hey, dirty, baby i got your money...

Don't you worry.

Well, ODB is resting in peace while the world of finance is collapsing. I can't read two articles that have the same opinion on this meltdown. The fact remains that my retirement accounts have less money than I've contributed. The conventional wisdom of exposing yourself to more risk when you're young to build the nest egg for when you're old failed me. This is to say that perhaps when I'm old and ought-to-be retired, I'll still be up at the SMART Board cloning and grouping and highlighting and Googling for third graders. I ain't ever going to be able to retire.

Now that's a scary thought.

shoeless at IUPUI

While this coach isn't getting near the amount of press that his taxi-driver-assaulting colleague is, perhaps he should get far more.

300-plus Coaches to Go Barefoot

The skepticism about good intentions and cynicism over athletes' and their coaches' behavior in general makes us all as sports fans enjoy sports a little bit less. How much happier were you as a sports fan seeing the Gators win the crown, knowing that the quarterback at the helm is a genuinely good person? Or that the linebacker leading the defense isn't going to spend his NFL-riches-to-be on a new Benz, but proper representation so that his incarcerated brother might get a fair trial? Contrast that with the joy you felt at hearing that the Cowboys cut Pacman Jones after his twentieth-time-too-many screw up. Maybe sports weren't so driftless after all. Perhaps all we needed was the media to start highlighting the good instead of the bad...

the brotherhood of justice

'80s movie rewind time. this week, what started as no one responding, regrets or otherwise, turned into four lovelies showing up simultaneously and robert joining us shortly. netflix had already delivered, so i was watching it regardless. i was glad to have company because man, this movie was worse than i thought!

if you've not been blessed to have seen this movie, let me give you the brief synopsis. rich boy keanu reeves leads a band of vigilante other rich kids in their school's quest to get rid of vandals and potheads...presumably because marijuana is the worst drug every cultivated, and it actually causes insanity. kind of like a g-rated version of lean on me, without the bad ass principal with a baseball bat. predictably, they get out of hand, his girlfriend catches wind of it, half the school cheers them, half the school fears them, and there's a gut check.

first off, don't expect an oscar-caliber performance. this is keanu "whoa, my name means rainbow" reeves. his girlfriend is played by lori "i made out with uncle jesse on full house, who also said whoa" loughlin. finally, kiefer "my dad smoked pot in a movie once before i became jack bauer and rid the world of all drugs and terrorism, picking up a nasty heroin habit along the way" sutherland makes a stellar appearance as the dude trying to squirrel in on keanu's girl. it's predictable, '80s after school special in every sense of the genre. the lighting is worse than in most home movies, and the acting is only slightly better.

oh, so at the end of the movie, there was a "based on true events" tagline. oh, really? yup. even made time magazine!
June 10, 1985: Fort Worth, Texas

Several prominent senior-class members were excluded from graduation ceremonies at Paschal High in Fort Worth last week. Earlier that day, seven seniors and one junior from Paschal were indicted on a total of 33 felony and misdemeanor charges in a bizarre vigilante scheme that involved arson, bombings and threatening another student with a gun.

The indicted teenagers, among them honor students, athletes and a cheerleader, belonged to the Legion of Doom, a society supposedly dedicated to purifying the campus of drug users and petty thieves. The Legion may have grown out of the school's efforts to improve discipline. At least four members also belonged to a Paschal organization called the Ambassadors, a now disbanded group of 29 top seniors assigned to patrolling the campus and encouraging others to attend classes. Legion members, mostly wealthy youngsters from prominent families, prowled less well-to-do neighborhoods at night, firing shots at one student's home, exploding a pipe bomb on another's car. A fire bomb tossed at a black student's house failed to hurt anyone only because it fell short and ignited in the front yard. Said a classmate: "These pillars of our community (were) doing worse things than we will ever do in our lives."

invite some friends over, pop some beers, and drink every time someone makes a bill & ted or speed joke as it relates to the movie. if their comment is misplaced, they drink. great fun will be had by all!

who throws a shoe? honestly...

so, in case you missed it yesterday, an iraqi journalist threw his shoes at dubya yesterday when he made a surprise visit to baghdad.



bush brushed it off, "i don't know what his beef is." this appalling lack of knoweledge of arab culture astounds me. now, i didn't know that it was such an insult until baghdad fell in 2003. i remember videos of iraqis smacking statues and posters of hussein with their shoes and learning about the insult.

i was going to get into it more, but the BBC beat me to the punch. read it here.

the discussion below the article on al-jazeera is a little bit more telling about how insulated he is from the realities of his international disrepute.

36 days until this cyst is out of office...

why michelle rhee is ill-suited for the job

this isn't the first time i've heard of something like this, but it's certainly one of the most misguided and broadly applied to raise attendance and test scores. what am i talking about? paying kids to do well in school. no, not by their parents, as it were. by a school district. first off, a little background. michelle rhee is the oft-maligned school chancellor for d.c. public schools. since taking office, she's closed schools, fired teachers, reassigned many more. she's a reformer, and the press seems to have a love-hate relationship with her policies and ideas.

so, i see this on the news last night.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced plans yesterday to boost dismal achievement at half the city's middle schools by offering students an unusual incentive: cash...Now they are introducing a program that will pay students up to $100 per month for displaying good behavior

the biggest problem i see with this is that it switches motivation to do well from intrinsic to extrinsic. intrinsically, we do things we enjoy without obvious external influences. the best students are intrinsically motivated and actually enjoy learning. granted, the targeted kids don't have much of either, but is giving them an extrinsic reason to learn in their formative years really the best solution?

she reasoned in her press conference that this will prepare them for the work force because school is their job. this is where the parents come in, not the government. school is school, not a job. it prepares you for society and (hopefully) a job later in life. parents are the ones that are supposed to instill the value of education in their kids. sure, i knew kids who got money for good grades in middle school and high school. they did what they had to do to get good grades. did they retain much of what the learned? i doubt it. my parents never even considered such measures, nor did many of my friends'. those friends and i are the ones who still read books for pleasure in adulthood, can carry on intelligent conversations, and take pleasure in being well-informed. i'd venture to guess that many of the intelligent young professionals that populate this great city fit the same mold.

i had a student in florida several years ago that was wholly unmotivated to work hard or participate in school. he bounced between the homes of his oft-jailed father and his never-quite-sober mother and his grandmother. my year with him, he was mostly with his mother, and it was all he could do to make it to school on time with a good night's rest and something to eat for breakfast. he had repeated first grade and was still far below grade level in most subjects. during career month, the students all had to learn about what they wanted to be when they grew up. his lack of motivation in school showed, "why should i pick a job? i'm just going to go to the mailbox once a month just like grandma."

no, it's not easy to motivate kids these days, even with good parenting. that's the point, there's no easy solution to making kids want to learn. great teachers, role models, and parents all fit into the equation. school chancellors that make it rain so the kids behave? not likely.

good news, bad news, vol. 2

news from gainesville hits me today, thanks to jedd. ugly, old news rearing it's ugly old head. i sure hope it stays out of the national news. let the vilification of all things greek begin.

better story. less consumption. mainstream? bicycles? how so, washington post?

i love this city.