But they cross list courses!
It's downright unnatural.
Everyone knows that information has to be siloed. That's what we praised in researching the intelligence failures leading to 9/11, right?
Bowdoin president responds: http://bit.ly/YkYo58
Of course the instigator is a grumpy Williams grad.
NAS responds to Bowdoin president's response:
I don't think Bowdoin should have responded at all.
Apparently conservatives love to whinge about small liberal arts colleges in Maine. 14 years ago David Horowitz had similar complaints about Bates College.
The Culture Wars Hackery classics just never get old.
5: agreed. Explaining "trolling" to a college president isn't always easy. Bowdoin's got a cool billion under management, its grads do fantastically, nobody's not going to apply there because of this: the house isn't on fire.
Wow, I hadn't seen this before. The backstory is amazing. Basically, a super rich right wing asshole went on a golf outing with Bowdoin's president, and said assholy things about diversity that interrupted the golf game. Then, Bowdoin's president mentioned the conversation offhandedly in a speech, in which the president defended diversity. So then the right wing asshole commissions a ridiculous hit piece (i.e., "study") designed to aggressively attack Bowdoin using tropes beloved by other right wing assholes. It's hard to have any response to that story other than "Wow what a stupendous asshole that super rich right wing dude is" and "wow immediately self-refuting survey" but apparently there's no limit to what a bunch of stupid fucking assholes right wingers are.
Also, I liked the Bowdoin President's response. Hopefully they get some more applicants because of this.
I'm just boggled at the idea that the president told the golfing story in a speech without naming the conservative and this still somehow a) got back to him, and b) set off such an explosion. Holy Toledo.
What a heck of a lot of opportunity costs, too.
Does anyone else well past college spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what life would have been like if you'd gone somewhere else for college? Maybe not inordinate, except why think about it at all...
Shorter: I coulda been a contender!
I daydream about having majored in something with a point to it. (Or, really, having majored in anything coherent at all, rather than taking a random assortment of courses that technically satisfied the requirements of an interdisciplinary program.) Anything that would have kept me out of law school.
I used to daydream about going back to college. Then I did! And it was terrible! Then, eventually, it was awesome! And now I'm kind of still in college! So that's definitely an anecdote with a lot of applicability to lots of people here.
Bowdoin's web page features the "Offer of the College," a poem from a former Polar Bear prexy that winds up:
"This is the offer of the college for the best four years of your life."
Now we know exactly what they mean....
I seem to remember that if one were smart but had for whatever reason (hungover, still drunk) had not done well on one's SAT Bowdoin was the college of choice.
I used to wonder what life would have been like if I went to grad school somewhere else, but I'm over that now.
If you'd gone somewhere else, the pet store might have included a different set of animals.
I wonder pretty much daily what would have happened had I not flip-flopped on my first grad school choice and called my eventual choice two days after the deadline pleading like a straying lover to be taken back. And then asking for a deferral. Christ, what grad admissions committees must put up with.
Oh no. I've invoked the bestiary.
I sometimes think about going to back to school to become a not-a-lawyer. I'm open to suggestions.
12, Would nonsurreptitious moral turpitude fence you out of only bar admission, or also out of law school admission ? I never had many second thoughts about this school or that school, but do wonder how life would go if I didn't start in STEM.
21: Today's Jeopardy! returning champ is an environmental engineer. I'd never heard of that kind of engineer before, but who knows, you might love it.
I don't wonder about having gone somewhere else for university, but I do wonder (especially as my own children approach these decisions) why - or how, really - I picked the degree course I did. I mean, I do know: I could do maths, and I read a book about Gödel and thought it was interesting. But seriously, was there not any more to it? Like, now I think biochemistry is pretty interesting, and when I got to university there were people doing biochemistry, but I'm pretty sure at 17 I didn't know that was even an option.
The president's response is good, but this I don't get:
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5: I don't think Bowdoin should have responded at all.
In an ideal world, no, but in this case I think some pushback is called for. I read about this a few days ago in the WSJ. The telling there is predictably (it's the WSJ) right-leaning:
Published Wednesday, the report demonstrates how Bowdoin has become an intellectual monoculture dedicated above all to identity politics.
This bullshit narrative is becoming a thing in conservative circles: dedication to diversity is actually racist! George Will had an absolutely idiotic and unconscionable piece in the WaPo a couple of days ago pushing a similar line of attack on education:
The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R's -- formerly reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic -- now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers "instruction" synonymous with "propaganda," which in the patois of progressivism is called "consciousness-raising."
I think at this point we do have to push back.
26: It's beyond the point of mere hostility to liberal education, it's become hostility to higher education itself. Especially pernicious in the eyes of the right is education that goes beyond mere training to be a cog in the corporate machine. Fear and ignorance are core elements of conservatism. They've finally cottoned to the fact that opening minds is the enemy of conservatism. The rise of MOOCs is being touted as a replacement for higher education on the right in part because they allow one to gain the necessary skills for service as a corporate drone without exposure to the harmful effects of exposure to the liberal arts. IOW pushback is totally called for.
Yep.
That George Will article continues to annoy: he links to foxnews and townhall.com (and the trail there leads to an organization whose mission is the furthering of "school choice"). It's entirely agenda driven. It's one thing to blather that stuff in locales known for their partisan agendas; it's another to put it up on a national newspaper with citations that are only visible to those who read online.
This bullshit narrative is becoming a thing in conservative circles: dedication to diversity is actually racist!
Archive link. Conservateria is always at war with Yesteryearia.
Does anyone else well past college spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what life would have been like if you'd gone somewhere else for college?
Oh god yes. Despite dwelling on this way more than I should, though, I still can't decide if it would actually have been better for my life overall to have gone somewhere different. There's no question that academically my college experience was fantastic (although majoring in something more practical might have been a good idea), and having a well-known and well-regarded school on my resume has opened lots of doors for me since then. I didn't enjoy college, though, and while there were a lot of other contributing factors to that besides the school itself it was definitely one. I go back and forth on how much to weight each of these considerations in thinking about whether going to a different school would have been better.
30: your school's curriculum seems really fascinating.
Choosing a curricula can be a challenge.
Oops. I don't do Latin plurum very well.
30: My experience was the opposite, I guess. I enjoyed myself but it was an easy place to do exactly as much work as I felt like and leave it at that. This amounted to getting a 4.0 in my major and scraping by in everything else. Somewhere like U of C would I have become disciplined and have had my interests broadened, or would I just have had a huge authority issue meltdown and transferred to somewhere like UT?
(Whether the name of the school on my resume has helped me or hurt me I don't really know, as I've never shot for anything particularly ambitious. Then I got a much bigger name on my resume but was in a field where you really might as well go to the cheapest school possible because the jobs are all about the same and prestige is a negligible factor.)
30 -- you made the fatal error of not being blackout drunk Wednesday through Sunday every week. I have nothing but good memories.
So wait, your Mondays and Tuesdays were always great? I'm confused.
That's when he had his meat science classes.
Well, I'm going to celebrate having done my taxes, and having finally put away about 80 cubic feet of boxes in order to make more room for the new bike, by going out dancing with the Iberian beauty. Hopefully that will stop me from thinking about how my life had been better if I'd gone to a different PhD program.
I occasionally wondered if I'd have been better off going to the other history program I seriously considered. I went to the place that was clearly the best fit for my interests, but there was a better gender balance, more people in my age range, and more people interested in closer fields to my own at the other place. I didn't really second guess it much, though, especially since I later lived in the city of the school I didn't go to. The main thing I regretted was not taking another year or two before applying.
It's beyond the point of mere hostility to liberal education, it's become hostility to higher education itself.
Thing is, there really are a *lot* of problems with higher education. The reliance on adjuncts and rising costs for students are huge problems. But we are getting to the point where any attempt to discuss the structural changes that might help this situation is viewed as an attack on the very existence of higher education. So discussion of real problems is off the table.
There is some analogy here to social security, although the problems with social security aren't nearly as great. I would really like to see the cap on taxable income for social security raised. There's no reason why you should stop paying taxes after the first 113K. But you can't talk about these things, because to raise the issue of social security is to threaten it.
"Do you approve of the job the president is doing higher education?"
"Well no, but for leftwing reasons, not rightwing reasons."
"I have to put Yes or No down on this poll."
"Sigh...yes."
It's lower education not higher education, but WTF Matt?
"Now if you wanted to say that these cheating scandals prove that we're never going to come up with a workable control system for organizations as large as big city public school systems and so we need to move to an all-charter system, I'd say that's an idea I'm sympathetic to. "
Right, because it's much easier to control several hundred separate school systems than lots of schools in the same system. Does he not realize how stupid that sounds?
45: He's a big, big fan of (criminal grifter) Michelle Rhee. Also, doesn't his wife work in the education reform (grifter) biz?
45 46
One of Yglesias's dumber education posts (which are pretty bad in general).
Also, doesn't his wife work in the education reform (grifter) biz?
Yep!
42: Does anyone know a good article on where the increased spending in higher education is going?
That piece really stands out for the transparently fraudulent false dichotomies, combined with the demands that his opponents must prove a negative, combined with the assumption that a system that has never existed would obviously be an improvement.
How about this, Yglesias, and Jonathan Chait, who is usually much less susceptible to the Cato Institute's propaganda: Could it be possible that these tests do not measure anything EXCEPT ability to cheat? And if not that, they measure ability to teach to the test by repeating the test's material over and over and ignoring other topics.
Since the studies justifying the tests show "significant" results on the population level, rather than the individual level, it makes sense that a single teacher would not be able to figure out any clear way to predictably influence the test results in the way you want them influenced. It makes even more sense that when told "Your top priority is now to have these test results be different from what they were before", the obvious response to the incentive is to take a shortcut to doing that, while continuing to teach in the same way you have in the past.
Is this not exactly what you would expect from people told that their future now depends on achieving some goal that they don't personally see as worthwhile?
50
My comment to Yglesias's post:
It isn't that pure seniority systems are good it is that performance based systems are actively harmful because they encourage bad behavior. The problem with performance based systems is that (as usually implemented) it is far easier to raise your evaluation by gaming (in various ways including but not limited to blatant outright cheating) the metrics than by actually teaching your students more. So in practice they select for teachers (and administrators) who are good at fooling the evaluation system rather than at teaching children.
George Will had has an absolutely idiotic and unconscionable piece in the WaPo a every couple of days ago
49
42: Does anyone know a good article on where the increased spending in higher education is going?
Don't know about good but here is an article about administrative bloat at Purdue (and other universities).
U.S. universities employed more than 230,000 administrators in 2009, up 60 percent from 1993, or 10 times the rate of growth of the tenured faculty, those with permanent positions and job security, according to U.S. Education Department data.
NOW THAT'S NOT FAIR APOSTRO, SOME OF HIS PIECES ARE MERELY TEDIOUS AND FACILE
Even without cheating, there are plenty of ways that the badly designed incentives of the standardized testing regime are screwing up education. Like by encouraging schools to get rid of recess and replace that time with more reading practice.
53: Right, I'm aware of administrative bloat in general, but I'd like something that puts an overall number on it. Is increased spending on administrators 5% of the increase? 50%? 150%?
In fact, my anecdote suggests it's having the opposite of the intended effect, driving good teachers out of the public school system. My wife is looking around at other teaching jobs and one of the big attractions of private schools is that you don't have to deal with the standardized testing shit.
Also, I don't even understand what he's talking about with moving to a charter system- public charter schools are still subject to the same standardized requirements, at least in MA, so you still have all the testing problems together with a lack of authority over the schools.
Can I without pause/play cut and paste a college-themed thing that is like a giant list of everything that is most horrible about the internet? It is kind of long. I saw it on fb just now. I'll admit that somewhere before the end I let out an actual moan, a moan of bitter resignation and skipped to the part where she (obviously) dies peacefully in her sleep.
An 87 Year Old College Student Named Rose
The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn't already know.
I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder. I turned round to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being.
She said, "Hi handsome. My name is Rose. I'm eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?" I laughed and enthusiastically responded, "Of course you may!" and she gave me a giant squeeze. "Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?" I asked. She jokingly replied, "I'm here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids..." "No seriously," I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age. "I always dreamed of having a college education and now I'm getting one!" she told me.
After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake. We became instant friends. Every day for the next three months, we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this "time machine" as she shared her wisdom and experience with me.
Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon and she easily made friends wherever she went. She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up. At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet. I'll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three by five cards on the floor. Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, "I'm sorry I'm so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! I'll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell you what I know."
As we laughed she cleared her throat and began, "We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing. There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy, and achieving success. You have to laugh and find humor every day. You've got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die. We have so many people walking around who are dead and don't even know it!There is a huge difference between growing
older and growing up. If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don't do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old. If I am eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight. Anybody can grow older. That doesn't take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change.
Have no regrets. The elderly usually don't have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those
with regrets." She concluded her speech by courageously singing "The Rose." She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives. At the year's end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago. One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep.
Over two thousand college students attended her funeral in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it's never too late to be all you can possibly be .When you finish reading this, please send this peaceful word of advice to your friends and family, they'll really enjoy it!
These words have been passed along in loving memory of ROSE.
REMEMBER, GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS
OPTIONAL.
We make a Living by what we get, We make a Life by what we give.
Presumably you needs those additional administrators to manage all the adjuncts.
Could anyone better informed about America's education system than a 30-year-old who went to Dalton and Harvard and made a trip to Finland once?
50
How about this, Yglesias, and Jonathan Chait, who is usually much less susceptible to the Cato Institute's propaganda: Could it be possible that these tests do not measure anything EXCEPT ability to cheat? And if not that, they measure ability to teach to the test by repeating the test's material over and over and ignoring other topics.
Putting outright cheating aside as a separate issue these tests are generally measuring something important. The problem is they are measuring other things as well and it may be easier to raise scores by improving the things you don't really care about.
Suppose for example a school district discovered that students score best when tested on Wednesday morning (this is a hypothetical example I have no ideal what the actual best time is) and ordered all such tests to be given on Wednesday morning. This would raise test scores without actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.
In fact, my anecdote suggests it's having the opposite of the intended effect, driving good teachers out of the public school system.
My wife quite her job as a guidance counselor when it became clear that she would have to be the one managing all the testing at her high school for the second year in a row. She was going to leave the job for unrelated reasons, but having to put up with testing made her jump ship early.
"a giant list of everything that is most horrible about the internet"
I don't know, it does say to pass it along to friends but it's missing the part about how you'll die in your sleep without finishing your degree if you don't pass it on.
11: I often think I should have at least applied to Bowdoin. It would have been a stretch, academically, and expensive, but I think I probably would have gotten through it in 4 years and could plausibly be a Washington apparatchik by now.
I have relatives who work there, and have spent a reasonable amount of time on the campus. It seems pretty much like any other SLAC, although obviously one of the cream of the crop. The museums are really nice. It's amusing that the campus, which a prof who graduated in 1959 described as "monastic", now seems to be mostly dominated by very intent young Asian-American women, cruising across campus under overloaded backpacks. Somehow I don't think the NASty report is going to have much of an impact on applications from that demographic.
She concluded her speech by courageously singing The Rose. Wow.
You know, people complain about unrealistic images propagated in the media that real people are never able to live up to. Mostly, this is done with images of women. But no one ever complains about the unreasonable expectations we have of old people. Old people are supposed to wise, vivacious, young at heart, inspiring, and played by Ruth Gordon.
This is ridiculous. I'm only 45, and I have already forgotten how to play and have no inspiration to offer anyone. How am I possibly going to be and uplifting 87 year old who gives big hugs to college students I just met?
58: The most shocking part is the idea of sharing a milkshake with someone you just met.
I think maybe nobody finds this as hilariously awful as I do. I actually burst out laughing at the end. I wish to say, in the voice of Thelma Ritter, "what a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end!"
66: The bar for inspiring behavior gets a lot higher as you age; no one is going to be impressed by me drinking whisky.
Wait, should that be "lower"? Are we limboing or hurdling?
How am I possibly going to be and uplifting 87 year old who gives big hugs to college students I just met?
You'll be senile, and you'll think they're your grandchildren!
Look, it's one of those walking dead we've all heard about!
The shocking thing about old people is what a range of conditions there is, usually correlated with economic status. How many 86 year olds have the health and resources to pursue a college degree basically for fun?
A guy at work is dealing with taking care of his mother who's in bad health. But it turns out she's the same age as my parents, who are not only in good health but are dealing with taking care of their parents.
|| It's completely coincidental that the military waited until just after the International Red Cross left the island to execute its raid on the GTMO prisoners (including shooting at them) trying to break the hunger strike to make sure they are safe and in good health. Pure coincidence. |>
72: I remember my dad going to his 40th high school reunion and talking about the retired classmates. He hadn't even started his final job.
66: Old man waving cane at clouds is still an available stereotype.
I'm sure the people who did the hit job on Bowdoin thing Liberty University is a paragon of open mindedness.
Rose apparently graduated in or before 1999, back when college was more affordable. If there was a Rose.
Rose's story sounds kind of like E/l/iza/beth's W/u/uertzel's latest idiocy about why she doesn't look her age (45).
It's like what a depressing person thinks an inspiring anecdote sounds like.
Oh lord, Chicken Soup for the Soul. How long did that franchise drag on I wonder. Borsch for the Id. Extra Large Vichysoisse for the Oversoul.
45: Gah. I can't stand it when Yglesias, or people in general, go glib like that. His final question, What about the fact that some people respond to performance-based systems by cheating should make me think that pure seniority systems are good?
is so foolish. Answer: It shouldn't. Those aren't the only two options.
The news that his wife works in the education reform (grifter) business is dismaying.
From a student of mine, as long as we're sharing:
When you carry a bible...the devil gets a headache.
When you open it...he collapses.
When he sees you reading it...he faints.
When he sees you living it...he flees.
And just when you're about to re-post this by hitting 'Share,' he will try to discourage you.
I just defeated him. 'Share' this if you're in God's Army.
I've seen this more than once, for the record. Does this count as sharing?
That is one pathetic devil, there. I am imagining him like the fainting lady in the Edward Gorey animated title sequence to Mystery!. "Oh! Ohh!"
82: All I ever get is "Share this or everyone will know you're positively glad little children get cancer."
82 - It's hard to say. Do you feel that the devil discouraged you from posting it? Because if not, it's more likely to be ungodly secular mockery.
11: I basically had two choices for college that on paper were superficially similar (small liberal arts college with strong music programs) but had radically different politics, social life, and national profile (the one I didn't go to being DFH-college (the one in Ohio, I can never remember whether that moniker applies to the the one in Oregon or the one in Ohio)). I think educationally, things would have been pretty close to the same (small classes, good mentors), but wow, the social life -- I ended up surrounded by great people, but very conservative, very religious. I don't regret it, but I think my life would have been drastically different and I do wonder about it, perhaps inordinately.
Sorry if this now off topic, back to reading the rest of the thread!
86: I don't feel discouraged. But maybe I was manipulated.
That makes the devil sound like a total wuss. I was led to believe that he was more badass.
Smearcase's 58 is giving me a pain.
So what's this about? A rolling back of the STOCK Act, of which I'd only vaguely heard:
The bill, which will now head to the president's desk, would exempt federal employees and congressional staff from a STOCK Act provision requiring them to publish their financial holdings online.
God's Army, yeesh. I'm not even in his Coast Guard.
91 cont'd: The bill itself is here. I don't know what it means that it was introduced by Harry Reid without cosponsors. Surely he didn't invent it himself.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world believe he was a pathetic wuss.
My head always hurts when people get too explicit and literal about the Devil and Hell and Evil. Probably the quickest way to convince me never to have a substantive conversation with you.
Now if I told you the devil holds his claws in the air and goes "woop woop woop woop!" like Zoidberg when he flees would that help you to live the Bible heebs?
What if the devil's actually a viral marketing Bible salesman?
97: Oh I've heard this one. I think he runs off with someone's prosthetic leg.
What if the devil's actually a viral marketing Bible salesman?
You mean like in the Joe Frank shoe "Bible Salesman"????
From the JF wiki:
Being larger than life. Selling adulterated bibles door to door. Hiding religion from an atheist, Marxist mother and a father who cooperates with HUAC. Pimping for nuns. Dealing with an alter-boy who stiffed Joe on a drug sale. Wondering the countryside living in the moment. Being tied to a stake on a raft drifting down a river in a surrealist jungle. An elderly woman as a pinata, a wedding party that ends in bloodshed. Unquenchable crying in a therapist's office. Finding the Roman catacombs and meeting Jesus in water skis. The search for enlightenment. Beginning the journey to the sacred in a restaurant where a waitress is distracted by Micheal Bolton. Is it better to be resent being unhappy or to not care. Does nature abhor a vacuum. The unexamined life. Playing Christ in a tableau vivant production.
Actually, I think 99 explains everything.
That really is an astonishingly terrible Yglesias post, even by the usual low standards of his education posts.
||
And now, off to a coffee date! Woo!
|>
103: Protip: don't try to work the term "steam wand" into the conversation.
Baristsu jokes always go over well.
If, however, you must introduce the idea of steam wands into the conversation somehow, working in the term is preferable to working in the things themselves.
If you're a regular at the place you are going, you can tip a barista to introduce the topic for you.
The date went well. This wasn't Boss Niece but a different girl that my friend who was visiting a few weeks ago met randomly at the museum and put in touch with me because she's new in town and wants to meet people. I hadn't met her before today. She seems nice enough but we don't really seem to have much in common, so I don't know if there's much romantic potential. We're probably going to meet again tonight to go see the Northern Lights, so that'll be an opportunity to get to know each other a little better.
Oh, and steam wands did not come up in the conversation.
So what happened with Boss Niece? Boss Nope?
We just sort of fell out of contact. I've been meaning to try to set something up with her but haven't gotten around to it.
I demand that you write, phone, or text her this instant!
Yeah, definitely follow nosflow's advice here. This is his wheelhouse.
Just because I'm going to live out my life alone and unloved, that doesn't mean I can't prevent that fate for teo.
In fact, my anecdote suggests it's having the opposite of the intended effect, driving good teachers out of the public school system. My wife is looking around at other teaching jobs and one of the big attractions of private schools is that you don't have to deal with the standardized testing shit.
WELL YOUR WIFE MUST BE A PRETTY BAD TEACHER IF SHE IS AFRAID OF THESE TESTS, THE SCHOOL SYSTEM SHOULD ONLY HAVE PEOPLE WHO LUST FOR THE ABILITY TO PROVE THEIR SUPERIORITY TO OTHERS.
Just cut off your best ear and mail it to her.
Do it for the blog teo, if not for yourself.
Cross-step and redowa lessons at 7 at the Finnish Hall in Berkeley tonight, dancing from 9 to midnight. I think nosflow should come, as being witty *while* doing this is possible and appreciated. Might also help trapnel's plan of marrying for money. Stanford money, perhaps.
The scene in Chuck in which he learns to tango in order to be a suave tuxedoed spy, but only learns to follow, which turns out well because the femme fatale is a natural lead, is one of my favorites.
(Do it for the blog, nosflow, if not for yourself.)
Wait, teo feels tepid about Boss Niece? Maybe it was more of a friend thing than a romantic thing. That happens sometimes, and you have to go with your instincts. You know, if it doesn't bother you that you've fallen out of touch. Sort of like stopping reading a novel 3/4 of the way through, having realized that you really don't care one way or the other.
Sorry, clew, I have to go to a Max Raabe concert tonight.
124 before seeing 122! For all we know, Ms. Niece has been sad all this time!
Also I'm uncertain of my ability to be witty while completely failing to learn to dance.
No, I do still like Boss Niece, and it does bother me that we fell out of touch. That may still end up turning into more of a friend thing than a romantic thing, but either way I do want to continue to see her.
Ms. Niece
Her title is "Boss". Boss Niece.
||
As computer errors go, the belief that your student loans have been paid off in full is not the worst. (Still contacted them to fix it.)
|>
The worst is probably the belief that the Russians have launched every missile.
129: She just seems too nice for that title.
You know her no better than I, parsley. No better than I.
Huh. If there's a Raabe concert tonight, the dance crowd will be noticeably thinned. On the other hand, if I stay home it's just me and the pie slice.
There are actually two, an early and a late.
133: How do you know that?? But seriously, it's up to teo. Also, perhaps she will text back right away; mayhap she will not respond for days, if ever. She just sounded nice, to me. Possibly a bit forward, what with the salmon-or-chicken thing.
I know that because I know her very well indeed.
How do you know clew has two slices of pie and their temporal ordering?
If you've got one slice of pie and a knife, you can have two slices of pie quite easily.
140: Give her another hour before you cut off your ear.
Hey, teo, do you think you'll still be in Alaska next summer (2014)? We're planning a Yukon family reunion...
I thought the title of the OP was a good suggestion for Teo's date.
I say cut off the ear now, just in case. You want it to have bled out by the time you use it.
If you cut off both ears, you can wear a pince-nez without everybody assuming you are too into steampunk for your own good.
Yes, if you cut off both your ears everybody will assume you have totally solid, sane, well-considered reasons for everything you do.
She has not yet texted back.
Do people sit by the phone (as it were) waiting for a response when they text someone? I would hope not, and yet I talked with a young woman a while ago who declared, all wide-eyed, that her phone was just constantly badgering her, and it was really quite frustrating, because she just didn't necessarily want to break off from whatever she was doing to respond to this, you know?
Man, it made me feel old. I suggested that she turn her phone off, and she seriously said that that had never occurred to her.
Later I found five dead cellphones.
What was she doing on your lawn in the first place?
149: If they don't know you very well, most people will be too shy to ask why you don't have ears.
It's really a matter of social norms around texting, which vary, but in some circles people are basically texting each other nonstop all the time and not responding quickly may well be considered rude. This seems to mostly be the case among people younger than me, though.
We were at an art opening. Both of us.
77: Not Rose, but sometimes older students do pursue degrees late in life, while endearing themselves to younger students on campus. I remember the news reports when she graduated, and found this followup story to share here.
Yes, if you cut off both your ears everybody will assume you have totally solid, sane, well-considered reasons for everything you do.
Around this time, Read had a fellow inmate cut both of his (Read's) ears off in order to be able to leave H division temporarily. While in his early biographies Read claimed this was to avoid an ambush by other inmates, by being transferred to the mental health wing, his later works state that he did so to "win a bet".
I'm going to count that as three votes for Teo to remove an ear.
I think TWYRCL texted me about three hours after our first coffee date, if that's anything to go by.
147.--Awesome! We'll be mostly on the Windy Arm, between Scagway and Carcross. I'll keep in touch with dates.
Hooray to 122!
Don't cut off your ear.
The other schools I seriously considered were Yale and Wellesley. I almost went to Yale; I'm not sure how different my life would have been if I'd gone there.
161.last: People would make fun of your school more? People seem to make fun of Yale a lot. Duke, too. Maybe it's a four-letter-school thing.
58: IME, people named Rose tend to hate that song, therefore I am way beyond skeptical. So is everyone else, but come on, who grows roses from seeds? Not people named Rose!
So is everyone else, but come on, who grows roses from seeds?
I have no idea. I tried to grow tomato plants from seeds this year and it is a huge pain. I think I should have started in February.
"The Zoidberg Interpretation" is my newest novel, brought to you by Robert Ludlum.
We'll be mostly on the Windy Arm, between Scagway and Carcross.
That's, uh, really far from Anchorage. But yes, do keep in touch and we can try to work something out.
I uncharacteristically have no pie, because who would help me eat it? And I have a headache and it's a while to drive to the dance and another while back. But if I don't it's just me and the pie slice.
No pie. A pie slice may be pie, or it may be the flatware designed to serve pie. I have the latter. Some time ago AWB resisted the just temptation to stab a fellow small-town-sojourner with a pie slice, and I have adopted it as the risk of a half-years' solitude.
Which, note, I could probably relieve by driving a distance that most Californians find trivial. I'm at the stage of being sure that my clothes are wrong and none of my friends will be there and they aren't my friends and I never knew how to dance and there's no point. Sometimes I go and this is true; it's always true if I don't go, so I'll go.
And yeah, you should definitely go to your thing.
Yes. Why not go. I'm working or I'd have gone somewhere.
I didn't say everybody else could go. I'm now working with nobody to keep me company.
Ironically, people that I am the boss of could probably do this better than me. Apparently, that's unethical or something when I'm working on homework.
Also, I shaved my mustache today. I had more authority when I had a mustache.
Wait, I never pictured you with a mustache. How can you have shaved it?
Indeed. Moby always had a mustache? This is mind-blowing.
He *was* funnier back when he had a mustache.
Moby did not have a mustache when I met him. That was a while ago, though.
I still haven't heard back from Boss Niece, but the girl from today's coffee date called and we are indeed going to go see the Northern Lights tonight. So there's that.
I grew a beard this winter and got tired of the beard a couple of months ago. So I shaved it down to a mustache.
Moby told us about the mustache two months ago.
We did see the lights. She was very happy to see them.
Relating to facial hair, I recently screwed up while beard trimming and ended up shaving it all off except for some sideburns. I'm not sure I'll keep them. I feel a bit like a Dylan McKay wannabe.
155: Last Chance Community College has plenty of students over 50, as you might expect. Almost all are driven by economic necessity, rather than the love of learning.
We had a sixty-year-old working as an RA in our lab a couple of summers ago who was in the middle of undergrad at a state school in California. I guess he probably was going to college out of economic necessity on some level, but he was enjoying the hell out of it, and planned (and was I think successful) to go to grad school in the more applied wing of my field. He was an great dude; native American, blues guitarist, full of crazy stories. He literally did not know how to use a computer at all (I was supposed to teach him to program but instead we focused on how to find things you downloaded in a browser), but whatever, he brought me awesome beef jerky. Also, you know, us nontraditional older students have to stick together.
Given that you're in Alaska I assume she's already seen the aurora borealis before. So which part of your body did you nickname "the Northern Lights"?
When rob and I were undergrads, a mother and her son were both enrolled in the year ahead of us. Both of them lived in the dorms, too. She finished; he didn't. (Lots of older than usual students at SJC. Lots of younger than usual students, too. Crazy SLACs.)
So I shaved it down to a mustache
Huh, I felt sure 192 would link to a photo of someone's vag.
I assume 195 means that Apo had been searching for such a thing and it wasn't readily available.
OT Bleg:
I need help. I have no clue how to file a tax return as an American citizen abroad. I'm employed in the UK, have a residence permit, and am paying taxes here. Every single time I try to look up information on what to do, I get pages and pages of IRS babble that I don't understand. I don't make a ton of money (I'm definitely under the $90,000 or whatever limit) and can't really afford to pay someone to do them for me. Does anyone have any experience to share, or resources to point me to? (I have googled. I just seem to be inept.) Feel free to email me rather than take up the topic in comments if that seems easier.
(Also, I know they're technically due tomorrow, but I'm eligible for the automatic two-month extension as far as I can tell, and have also sent off a request for an extension.)
But that doesn't seem believable, either.
197: I haven't searched, but I can assure you such a picture would be readily available.
IANYL, but I'd file an extension and worry about it later.
Also not reading to the end of the comment. As you were.
Hm. It seems I may have made that bleg two seconds too soon, as I finally found something helpful and informative. Feel free to pass along advice nonetheless!
Having now looked, VaginaMoustache.com is a real site.
i) oudemia beat me to the punch in linking to ms. wuertzel's skincare tips.
ii) teo should nix the ear removal plans. for both ears. each of which should remain attached, if you follow me. but william s. burroughs cut off the last joint of his pinky finger with a pair of poultry shears to give to a reluctant lover and there was less blood than he thought! but when they took him to bellvue they took his finger away and didn't even let him give it to the dude!
iii) mobes should grow back his mustache. wait, does gswift have a mustache? he totally should, also.
iiii) 99 explains everything.
v) clew should go dancing while keeping the pie-slice at the ready in case of bumptious fellow-dancers.
vi) boss niece and northern lights girl should be pursued simultaneously. I got a good feeling about boss niece. sure, we're all rooting for her just because she's named "boss niece" like she's the next boss level of your dating life but there's more to it than that.
vii) I am...uncharacteristically unsure about the stanster here. I mean, he's been known to be the early adopter of a bold and pioneering facial-hairstyle. otoh dylan mckay. you know how all italian food in italy is so fucking amazing, and you go buy eggplant really early in the morning at the streetmarket and later that eggplant changes your life? and you go with friends to a cafe in rome at night that's out on the street in one of the piazzas, and you eat the best all'amatriciana ever? except you try to get one of those good-looking pastries all covered in panna montata down there from one of the bakeries and they are all awful. all. so much fucking delicious coffee, would it kill a man to give you a decent piece of pastry in the afternoon? apparently. apparently it would. that's the ambivalence I'm feeling now around stanley's facial hair.
viii) and finally, flip's protestation--that the world is christ's (alternatively, that christ is a 1968 sting-ray corvette in green with those little sparkles) and satan is a martinet high-school vice-principal (doctoring the school's test scores, it scarce merits mention)--aside, I am afraid the devil is more formidable than the fainting gorey maiden brained by an urn. the FB post above seems not to take the whole thing in the right spirit. the fuck they think they're getting they soul saved by, fucking brylcreem? you click on share? nono ohno no. some people clearly need a lot more sinners in the hands of an angry god in their lives.
I agree with 205.vi and especially 205.vi.last and was going to say much the same thing about having a good feeling about it last night.
I have a moustache, alameida, and yet you are ignoring my critical message on Facebook.
198 203
It is my vague understanding that it is important to file a federal return even if you don't owe money as otherwise you can end up losing the benefit of the exclusion.
And in some cases you also have to worry about state income taxes.
Here is a Q&A from a commercial service.
205: Honoring the analogy ban by bold breach, isn't Satan sort of the theological equivalent of the high school star athlete who keeps hanging around the old playing field, scrounging for crumbs of the lost love of the crowd?
Wow, that was a stretch.
209. Only if said athlete keeps trying to bribe the current team to throw the game.
Is this a shaving thread? Did I mention after everyone talked me into using shaving cream, I quit again and my razorial life is much better? Using only soap and hot water, I never cut myself.
Once you add a blade maybe it will be different.
198: I think there's no getting around the fact that living abroad makes taxes complicated. You have to sort out whether your tax home is in the US or abroad, and the definition of that is complicated. You may need to look at the details of the tax treaty between the two countries. If you're unhappy reading legalese then you need to pay someone else to do it for you.
My understanding (I am not a lawyer and I was in a different country) is that if you have a permanent job and have lived there the whole year, then you should be able to take the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (up to 91K) and not pay any taxes. But the details can be tricky depending on your exact situation. See: http://www.irs.gov/uac/Five-Facts-about-the-Foreign-Earned-Income-Exclusion
213: Oh, my tax home is definitely the UK (I'm on track to permanent residency here, and haven't been back to the US at all since I arrived), and I don't have to pay taxes to the US. I got that far. It's just the whole "how do I actually fill out these bits of paper" part that I'm stuck on. However, I'm almost done and am only intermittently yelling at my computer in frustration, so I'm going to call it a win.
Thanks for that last link! It confirmed I'm doing the right thing.
To continue this less than engaging saga, I finished. I appreciate the help, and I also think that perhaps I was wrong as to how confused I was, given that it only took a few hours of agonising!
If Unfogged hijacked a plane, which one of these incidents would it be like?
options:
a) extremist
b) inadequacy and bathos
c) ill-thought-out ransom scheme
agonising
Using funny spelling is not sufficient proof of full time foreign residency.
216: option (d): the comedic value of hijacking a plane using a pie slice.
I still think the proper term is 'pie slicer' and that a 'pie slice' is a slice of pie.
A successful hijacking could change all that.
That seems an unusual demand for a hijacker to risk death and prison for.
You're certainly more likely to succeed if you tell them you are armed with a pie slicer.
Maybe it would make more sense to combine all four options, (a) through (d), in one hijacking.
Given that you're in Alaska I assume she's already seen the aurora borealis before.
No, she's relatively new in town and hadn't seen them yet. They're rarely visible from Anchorage.
boss niece and northern lights girl should be pursued simultaneously.
That's the plan!
Which movie/TV show was it where a guy was on simultaneous dates with two women? I guess there are probably several examples.
226: Awkward to explain when they discover you're missing two.
You have to wait for them to grow back before you try for another threesome.
I guess you could turn your head so that they only see you in profile.
OT: I had no idea that the NIMH in The Secret of NIMH was just the National Institute of Mental Health. It makes the NIMH-funded work on which I participated seem much more boring that it did to me before.
230: That could have been a Three's Company episode, if Three's Company ever explored its dark side.
218: I remember watching an old (Australian) lady explaining the function of a cake slice to Singaporean airport cops in about 1994.
By "explaining the function," I assume you mean she killed them on the spot with it.
235: No, but looking at a Depression Inventory or something seems more boring when you compare it to trying to create super smart rats.
Got it. Super intelligent rats would be a cure for depression, because we'd all have the thrill of battling for the survival of humankind.
It's called Mrs. Frisby and Rats of NIMH. This is inordinately important to me for some reason.
|| I am sitting here drinking wine and watching CA play Bioshock Infinite. It's oddly comforting. |>
Is Bioshock Infinite cool? Is it okay for a relatively mature eleven-year-old?
I mean, I know there's a movie adaptation of the book, but it's a pretender.
Look very closely at what you wrote.
242: Has he played the others? CA says it's not very different blood and gore wise (but still a first-person shooter), no titties or anything, and this one riffs on labor and racism and American exceptionalism. (Bloodier than Assassin's Creed 3, though, he says.)
Teo knows exactly how important things should be to VW.
245: we were too poor for definite articles when I was kid. Way to be classist, dood.
231: I figured that out fairly recently and had a similar reaction.
Bloodier than Assassin's Creed 3, though, he says.
Thanks. This is just what I needed to hear.
251: It is pretty cool, though. CA just caused a revolution. "Keep your guns! We need FOOD!"
247: I feel obligated to carry on the proud tradition.
252: he's allowed to play AC3, but I think that's about our limit. For example, he briefly had Halo Reach, but that got too gross for us. Is Bioshock less gross than that? Or more interesting? Or in some way redeemed by something or other?
It's definitely not gross, so far as these things go, but you have guns and you shoot people. And all the Bioshocks are beloved by geeks for their story lines. (In the first one, the world in which you're killing people is a mid-century Ayn Rand-inspired Libertarian dystopia. In the second, it's a communitarian dystopia. In this one, the "utopia" is founded by a late 19th c American racial purity and capitalism fetishist. You're an ex-Pinkerton with a heart of gold.) The PK plays Bioshock. CA's nephew would never be allowed near it. Hard to know!
I don't like playing video games, but I really do enjoy watching this one for some reason.
CA's nephew is Canadian, so he's only allowed to club seals not people.
257: Clearly the answer is that the next version should be Bioshock Seaworld.
AC2 was pretty bloody already, you ask me, for 11.
I never played many first person shooters newer the Castle Wolfenstein and Doom. I did play Thief III, which isn't supposed to be a shooting game, mostly, but I wasn't very good at stealth.
205.vii sorta makes me want to keep the sideburns in a (perhaps misguided) effort to forge anew the forgotten frontiers of facial hairdom But really, I'm lazy, and shaving takes work. The beard will swallow the 90210 sideburns soon enough.
Despite 205, I'm going to keep shaving for a while. I never got used to my own face with a mustache.
Not that 205 didn't give me a brief moment of regret.
I grant I never saw a goddess go, but an upright young woman in a columnar maxi-dress, gliding down a long block on a short skateboard, gave me some pause.
I am currently working hard to inflict more power point slides on the world. I have 8 to 10 minutes. Should I make 20 slides and plow through them faster than anybody could comprehend in order to make time or should I make 10 slides and plow through them faster than anybody could comprehend because that's how I talk when I don't bother to practice?
It should have been a coup de foudre, given the golden horizontal light and the beautiful breeze Von Wafer was humblebragging about. Also an orange-tree behind her. Maxfield Parrish was leaning down from the heavens.
266: 10, unless the peachy koochie thing is cool where you are, in which case I guess 20.
266: No, focus on the transitions—that's the most important part. Make sure to include both Checkerboard Down and Checkerboard Across, plus the occasional Comb Vertical.
I don't even know where to find the menu that lets me add transitions/wipes/whatever.
271 should not be interpreted as a request for information.
If you don't want to work for it, you can at least be sure to wear Transitions® Lenses when you give the presentation.
I got ten slides, if you don't count the title and references.
If you do count them, I have eleven slides. Clear organization isn't my thing.
The title and references are on the same slide?
I only have six references and a short title.
6 references and a short title could still get you into an Ivy League school, Moby--if the references are sufficiently glowing and the title isn't from a cadet branch.
You put full references in your presentations? La di dah!
It's for a class. I sort of had to. Also, I forgot I need to add a figure, so that will be one more slide.
So what's this class you're taking, anyway?
I'm also writing a talk. One slide per minute is my rule of thumb. Don't put much information on the slides.
I'm doing that thing where I flew in tonight and I give a talk at this conference tomorrow morning and then fly home. That thing I always thought was kind of arrogant and assholish when I saw older researches doing it when I was younger, like "oh, look at me, I'm too important to listen to other people's talks, I'm just going to swoop in and grace you with my presence and then vanish". Am I an asshole now?
Also I forgot to pack a charger for my phone so it's a good thing this trip is short.
Am I an asshole now?
The asshole you always were is expressing itself.
I considered making the joke in 285 but rejected it as too obvious. FACT.
227 Which movie/TV show was it where a guy was on simultaneous dates with two women?
There was a very recent (last week, maybe?) Community episode where Abed did this, and then met a third woman he had much more chemistry with in the process.
287: Then 288 becomes even worserer for me.
Community has sort of a Saved by the Bell feel to it this year.
I've been speaking prose an asshole all my life and didn't know it?
Unusually, I have to travel for a conference this week. I'm mostly going to be listening and meeting people. I don't have to present. That's my coauthors who do that.
Teo, it is just a stats class again.
If you take it often enough you're bound to pass eventually.
Know where you can always get a phone charger when you forget yours? Any car rental counter at any airport. They have tons of them. With a little luck you might even get one with a usb that joins the cigarette lighter thingio (and charge the phone from your computer).
Good to know. I forgot my charger when I went to Philadelphia recently. Luckily my phone didn't die until the last day I was there.
||
I'm a bad person and laughed out loud at this.
Man shoots himself in the head during NRA 500
I had a similar reaction when I saw that headline.
299. Wow. I guess probably there isn't a higher proportion of complete fruitloops in America than anywhere else, it just seems that way because there are so many people. It must be awesome in China.
296: I plan to take a course every couple of years until I'm an inspirational, cuddly old guy who gets lifestyle stories written about him.
It's definitely not gross, so far as these things go, but you have guns and you shoot people.
The melee kills are pretty damn gross. I wouldn't let my fictional 11-year old play it. But I'd probably have played it as an 11-year old and been fine, so take that how you will. More broadly, I'm not sure an 11-year old will get all that much out of it. A lot of the narrative and political stuff will probably go over his head, or at least not resonate as it's intended to, and the shooting gameplay is only so-so.
Regardless, it's definitely a good idea to play the first Bioshock first.
"You'll do your homework after you finish playing Bioshock."
I thought the first Bioshock was just OK, but the new one is getting pretty (if not universally) enthusiastic, interesting reviews, so maybe I'll check it out sometime. Is Batman in it?
I thought the first Bioshock was just OK, but the new one is getting pretty (if not universally) enthusiastic, interesting reviews, so maybe I'll check it out sometime.
If you only thought the first one was OK, I doubt you're going to like this one any better. The core gameplay is basically identical (in a way that feels weirdly old-fashioned these days), but there aren't any enemies that match up to the Big Daddies either for the fun of the combat or for pathos. And while there's a lot to like about the story and the presentation, it's not as coherent and thematically-driving-in-the-same-direction as the first one.
299, 300: If you made it up, nobody would believe you.
Which movie/TV show was it where a guy was on simultaneous dates with two women?
Switch the genders and it's Marcia Brady, I think.
Didn't Abed say which show(s) it was? He did frame it explicitly as a move out of TV sitcoms, but maybe he didn't say which.
Nobody randomly Googling is going to read the whole thread, but one of Scott Lemieux's commenters pushed back on 46 over at LGM, and as far as I can tell, it's not true. Five minutes of Googling, which was all I could do before I started to feel like a creeper, suggests that Yglesias's wife works for a perfectly innocuous DC trade association with no bearing on education reform.
