Author: matthew

Just got this in my inbox…

Host: QOHS Reunion Committee Location: Holiday Inn 2 Montgomery Village Avenue, Gaithersburg, MD View Map When: Saturday, July 8, 7:30pm to 11:30pm Phone: 301-948-8900 Ticket prices are as follows: $65/person or $120/couple if paid by June 30, 2006 $75/person or $140/couple if paid after June 30, 2006 and at the door

Payment Options: Checks and Money Orders should be made payable to Daniella Hoffman – Quince Orchard Reunion, (Address removed).

UNTIL JUNE 30TH, For a fee of $3.75, Credit or Debit Cards are accepted through Paypal at www.paypal.com. Please send your payment to (email removed).

THE FIRST 50 PAYMENTS RECEIVED WILL BE ENTERED FOR A FREE HOTEL ROOM FOR THE NIGHT OF THE REUNION AND A COMPLIMENTARY BRUNCH THE NEXT MORNING!!!

If you have any questions, please email Daniella at (email removed)

For overnight guests the Holiday Inn is offering rooms at a discounted rate, please contact the hotel for reservations and/or details.

I think I’m going to go, once they get the right email address… I consider my gmail account a “throw-away”, but somehow people keep thinking that’s my address rather than honoring the reply-to address (my barnson.org email).

I think, if we do come, we’ll take up Justin & Kelly on their offer of a place to stay. That really close proximity to the festivities is just too much to pass up. Justin, are you guys going to be in town that weekend? If so, that means all we have to worry about are plane tickets and finding a babysitter for a few days.

Now that I think about it, only Bryan, Daniel, Sam, and I were in the grade together at Q.O., right? No excuse not to get together with whoever’s in town and have a few drinks. For me, the drink of choice is a tall double breve with sugar-free vanilla and hazelnut 🙂

So let’s call it dinner on Friday night, July 7, 2006. Are there any good, cheap restaurants in or around Monkey Village where we can maybe book a room and have a dinner together? We were tallying, and realized that if everyone came that I’d want to see, we’d be looking at like twenty+ people!

Christy and I are working out what we’d want to do for travel plans. I’m thinking we’d fly in Thursday afternoon/evening, plan on spending a day driving around and being tourists on Friday day, have a dinner with friends Friday night, and then spend Saturday just doing whatever and then hitting the reunion Saturday night. Sunday’s another free day, and we’d fly home Monday-ish.

Every so often, an essay comes along that changes your whole point of view on something. This one, by Paul Graham, is long but worth it: Why Nerds Are Unpopular.

I’d usually summarize the points someone’s trying to make, but it would be a disservice to this essay to let it be picked apart based only on my summary of the author’s primary points. All I have to say is my immediate reaction upon reading it was “Wow,” followed by “He’s so right”.

I was terribly unpopular — bottom-of-the-heap unpopular — until 10th grade, when I made a conscious decision to play the popularity game. I managed to bump myself up a few ranks on the popularity scale, until by 11th grade I realized it was stupid and time-consuming. That was about the time I also got less angsty about the whole thing.

I think every thirteen-year-old should read and understand this essay. Unfortunately, I think they’d fall prey to the same problem described in it: it’s an assignment given as part of the zero-sum, worthless game played in the prison of high school.

The trouble with profound things is that they’re too irrelevant, most times, for me to have been interested in “getting” them in junior high and high school when I needed them most. I remember being assigned Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in 7th grade, and pretty much missed the whole thing. My freshman year of college, that piece caused another “Holy Crap!” moment for me.

We’ve built this thing that we were trapped in through junior high and high school. It wasn’t intentional… high school is like the garbage-dump of our industrialized, specialized society. A by-product, something we had to do to build a more productive adult society. What do we do now to fix it? Or does it need fixing?

4:00 AM. I used to have a joke about this time of morning. “You know why there are so many babies in Tooele lately?” I asked a neighbor once. “The water?” they responded. “No. It’s the 4 AM train,” I replied. “How so?” said they. “Well, you know, the train going by wakes you up. It’s too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep… what’re you gonna’ do?”

Well, here I am at 4 AM. I hereby nominated 4 AM for the “Armpit of the Day”. The real hard partyers all went to bed two hours ago. The hard workers have at least another half-hour or hour to sleep before they’re up for the day. The hard sleepers have another 3 or 5 hours to go yet before they’re up.

The tattoo-to-customer ratio down at Wal-Mart goes way, way up, as does the “generally scary people” quotient.

The sobering thing is that I am numbered amongst that “scary people” bit. It’s just a smelly time of day. The air lingers, heavy and thick like fumes over a garbage dump, waiting for the morning breeze to blow them away.

On the flip side, I’d call 3 or 4 in the afternoon the “Back” of the day: the traditional time at which you might take a nap, or ease back in your chair to read some email and get ready for the stretch to quitting time. For the night-shifters like me, that’s the time of day when sounds and smells begin permeating your existence, slowly drawing you toward wakefulness and preparation for another hard, long night.

It’s break time at work. That’s about the only redeeming feature of the Armpit of the Day. Maybe I’ll go hit Wal-Mart and act like a scary person.

Latest idiotic news today: Tresa Waggoner was fired from teaching for playing excerpts of “Faust” in class.

The first part of the editorial is something we’ve dealt with before: the suspension of a teacher for presenting an imbalanced political argument in history class. The second part is what I found interesting (excerpts below):

Her supposed sin was introducing her first-, second- and third-grade students to opera by showing them a bit of Faust, a staple from the school library.

She showed a clip of the video last fall to teach the children about bass and tenor voices, the use of props and “trouser roles” in opera ahead of an upcoming Opera Colorado performance in Bennett.

…

Some folks think the real reason Waggoner became a target was more because of the school’s Christmas play than her playing 12 minutes of Faust.

Karen Grossiant, who resigned as Bennett mayor after Tresa Waggoner was placed on leave – saying it was “the last straw” – acknowledged as much.

The true problem: Waggoner did not put Christian songs in the play. This outraged some townsfolk. She had to go.

Faust is a classic opera by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. In a moment of despair, Faust makes a pact with the Devil (Mephistopheles) to have Mephistopheles do his bidding in exchange for Faust’s soul. After a period of festivity, Faust realizes the error of his ways, and that service to mankind is how one gains “immortality”, and is saved by angels as the Devil attempts to claim him.

You probably wouldn’t, at first, draw a correlation between this incident and the firing of Utah teacher Erin Jensen. But the common theme underneath them both, from where I sit, seems to be the practice of firing teachers due to politics and religion, rather than their ability to provide a quality education.

This really concerns me. Teachers should be worried grading papers, keeping kids interested in learning, and ensuring that children have the education they need to thrive in today’s society, not which politician, parent, or pundit they’ll offend.

About a year ago, I was talking with Christy, and suggested that maybe she ought to consider returning to teaching after our smallest children are in school. She told me the ugly truth about teaching. “I love teaching. I loved the kids. But I hated the paperwork, grading papers, and politics, and that’s 80% of the job.” She’s more interested in pursuing her home-decorating business (which turned a modest profit last year! Yay!) than teaching.

It looks like only 20% of the job is actually the enjoyable part most of us associate with teaching: instructing the class. That’s the fun part, I guess. But with today’s political climate seeping into public-school classrooms, that 20% fun seems to be turning into 50% “walking on eggshells”.

I guess that’s just another reason why we’re having so much difficulty finding good teachers for public-school classrooms in the US. The awful pay and bad coffee weren’t enough.

Truth is scarier than fiction: Credit Card Companies will accept obviously torn and re-assembled applications.

In the spirit of Duke Nukem, I’d like to add that Chase Manhattan is a bottom-feeding, scum-sucking algae eater of a company. And that an essential personal protection device of the twenty-first century appears to be the shredder.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: algorithm, n.: Trendy dance for hip programmers.

So in the world of darn cool videos again, I give you Ryan Vs. Dorkman.

Hey guys,

Do any of you have suggestions for more blogs to aggregate into the “Friends’ Blogs” column on the right-hand side? The principal requirement is that it needs to be a FOAF (Friend-of-a-friend) and not a commercial-type site. I’d be interested in seeing pretty much the whole thing rotating daily. Thanks!

OK, so this isn’t actually about basketball. But being a former cheerleader, this kind of ticks me off: NCAA bans stunts for cheerleaders.

OK. Let’s say you play a game, like Football. Or Rugby. Or Basketball. You accept the fact that, as a player, you run the risk of injury. Possibly serious injury. People die or break their necks in sporting events all the time. It’s just a fact of life, and your number may be up as a statistic if you play.

Now imagine that, due to a few accidents, the NBA banned all touching of other players, even by accident. Imagine if college football was played with little belt flags rather than tackling, like we played in gym class in high school. Imagine banning Pole Vaults and High Jumps from track meets, field hockey with no sticks, gymnastics with no tumbling, fencing with rubber sabres, wrestling with no contact, or dance with no lifts.

That is like cheerleading with no tumbling, basket tosses, pyramids, or lifts. Great. Now college cheerleading is people just standing and shouting with megaphones. That’s excitement!

Dude, there was NOTHING like throwing Jennifer Wood thirty feet into the air to make the crowd scream their heads off. (It was Jen Wood, wasn’t it?) Pyramids are visually compelling and an integral part of the sport for decades. Spectacular lifts are part of cheerleading that makes it fun and challenging. And now you’re not allowed to do them without a pad underneath?

Yeah. That’s gonna happen. Let’s drag 2 foot thick mats out on the field to cheer on.

The main reason our co-ed squad was so popular and did so well, IMHO, is because the guys added grunt to the basket tosses and as bases for stunts. Fact is, guys are stronger, and we proved with with massive four-man tosses that could rocket a little 90-pound chick into the air like she’d been shot out of a cannon. And we could land her safely, every time. It’s called teamwork. It’s about knowing your limitations. It requires trust and coordination.

This is why it’s a sport, and not just people making idiots out of themselves shouting on the sidelines or from the stands. We have the Hogs for that.

I say, make cheerleaders sign disclaimers stating that they understand the risk. The risk of injury or death from cheerleading is lower than that of many contact sports. But, unfortunately, lawsuits rule the day, and a recently successful $2.1 million cheerleader injury lawsuit has made the NCAA uncomfortable enough to ban the very aspects of cheerleading that make it sportsmanlike, rather than just a sideshow: stunts.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: If our behavior is strict, we do not need fun!

I wish more news were like this bit: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-818944862742874918&q=autistic

Simply. Awesome.

A bill that would have required teachers to read a special disclaimer about evolution before teaching it “died on a 46-to-28 vote in the Republican-controlled House after being amended by the majority whip, Stephen H. Urquhart, a Mormon who said he thought God did not have an argument with science.”

Apparently the bill was neutered by Urquhart prior to the vote being cast, saying only that the state Board of Education “shall establish curriculum requirements relating to scientific instruction.” My guess is that it was still sufficiently politically-charged that sanity ruled in the House. Seeing this bill die the ignominious death it should almost makes me want to thank your deity of choice!

My favorite quote from the article?

Casey Luskin, a spokesman for the Discovery Institute, a research group based in Seattle that has promoted the ideas of intelligent design, called the vote “a loss for scientific education,” but said it was a purely local Utah matter.

The bill not passing was “a loss for scientific education”? That’s, uh… Wow. I think if I opened an encyclopedia to look up the word “spin”, Casey Luskin’s picture would be there.