think so, I'll just insert it with the now-handy paper-clip button.

Remembering Murph 6-17-2006 4-57-43 AM 2272x1704

At least my pre-sets seem to have come across. The above photo is of some of the little verbena plants that we gave out at the end of Mom's "Celebration of Life" party. These are the leftovers, which ended up making the front bed look very cheery when I left at the end of my week "at home" last month. More on that later.

A new, and intriguing button is the "Amazon Search" one. I have a little plug-in on my Movable Type installation that may stop working someday… and when I attempt to us it via ecto, I have to go back in and edit it in MT to get the plug-in to work. So let's see what happens next:

Tai Chi Beginning Practice [2005]

Hmm. Interesting, but doesn't include my associate ID, and it's stupidly set up to align to the center. Also, the paragraph tags picked up my drop shadow presets and all kinds of CSS hell broke out. The DVD is something I purchased in Salt Lake, though I haven't had a chance to watch it and attempt to mimic the movements much. I took a Tai Chi class years ago and it occured to me that I might like to take it up again. Anyway.

Let's see if the plug-in works via ecto now:

Tai Chi For Beginners

UPDATE: Nope, not unless I switch to HTML mode and make sure the brackets are entered just as God intended, and not as the Demi-Gods of W3 demand. I've got regular expressions working in a couple of my plugins that require brackets and not their more compliant equivalents.

Anyway, it's handy for searching Amazon, though it can't yet be customized with associate IDs. Bet I could ask for that.

Now, here is some really odd behavior. I'm apparently not getting out of paragraphs or divs properly, because if I start to enter text after an image in Rich Text mode, the text all gets the same drop shadow image applied to each subsequent paragraph. What's up with that? Obviously, I'm not getting this Rich Text mode very well. How do you make sure your cursor is not in the wrong HTML block element when you are ready to type more text??

Ugh, there was more badness under the HTML hood when I stopped to REALLY take a look. I have got to figure out how to deal with Rich Text. Also, my HTML tag snippets weren't invoked when I tried to use them in HTML mode. Why? Argh. 

More gnashing of teeth will occur later. There are some very nice features that ecto has that add functionality and make some aspects of blogging easier, but I keep struggling with items of the 'that's not a bug, it's a feature' sort that stem from programmer mentality more than anything. As in "users are stupid, and Windoze users are the stupiderest."

Meanwhile, I'll listen to a zippy jazz tune David and I found last night when we were looking for something to back up his latest work project, a business podcast. The subject of the podcasts is yet to be revealed, but the title of the tune is supposedly a sly reference.

iTunes: Yellowjackets: Silverlake: Samurai Samba [5:46]

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LIfe Is Wonderful

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I was doing my travel agent-y thing the other morning and had occasion to call a Hilton hotel to try to change an existing reservation. Apparently, they had only trainees available who didn’t know how to make the modification I needed – so I was put on hold while they figured out what to tell me (short answer: book additional nights myself in my system).

While on hold, I heard a few notes of the “music” they use for such things, and to my surprise it was not only a tune I recognized, but one I have on iTunes and also one I’ve seen performed live. Turns out Hilton has a whole series of TV ads that came out this winter with nice pop songs that make you feel all special and cozy about paying Hilton rates (and remember, these people spawned Paris…). It was Jason Mraz’s “Life Is Wonderful.”

I went Googling around and found there are websites devoted to identifying and discussing music in advertisements. Apparently, quite a few people thought Jason’s singing was “OMG that is the g8tst thx u so much1!!!!!1” No, really, it’s a nice song. What’s interesting to me is how quickly Jason Mraz went from “quirky independent artist” to “possible commercial sellout” (only in my own opinion, really)
just because I heard his song while on hold. It’s all about how you market your product, I guess… so I hope Jason gets some perks out of Hilton while touring.  

iTunes: Jason Mraz: Life Is Wonderful: Mr. A-Z [4:20]

[composed and posted with ecto]

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Are any humans reading this? If so, read on

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Let’s face it, I have no friggin’ clue who reads this stuff, or if I have readers at this here point. I have a stats page, which I check now and then and note that “readership” seems to be going up. But when I dig into said stats, it appears that many of my readership seem to stop by for a few seconds to attempt to leave spam in the comments before leaving. Or, they’re using an image from here as an avatar at MyDumbass or PrincessMarySueFanfic.com
There are at least one or two of you, because you comment, and that’s nice. But frankly, lately there hasn’t been much to read here of any interest unless you like regurgitated news stories about irritating politicians and religious people who happen to like show tunes.
I’ll try to do better.
My husband David is in the other room, blogging his total disenchantMEHnt with the Robert Altman “A Prairie Home Companion” movie we just saw. He didn’t enjoy it except for the “dirty jokes” song with Dusty and Lefty, the old trailhands. I liked it pretty well, except for Virginia Madsen walking around looking portentious in a white trenchcoat. She’s supposed to be an Angel of Death, see, and so she walks around slowly and, theoretically, ethereally. Problem is, she moves rather awkwardly and clomps around in (unseen) high heels. So people on screen are constantly staring after her thoughtfully and somewhat apprehensively, because it’s broadly hinted that they all know exactly who and what she is, but as she’s wobbling out of frame, you hear this “clomp! clomp! clomp!” sound effect, a most un-angelic sound effect.
Or maybe that was just the Foley guy, having a little fun.
Anyway, aside from that I enjoyed it, though I probably would have liked it better if it had just been a straight-on concert show with Guy Noir and the Old Trailhands cast just as they were, as if they really existed.
Also… there didn’t seem to be a tale from Lake Woebegon, although Garrison Keillor seemed to be telling it as an aside to one or another person backstage through most of the action.
Anyway, I’ll try to do better and write more personal things, rather than impersonal things.
For instance, Mom’s desk and recliner arrive tomorrow. My sister Timmy tells me the house is mostly cleared out aside from “the basement. YUCK!” Said basement was known as “The Black Hole of Calcutta” in Mom’s lifetime. There’s a lot of fabric and sewing stuff down there, plus some odds and ends of tools and old books, none of which any of us daughters really wanted or needed. They’re up for grabs for the rest of the family, though they’ll probably end up in a yard sale.
I’m actually looking forward to having the recliner, though I’m not sure where I’ll put it. Eventually, the fabled “third bedroom” with the floor project from hell.
Speaking of PrincessMarySueFanfic.com, David and I happened to watch a couple of Star Trek: Next Gen episodes the other day that I’d never seen, and one of them played out like extremely bad MarySue fanfic, complete with an undead mostly immortal Scottish lover. The other one had Worf looking hot and irritable in a very uncomfortable and nerdy looking hat that fastened under the chin. Both were icky, each in its own special way. What I could have used was a nice politically ambiguous DS9 marathon, complete with the “Klingon Opera” episode with Worf and Jadzia. Now THAT was action!
We’re not planning anything special for the holiday here – I work tomorrow, so David’s taking delivery of the furniture. Tuesday, may go see fireworks, although most in the area take place on the 3rd. We’ll see.
In any case, more not-very-interesting but personal stuff will ensue. Stay tuned.

Young Man! Do You Want To Learn Electrical Engineering?

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Tikaro.com: John Young’s Blog: “Young man! Do you want to learn electrical engineering the seven passwords of the Gnomon?”

…well, you know the obligatory ingredients of a supervillian’s lair?

* Underground
* Big, heavy, inscrutable machinery
* Some kind of platform or catwalk
* LCD monitors bolted to the walls
* Some kind of big blackboard with lots of math on it.

The damp, flyblown, and utterly terrifying unimproved basement space two stories underground had ALL OF THAT, including twelve classroom chairs jammed next to a big blue boiler, facing a six-foot concrete platform, in back of which was mounted a big dry-erase board covered in capacitance diagrams. Or, er… something. It did not appear to be the plans for a nuclear-tipped drill aimed at the molten core of the very earth itself, but you never know with scary subterranean lairs. He even gave me a brief lecture on calculating capacitance.

Anthony (that’s his name) turned out to be a really interesting guy — he’s 78 years old, and teaches classes for free that would cost two grand at trade school, and his only requirements are that you don’t have any felony charges and that you show up for class. He builds a lot of his own diagnostic equipment. The idea is that the students can take their first electricians’ tests and get a leg up on a good job.

Batshit-crazy as it sounds, it’s a really intriguing idea. There are thousands or millions of man- and woman-units of skilled, valuable knowledge out there in America. Retired people in relatively good health could teach underpriveleged kids useful skills for free, using good quality but outdated equipment donated by businesses, schools, and private citizens. They could set up teaching facilities in community centers and church basements (probably not as colorfully and mad-scientisty as the original location, but still). They could give kids an idea about a skill and some practical experience and give them an advantage in taking qualifying tests or possibly small scholaships to technical schools.

They could teach fundamentals of food service and food handling, carpentry and woodworking, dressmaking and clothing repair, automotive repair, and so on. These are all things that public schools used to teach, or still teach but are unavailable to kids who’ve dropped out.

Hmm. The only requirement is that you’re not a felon, and you show up for class. Seems like a leg up to me.

As seen at Boing Boing