every time we get a heavy rain, they make sure there are enough recyling bins (presumably heisted from vacant cubes) out on the atrium to catch the drip-water from the leaking roof.
yep, it’s these little gestures that show they care and that remind me i work for a fortune 100 company.
not only does it not work, it will never work. for anything, not just in the glaringly obvious cases, such as a 12yr. old being arrested for doodling. yes, that’s right, a 12yr. old kid wrote a silly 12yr. old girl message on a desk:
“I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)”
for this she was sent to the principal’s office, who then called the fucking cops and had her arrested. not a detention. arrested.
i’m not that old. high school was over a decade ago, sure, but damn, it would have taken a fucking lot to get arrested. even if you got in a fight, you’d just get detention and maybe suspended for a few days. maybe if you were selling drugs in the school, but even then it was iffy. if you fucked up in school you got punished according to the severity of the infraction. detention, kicked off a team, parents called in: all the normal stuff. yes, i know there is now DANGER! in schools, and yes, there are schools that are rightly concerned about weapons and violence. there are plenty of parents who don’t give a fuck about their kids (part of the problem, of course). none of this, however, justifies “zero tolerance” policies. why? here is the single most telling quote from the article:
Kenneth Trump, a security expert who founded the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, said focusing on security is essential to the safety of other students. He said zero tolerance policies can work if “common sense is applied.”
that statement should be enough to convince anyone with half a brain that zero tolerance policies are fatally flawed and that mr. trump is either dishonest or just stupid.
zero tolerance means just that: zero tolerance. if one starts to apply the ever nebulous “common sense” to interpreting said policy, it is no longer zero tolerance. you’ve just introduced tolerance. you are making distinctions between the severity of infractions. you are taking a person’s background and prior behavior into consideration. you are admitting there is a marked difference between writing a) “i’m going to kill my friends” and b) “i love my friends” and responding to the intent behind the infraction, not the simple physical action. sure, good old common sense tells us that a) is a cause for concern and means the kid’s parents should be called, as well as the school psychatrist and, as a last resort, the cops. whereas b) means you stay after class and clean all the desks.
we continue to see these stories: kids suspended for bringing nail clippers to school, honor roll student suspended for giving a friend an advil, etc.. they all end the same way: school apologizes, says it was a mistake and the parents wind up suing. as long as we continue to have zero tolerance policies they’ll keep showing up in the news. considering our laws for adults allow for tolerance, to such an extent that we recognize there are situations where it is justifiable to kill another person, it make little sense to have no leniency for children. after all, there is a reason we do not try children as adults. as a society, we seem to recognize that kids are, well, kids. even the best kid is going to fuck up, particularly once they hit their teens. certainly we should keep an eye to security, but let’s try and avoid turning schools into psuedo-prisons and let kids make ordinary mistakes.
in theory, there is nothing wrong with remakes. some of the greatest films we have are technically remakes (maltese falcon springs to mind). however, as a general rule, one should only remake a film under some form of the following scenerio: good story or premise, but the execution of the film was flawed (or outright sucked) in some way. miscasting, shoddy script, terrible acting, poor directing, bearing only a passing resemblance to source material and so on. a film doesn’t necessarily need to be bad to warrant a remake. lynch’s dune is a good example here, as i’d say it’s an enjoyable movie, though not because it adheres overmuch to what goes on in the novel (granted, half of the novel consists of what people are thinking…damn you ominscient narrative voice!). in straying from the source, it is flawed and ripe for a remake (which is happening. again).
alas, too often remakes are spawned by the “hey, let’s update a classic (or at least, a good film)!” school of thought. “you’ve got mail” is the sort of neferious result you get. these films are a bad idea. there is no reason to remake a good movie, because the original does not vanish into the ether after a few years. even the idea of “updating” a film tends to be misguided, at best. on the face of it, remaking “guess who’s coming to dinner” as “guess who” and reversing the race roles is not that bad of an idea. replacing spencer tracy with bernie mac and sidney poitier with ashton kucher however, was that bad of an idea.
all of this rambling is a roundabout way to ask just who the fuck thought remaking “akira” as a live action film was a remotely good idea? seriously, who thought that?
in the abstract, i knew there was a “loquacious” switch located somewhere within the toddler brain. still, the actual flicking of that switch to on is quite an experience. in other words, macduff has undergone the change from stoic and (mostly) silent to a proper chatterbox. quite entertaining actually and good that he’s finally able to speak his mind, feverishly racing though it be.
all this is to say that i now know there is a dinosaur in the downstairs bathroom. you can hear him when the heat kicks on.
oh, christmas photos! soon (er, eventually). also, new washer and dryer! hooray for appliances!
two weeks out of pocket: blissful, but now, sadly ended. in a just world, i’d be helping dinosaurs attack a train, instead of sitting in front of this damn screen.
i’m trying to clear the backlog in my moderation queue and behold! actual comments, buried amongst the penis enlargement/mayan end time/indecipherable (to me) russian spam! so, hi guys. and sorry kat, i did seem to mark you as spam. oops.
in actual fall cleaning news: saw people make our neighbor’s leaves magically disappear (well, for a day or two) so we called for a fall clean-up quote. three hundred dollars? three hundred fucking dollars? i hate raking, but christ, i can buy my own leaf blower for that sort of money. lunatics.
on the good news front, we’ve finally settled on a price for the house and will hopefully close by turkey day. magically transforming from renters to owners, all without moving (hooray!). perse & wee macduff continue to do well (despite an attack of the sniffles). life is good.
i don’t understand anymore.
lose a bid for the olympic games to come to chicago = hooray!
win the nobel peace prize = this is terrible!
what the fuck? seriously, i don’t understand anymore. not that certain lunatics hold idiotic opinions like this. more that such blatherings are picked by the media and treated as valid, rational and representative of public opinion.
times like this, repeatingly banging my head against a brick wall seems the only sensible thing to do.
likely i’ve mentioned my loathing of politics before. still, one cannot escape it, since nearly every medium blares the godawful stuff at you constantly. mind you, that is one of the reasons for my loathing. another would be the oxymoronic lunacy that shat itself onto my tv last night, in the form of a paid political advertisment (for some silly PAC, as far as i could tell). i have this annoying habit of paying attention to what people say, even if it is a commerical. what these people were saying (via a bad actress dressed as a doctor) was stupid. they are against health care reform and spewed forth the typical talking points about government rationing of care (cause insurance companies don’t) and fabrications about existing systems of socialized medicine (ie: canadians wait up to a year for “vital” surgeries, if, by “vital”, you mean “elective, non-emergency” surgery. and by “a year” you mean “about 2 months”). what really got me, though, was the take-away message: don’t let the goverment get between you and your doctor [by reforming health care to include a public option], tell your congressperson to focus on funding medicare. i’ll let that sink in a bit, before the befuddled “what the fuck?”.
i’ll admit to be a regionalist. frankly, i consider the northeast too intelligent for this crap to fly here. apparently i think too highly of my fellow new englanders.
back to the message. i just don’t understand how groups like this think. what are they trying to say? no government run health care, except for the elderly? it makes my brain hurt, to try and unravel the madness. now, my understanding of a public healthcare option might be off, but it is just that: an option. the government sets basic criteria for insurance plans (which, um they already regulate), offers a public plan that is the baseline and people have the option to choose the public plan or a private plan. i know the fear: it will put private companies out of business. kind of like how public universities have done away with private ones (wait, they haven’t?).
well, so fucking what? hey, i work for an insurance company (not health insurance, but insurance nonetheless). they exist to make money by investing your premiums. insurance is a hedged bet, particularly health and property/casualty insurance. term life insurance too. you pay to have coverage in case something bad happens. the more likely it is that something bad (sickness, car accident, etc.) and covered will actually befall you, the more you are going to have to pay. if a company feels you probably won’t ever make a claim, they are fine with charging you lower premiums. lower risk, after all. the ideal form of the business model is that people pay for insurance and never make a claim. the goal is to avoid paying out. this is something we should strive to preserve…why, again? consider, if you will, what happens if insurance companies don’t make money off a particular form of coverage. flood damage, for instance. homeowners insurance never covers it. you have to buy government flood insurance. why? because the risk is too high for insurance companies to want to cover it. no profit in it. why, again, would we want to make sure these companies thrive?
the whole thing makes me angry. like education and dependable public transportaion, health is something we should consider part of the nation’s infrastructure. i’m not a fan of having to pay taxes, but since i have to, the things i want them spent on are making sure everyone can get an education (free, up to a bachelors, if they desire), get to where they need to and receive the care they need to stay healthy. maybe thinking the government should provide the baseline for these things makes me a socialist. so be it. public versions of education and transportation haven’t eliminated private versions. i see no reason why the same shouldn’t hold true for health care.
just picked up TMBG’s “here comes science”, supposedly for my son. i suspect i may also have gotten it for myself, as listening to it just puts a big smile on my face. highly recommended to TMBG fans (even moreso if you actually have children).
from the bbc: Twitter tweets are 40% ‘babble’
to which i reply: “only 40%? i’d have thought it was far more.”
turns out that “conversational” twits are not considered “pointless babble”. the short of it is this analysis company determined around 9% of the twits to be “of value”. from the article (again):
Instead, it found that 40.5% could be classified as pointless babble, 37.5% as conversational and 8.7% as having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively.
granted, no one bothers to explain what the fuck “pass-along” value is. one would assume it is information deemed important enough to share with others; however, that is a rather subjective criteria (moreso than usual).
i don’t use twitter, mostly because my pointless babbling tends to run on the wordy side. still, it’s impossible to avoid knowing what is it. given the entire concept is “say what you are doing right now, in 140 words or less”, one might (rightly) surmise it exists solely to pointlessly babble. only, it isn’t quite pointless. at least, not to those interested.
see, there is a profound truth that most people miss about the internet. particularly the media and marketers. it’s a niche market. always has been, always will be. the assumption is that, since one is available to the whole world, one is trying to speak to everyone. not so. most of what goes on across the web is what always goes on amongst people: small knots sharing interests and not paying attention to the others. it’s just easier to find the knots that interest you.
the web is public the way a crowd is public. sure, you can listen in, or join into any conversation. but you are really just going to wander around, trying to find a conversation that interests you. mainstream media still persists in thinking of the internet as some seperate entity, something more than a tool. it is not. it is simply connections. connections between information and between people. that’s all.
frankly, most people aren’t all that interesting, except to those who know them. take this site. except for those who know me, who the hell is going to swing by and look at baby pictures (or read the occassional rant)? no one. nor do i expect them to (or want to, for that matter). sure, the possibility is there, but the probability is low (this seems a reasonable point to mention that, if i do have any unlikely new readers/commentators, my apologies. there are nearly 50K messages in my moderation queue: too many to mass moderate. i can only do 20 at a time, so if there is actually something other than spam in there, it’s not seeing the light of day.).
anyway, the point is, twitter is a service developed specifically to post pointless babblings. telling people that most twits are babbling is, well, pointless.