Re: Friday WTFuckery

1

So, Jammies is student-teaching this fall at a high school. This high school has two quirks that are funny to me:

1. There are three lunches, A, B, and C. If you have A lunch, you go to 4th period then lunch. If you have C lunch, you go to lunch, then 4th period. And B lunch splits 4th period: 20 minutes of class, lunch, and then back to 4th period for 20 more minutes.

I think this is bonkers, but I mentioned it to a few people, and it turns out maybe many schools do it? My colleague had it in Wisconsin in the 90s.

2. There are floors and wings to the building, so when you reference a hallway you need to reference both. Only, they use the alphabet for both. So there's A, B, C, wings and A, B, C floors, and AB is a different hallway than BA.

WHY NOT JUST USE REGULAR FLOOR NUMBERING THAT ALREADY COMES WITH FLOOR NUMBERING? (I'm wondering if there's a computer field somewhere that only accepts letters and not numbers.)


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 9:31 AM
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Isn't all teaching teaching of students?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 9:33 AM
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1.1: I think my high school did it like that, althought it's possible I'm misremembering. That was a long time ago!


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 9:38 AM
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My high school had lunch all at once. Then we had to stand outside until lunch was over so the teachers could finish their cigarettes in peace.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 9:49 AM
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We had a smoking area for students outside the lunchroom. But it was forbidden to chew gum anywhere on the premises.


Posted by: bill | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 10:05 AM
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6

Was Philip K. Dick correctly paraphrasing Freud in this quote, or was he making shit up, or misremembering? I can't find the thing about the horse anywhere else.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 10:39 AM
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There was a hill by my high school that was the unofficial place to smoke pot during school. The police raided it and arrested a few kids, and then the students rose up as one to protest these "Gestapo" tactics. The administration decided the way to solve the problem was to build an auditorium on the site of the hill.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 10:40 AM
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8

The Democrats saying "Lol, no, we're never going to get Trump's tax returns" is pissing me off.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 10:56 AM
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6: I don't know the quote, but it's the sort of thing that would work structurally with anything else valuable substituted for the horse. So Freud might have said substantially that, but not with the horse.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 11:28 AM
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10

Trump deciding to become "President K-Hole" is a welcome break for the weekend.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 11:42 AM
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11

Having skipped eight places from his previous position.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 11:43 AM
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"T-hole"? What does that even mean?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 11:47 AM
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10-12: What are you talking about???


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 11:54 AM
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K L M N O P Q R S T


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 11:57 AM
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Context.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 11:58 AM
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15: Thanks! I actually had read about the Ketamine earlier today, but I'm at that stage of life when it's easier for me to remember stuff from 40 years back than a few hours ago.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 12:01 PM
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The esketamine/Spravato thing is so weird. IV ketamine for serious depression seems legitimately pretty awesome, and yet both the attempt to cash in with a patentable drug and this attempt to score a kind of political point are much worse.


Posted by: Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 12:06 PM
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It hasn't been provident that ketamine won't improve memory. So far as I know.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 12:06 PM
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6: It is in Freud, with a kettle, not a horse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_logic


Posted by: lourdes kayak | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 12:39 PM
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19: It may be Dick's idea of a joke to make it about a horse, since the character's name is Horselover Fat.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 12:51 PM
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1.1: How does that even work, logistically? Do the A lunch kids only have 20 minutes to eat? If not, then the A and B kids are eating simultaneously, so what's the gain in splitting them up?

My high school did something like this, but we were also block-scheduled, so all the lengths of time were multiplied by 2. The downside was that the A lunch started at some absurdly early hour like 10:45.


Posted by: Micah | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 1:06 PM
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I think they all have only 20 minutes to eat. I don't quite understand why it seems so hard for schools to schedule a real lunch hour now -- it didn't seem to be when I was in school, and I don't know what's changed.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 1:21 PM
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22: It's neoliberalism.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 1:36 PM
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Now that they have recess and art and stuff like that there's less time for lunch. Wait, there's less of those things too.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 1:45 PM
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21, 22: I don't think it matters how long lunch is. If lunch is 53.4 minutes, then the whole lunch+4th period block is 93.4 minutes long.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 2:29 PM
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https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-my-very-very-sick-pal/


Posted by: friday WTF | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 2:42 PM
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But he pulled so many prominent thinkers into his social circle, using the promise of his money to create "some kind of a mini university of thought," that in Pivar's view he did "amazing, incredible, amazing, remarkable things for science." There were lavish dinner parties with the likes of Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould during which Epstein would ask provocatively elementary questions like "What is gravity?" If the conversation drifted beyond his interests, Epstein was known to interrupt, "What does that got to do with pussy?!"

What a bunch of preening jackasses. Are these the rich people from Beetlejuice?


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 2:47 PM
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In case you missed it.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 3:15 PM
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I just heard on NPR that Justice Ginsberg just wrapped up three weeks of treatment for pancreatic cancer. The statement says she's all good now, no further treatment needed, but oh fuck, I don't want to contemplate this, too. (Sorry if this is a repeat - I scrolled quickly.)

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/23/753699013/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-underwent-another-round-of-cancer-treatment-this-sum


Posted by: ydnew | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 3:27 PM
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29: I love her, but I am so mad st get for not retiring early in Obama's 1st term or whenever he could have gotten someone on the Court.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 3:43 PM
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I'm unable to drink tonight. Can we talk about something else? Maybe I'll go for a run.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 4:31 PM
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Talk away. I will run. That's almost as good as three beers for anxiety.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 4:35 PM
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"Three beers for anxiety"

not a bad band name.


Posted by: sb driveby | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 5:42 PM
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Soup biscuit?


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 5:56 PM
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Standbibe?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 6:00 PM
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Soby Bick?


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 7:03 PM
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I'm glad they got the legal expert to point out that Trump can't order U.S. companies to leave to China.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 7:25 PM
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I think ever since the Boxer Rebellion only Her Majesty's Minister Plenipotentiary can order that.


Posted by: lourdes kayak | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 8:51 PM
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Twitter thread on the Amazon and Brazilian government (I sincerely apologize, these would have been wholesome blog links ten years ago). Some taunting of the corrupt minister with a fake Yale degree, then serious: "Any suggestions that Brazil should lose the Amazon can (and will) be used by military nationalists for propaganda purposes. The solution is Brazilian democracy, and the excellent scientists and environmentalists that country already has." Regarding those military nationalists, he provides a five-year-old link about militarization.

The list of priorities I linked to yesterday had as priority #3 (after nuclear fusion research, although I don't know if they were precisely ranked?) an extension of the Calha Norte Project, discussed in a 1989 article four years after its founding here and on the government's website, in Portuguese, here (with map). I'm trying to form sage observations about this but it's all turning into garbled memories of reading Os Sertões in grad school.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 9:02 PM
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37 Under Abrahim-Youri he can nationalize their facilities in China. Don't tell anyone about this.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 08-23-19 11:38 PM
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In the interim I for one would be happy with a review of Os Sertões, garbled or no.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 1:14 AM
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But certainly the world is (literally, terribly) on fire
I was talking to a couple of Russians yesterday who confirmed that Siberia is still burning merrily, but the media has moved onto Brasil, so we no longer read about it.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 4:33 AM
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Lurid has them both covered.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 4:57 AM
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If the Republicans want to start nationalizing capital, I say let them and treasure the precedent.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 5:59 AM
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A-Y was about conduct by GHWB, litigated by the Clinton Admin. Precedents considered included acts of 2d Johnson Admin in Panama, Carter Admin in China, 1st Adams Admin vis-a-vis France, and something about the purchase of Florida, but I forget who was President then.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 9:31 AM
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As the first military president of the authoritarian state is reputed to have said, the government was "forced to choose between the folly of continuing Brasilia and the crime of abandoning it."72 They chose the folly and maintained the capital in the interior. As in the Kubitschek era, areas the airplane already reached were to be opened up further and continuously integrated. In the 1970s the area for this development turned out to be the Amazon, where 50 airports and landing strips provided the only connections. As for the central Brazilian hinterland, a plan for an integration of that area had been written during World War II by the US Board of Economic Warfare. The author was the acclaimed inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, a protagonist of aerial cartography in the 1940s and the designer of "biosphere domes" constructed after World War II. Fuller's propositions were even more radical than those made by the Cooke Mission:
Almost so simple that it will be shunned by those who prefer to plan the hard way, in order to take advantage of their hard-earned specialized experience of the past, is the technique now provided by modern warfare that would approach this whole Brazilian jungleland from above, bombing it open, then parachuting in with well-planned hand equipment and personal protective devices to carve out a complete polka-dot pattern of island airports over the whole country, into which pattern mechanical devices would be fed progressively as parachute deliveries graduate to plane-landed deliveries, etc. Each area would receive its quota of machine tools, drafting equipment, air conditioning, etc., and then its engineering and designing personnel would amplify the hold on the jungle. This "island" network of "tropical research and development stations" should form the nuclear structure of the new Brazil.
In the words of Fuller, the Brazilian government preferred to plan the hard way. As with the Belém-Brasilia highway, their program foresaw that the construction of roads crossing the jungle would enhance the country's economic integration. However, the project did not turn out to be a success, and many of the roads were washed away in heavy rains.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 9:33 AM
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Oh, conduct of the Monroe Admin litigated by the 1st Johnson Admin.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 9:36 AM
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48

Detective Pikachu has a much better cast than I thought.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 4:47 PM
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I was talking to a couple of Russians yesterday who confirmed that Siberia is still burning merrily, but the media has moved onto Brasil, so we no longer read about it.

Alaska too, although the air is a lot less smoky today than it's been the past few days.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 08-24-19 6:33 PM
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Amoral loudmouths can at least reverse themselves with unseemly haste.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 1:01 AM
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I thought that was going to be about Trump's trade war.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 6:04 AM
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Speaking of trade, the one weird thing I just noticed is that in Iowa you can buy gasoline that says it doesn't have any ethanol in it. It's about ten cents a gallon more. In Pennsylvania, you can't. Somebody should corn-shame the Iowans.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 3:07 PM
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They know how ethanol starves Mexican people, right?


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 3:25 PM
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Probably not.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 3:26 PM
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My uncle, who managed to be in the cattle business in Roswell for decades but not to meet the guy who saw the aliens, said that it was illegal to feed corn to cattle in Mexico because they didn't want to compete with people food.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 4:03 PM
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Cattle are also people food, strictly.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 4:30 PM
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34-36 not much of a drive by if you name names


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 5:47 PM
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The u-turn isn't usually part of a drive by either.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 6:12 PM
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We call it a double tap in the industry.


Posted by: Opinionated CIA | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 6:19 PM
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"Double penetration" was taken.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 6:21 PM
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Honestly we do mostly voyeurism these days.


Posted by: Opinionated CIA | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 6:23 PM
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We have the technology.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 6:31 PM
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I've heard ethanol is bad for two-stroke engines. Maybe Iowa is a hotbed of weed-whacking.


Posted by: Stanley | Link to this comment | 08-25-19 6:34 PM
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