Monday, August 04, 2014

Monday's Child

1.  Spock look-alike draws line at "The Vulgar Vulcan."  Yeesh.

2.  They's trahn to teach us Suhthahnahs to talk goodah.  Why would anyone be upset about that?  Nothing insulting or condescending in THAT idea, is theah?

3.  Just a fluke?  This does seem suspicious.  On the other hand, I'm not sure I can take someone seriously if he can't spell dinero.  Saying "mucho deniro" makes it sound like she's invoking the actor.

4.  There's a limit to how much you can abuse people and subject their children to indoctrination combined with horrible education.  But it's a shame that we are doing this in response.  Most folks--including me!--don't know enough to educate their own children in any broad way.

5.  Beta marriages?  Once.  And Twice.  And Three Times.

moremmoremore!


6. Evo seeks votes in the bedroom.  Or something like that.

7.  So proud of AZ.  Almost every fact in this story is wonderful.

8.  Quityerwhining.  They caught one of the fraudulent entries.

9.  The answer is simple:  Come the Revolution, you WILL like kale and black beans.

10.  Keri's first ride on Lyft did not go well.  And it got progressively worse.

11.  Terrific links from Don Boudreaux.  A little meta, to link to it here.  But still, terrific.

12.  My kind of obit:  "And he would like to remind his friends:  Please do NOT email me, I'm dead."

13.  I've been waiting for this.  If there is no grocery store, it's because of racism.  And if someone opens a grocery store, that is proof of....racism.

14.  P.J. O'Rourke hates the beach.

15.  As I have said repeatedly, the surprise is that anyone believed the lie in the first place.  Premiums had to go up, a lot.  That's the only way to cover all the people who had no coverage.  If you voted for Obama because you believed health care costs were going to go DOWN for those who were already insured, you are an idiot.

16.  Cell extraction. It's not biology, it's penology.

17.  It turns out it takes a lot of regulations to protect the large financial firms that finance the Democratic Party.

18.  I bet he was axing for it, though...

19.  Sticker shock.

20.  Young man in trouble for (allegedly) photographing his junk to be forced, by medical injection, to get an erection so police can photograph his junk.  Presumably for a penis line-up.  "You, number 4, stand up!  Oh, sorry, you're already standing."

21.  Wait.  What, now?

22.  Date like an animal....

23.  Heck, I'd walk 30 miles to be adopted by Helen Rich.  (Helen RICH?  Seriously?)

24.  If you need an app to be reminded that your baby is in the car, perhaps you should not be having babies.  Or, for that matter, a car.

25.  A video (NSFW!) of Janet looking at a series of pictures of maleness, and commenting.  Kind of like MST3k, without the robots or the pictures.

26.  A new reality show?  Instead of "Bait Car," just "Drunk Crazy Person" car.

Headline:

Woman Crashes Car While Shaving Her Bikini Area.  (As the loyal reader who sent this notes, "If this doesn't belong on Monday, nothing does!")   More details here.  Including this one:  The actual crash was caused when Ms. Barnes asked her passenger to steer the car while she finished shaving her privates.  And it's hard to steer from the passenger side.  Lagniappe:  The passenger was her (wait for it) ex-husband.  She had a wreck...because she asked her ex-husband to steer...on a bridge... so she could shave her hoo-hah...to look good  (ew!) for her boyfriend that she was driving to visit.  So proud of Florida, right Jackie Blue?

4 comments:

Dirty Davey said...

The memory processes involved in leaving a baby in a car are probably more complicated and prone to failure than you would like to believe.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html

Anonymous said...

Not sure what's typical of #4. We know folks who homeschool through a co-op where different parents teach different subjects so the kids get interaction with a cluster of kids. Plus since you're dealing with real people, the time flexibility enables a lot of extracurricular/social activities. If the homeschool kids we know are the norm, then this is definitely the way to go if you don't have dual incomes that make it impractical. In fact, I'd probably rather have my kids in the co-op and pay an opt-out-of-teaching fee than send my kids to most traditional schools.

Norman said...

#4 only seems like a shame if you haven't looked at aggregate data. Home schooled students have consistently perform higher than public school students on every standardized test in every state for decades. Controlling for demographic differences, students tend to perform just as well in either environment.

If your objective is to actually "broadly educate" students, then home schooling is at least as good as public schooling (assuming, as BR points out, that you don't have a dual-income constraint and at least one parent has a college degree). There are low performers, of course, but going to public schools doesn't reduce the chances of that.

There are kids that don't get enough interaction with people outside their family, but as BR points out this is fairly easy to avoid. It's also odd that our standard of socialization is forming cliques where you only interact with a small percentage of children the exact same age as you. I've never understood how adequate socialization is supposed to be achieved by managing herds of children the way we manage herds of prisoners.

There's also sometimes the risk of students being indoctrinated into their parents' ideas without adequate exposure to other ideas. That also happens to students in private schools. And public schools, for that matter. The students who would figure out at some point how limited their experience has been and do something about it will do so regardless of which school environment indoctrinated them.

Road To Surfbum said...

After 15 years of teaching incoming freshman every semester, I've come to be quite a fan of the home school crowd. Their kids are excellent students, and more open-minded than the gender studies upper division majors concerning evolutionary psych topics.