Sad link from Scrappleface. I want to know just what the hell everybody was thinking? I want to know why she and her husband conceived the baby if another baby would be too much of a burden and I want to know why the hell they put the baby in a jar labelled with the woman's name on it! It's almost as if it was calculated to make her feel bad. What is worse the fetus was "baby-like" in appearance from what I gather. Otherwise I am guessing she wouldn't have noticed. This is the link to the original story on the Daily Record a British newspaper.

One more link from College Humor.

Another fun link from College Humor.

Comedic Brilliance like this never goes unpunished. The link is from College Humor.com.

Very Cool. I'd use more pictures but I would need to cut down on the size as large pcitures stretch out my layout.

Always shut your windows!

OI am feeling lazy tonight, so I thought I'd post an editorial I wrote for the student newspaper at UTD. A lot of people didn't like it then a few might not like it now. I wrote it just before the presidential elections as counterpoint to the majority opinion of the newspaper staff.

I'm hyped and I 'm amped!
Most of my heros don't appear on no stamps!!
Soccer today, I have a little energy to burn off and no work to do.

Look.

I am desperately in need of purpose and direction in my life. I need an overriding career goal. When I started college I believed that a degree in computer science would get me a job and thus provide de facto direction in my life. I was wrong. In fact, I have known that a degree in computer science does not do that since my sophomore year and my first job as an intern. Companies are no longer hiring people based on the flimsy weight of education credentials. During the Dot Com Bubble they had little choice really, but now in the Dot Con Crunch, I am getting the feeling that programmers will be just a step above mechanics on the employment food chain. What is worse a degree in computer science does not even qualify you as a programmer. It qualifies you to be a research assistant or a graduate student if your grades are decent.
I screwed up by not following through on my schooling with as much heart and desire as I should have. I have never been extremely enthusiastic about school but until college my (non) effort had been enough to score mostly A's. My Dad pushed me so I scored a 1300+ on my SAT because he wanted me to get into a top school - MIT. I nearly did I think. Had I progressed passed Algebra II in high school I might have made it. As it was I scored a 650 on the Math portion after re-teaching myself geometry and and struggling with basic algebra concepts. (I later recovered enough to score an A in Calculus I and a B+ in Calculus II but not before retaking each class once. Go figure.) With better prepaation I would likely have scored in the low 1400's. My highest verbal score was a 750. I had potential. I still have it. The question is what am I going to do with it?

I taught at Hillcrest High Thursday. I was miserably late; due once again to my inability to get up early enough to leave the house on time, and also the fact that I got off the train at the wrong station. When I finally did catch my bus I was riding what appeared to be the Park Cities Spanish-Speaking Domestic Help Shuttle. The driver spoke Spanish exclusively, and most of the passengers wereolder hispanic women who disembarked as the bus wound its way through tony University Park and Highland Park streets.
I got in and was signed in by an unusually young dean. Most dean's are candidates to join the aarp. So a 30-something dean is remarkable. I hung out in the teacher's lounge until the dean summoned me to cover for a teacher who was having a conference with the principal. My first class was fun. It was marred by one student walking out and not coming back due to instructions left by the teacher to not write bathroom passes. In retrospect, I should have just written the pass because it must have truly been an emergency for the student to dare the consequences. I did write passes for other students during the day claiming emergency bathroom situations. I suppose bathroom trips should be expected, since other than lunch, students only have five minutes to make each class. High School campuses between periods are large madhouses. Making it all the way to the restroom, locker, and attending class on time would be a herculean feat.
After lunch I noticed that I was supposed to be teaching French for 8th period. Needless to say, I was nonplussed. I don't speak French but the lesson plan provided called for extended babysitting. The only major incident involved a student not in the class calling one of my kids a "bitch". Usually, the kids let profanity slide, but the girl took offense because she didn't know the other student. Also he was an insufferable pest. I brought in another teacher who forced him to apologize in frontof the class and gave him a thorough reprimand. (Profanity is an extremely useful crutch. I just had to consult a thesaurus no less than three times for a word meaning "annoying person" and had to substitute reprimand for my favored noun - a** chewing. Being PG-13 is hard. Maybe I'll relent and just got to being R-rated as long as the sex, profanity, drug use, and violence is not gratuitous and has actual merit. The problem being that I love gratuitous sex, drugs, violence, profanity, and rock and roll.)

William Saletan is in favor of a resolution authorizing war with Iraq! To explain why I am surprised at this, let me tell you that Mr Saletan is strongly opposed to war with Iraq as are most of the writers at Slate. What he realizes, and everybody else in the liberal left should realize, that when President Bush asked for authorization to declare war on Iraq, the best way to stop him from going forward with war is to give him permission. If Bush's only aim was to get Saddam Hussein he could have just ordered massive unauthorized attacks on Iraq - an unofficial war. The President of the United States can do that. Obviously he asked for permission, so elimination of Saddam Hussein is not the only goal, or at least it isn't important enough to risk becoming extremely unpopular. Bush's constant pushing on the issue has had the effect of causing our allies to yield to increasingly more drastic consequences for Iraq should they fail to disarm. Iraq in turn has been forced to be more conciliatory. The game liberals should play is that Saddam is rational enough to finally yield in the face of certain annihilation. Bush wants to test the theory of Self Preservation - Saddam doesn't want to die so he won't use nuclear, chemical, or bioligical weapons against us. If Saddam is rational he will yield and and the liberals will have proved their point. If he is not we'll go to war and President Bush and the Hawks will be vindicated.

One more thing, I saw an old college aquaintance, Jeremiah, at the train station. Weird.

I am having trouble with students flirting with me. A girl today wanted to know "Is it true that you have six pack abs?" I immediately responded "Who told you that?" Then I realized there was no way she could have known, she was just flirting.
I went to sex education today for the first time! Kind of an eye opener for a 23 year old virgin. I realized that I was unable to name the parts of the sex organs. I still can't name the parts of the sex organs; but I think I might do a better job of locating the labia majora and labia minora. One girl in class volunteered that she found male virgins very attractive - definitely not the time to mention that I belived in abstinence so much that I was still a virgin. There was no talk of birth control or protection but a complete concentration on the dangers of even protected sex and the immorality of sexual intercourse outside marriage. It was odd to hear a teacher in a public school saying that pornography, television, movies, and music all might lead to sex before marriage. I suppose I am an oddity, having indulged heavily in entertainment and still maintained my physical purity.
My biggest beef with the sexual education is that by preaching abstinence the public school system is forced to rely on moral instead of practical or scientific arguments. Public schools really are not in the business of teaching morals because religion is not allowed. Without some concept of religion or God, morality has no meaning to me.There is no God or religion in public schools. Most people teaching abstinence are going to need to rely on religion to justify abstinence, which isn't allowed. What's more, the teacher also spoke against homosexuality. Homosexuality is a moral issue and again public schools have no business teaching morals. Perhaps sex education should be left to parents so that children are not taught contrary to their parents' morality. If sex education is taught, birth control and protection (condoms, spermicides, etc) should be mentioned and perhaps even provided. Abstinence should be emphasized by all means, but even long ago before our parents were children, teenagers did have sex and would have benefited from using protection.

The Dallas Morning News has an article on the front page about an Israeli missile attack that Palestinians claim killed fourteen civilians. What I just realized, and everybody else who takes an interest in the war on terror should realize, is that terrorists are civilians. Soldiers and governemnt operatives don't strap bombs to their chests and board buses. So the two (terrorists and civilians) in many places are indistinguishable.

A New York Cop, writing for Slate (I am linking way too much to them) thinks that the DC sniper is going to be very difficult to catch. I can't help but agree. I am not an expert but it is fairly obvious that this guy is good, a veritable killing machine. He has probably had military training because civillians just don't shoot that well without expensive hard-to-buy equipment. An insurance salesman who stopped by the house made an interesting point. The killer seems to be choosing his targets at random, but he could be killing some of the targets to obscure his motive for killing one target. Otherwise the sniping is just a very sick game.
I must be the world's worst telephone conversationalist. Somebody called me today looking for a pick me-up (I am guessing anyway) and I failed miserably. I told a lame joke about two hunters in the woods. You know, the one where the guy shoots his buddy because the 911 operator tells him to make sure he is dead. My delivery is always rushed when telling jokes and I am usually ill at ease telling them. I do better with wise cracks and stories. I can be funny (at least I would like to think) but not that type of funny. Call me again! I'll do better next time.
My brother is getting too big and strong for me to wrestle with. I had the upper hand physically in the past by a safe margin.Now he's so strong and agressive that the stakes are kind of dangerous. I can still whup him, but the amount of effort is enormous. Plus he's a mean little squirt. He's taken to sneak attacking me and wrestling me to the ground by my head. I have taken to pushing him off and demanding shrilly in a little girl's voice that he "leave me alone!" My Mom warns us not to break the furniture and him not to complain when he gets hurt fighting someone bigger than he is. It's sad - I can bench press twice his weight, but I can barely beat him in a fair wrestling match.

Wow! Who knew that sex kills? This is the Egghead column from Slate.

Poetry from Slate.com.

Crazy about baseball? Here's a bookmark worthy blog. He could use an editor to clean up some of the typos but so could I.

Just when I think my life can't get any worse somebody tows my car. I am inclined to let them have it but I could sell it for at least $600. DOH!

Down in the middle of this article from ESPN is the type of picture that makes me go whoa. I guess rednecks do have more sex than the rest of the population. I used to comfort myself with by claiming that it was with skanky women, but even skany women have their charms.

WIlliam Saletan makes the casethat Iraq and The War on Terrorism are two different issues in this article in Slate. So what? I believe the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein's influence is a compelling enough reason for war.

I wonder how many schools double as Nuclear Fallout shelters? T.J. Rusk is apocalypse proof.

Has anybody ever noticed how blogger has a habit of hiding the archives every so often? Very annoying...

I had something really important to say but I forget what.

YES! I always want to weep for joy when people argue for things I believe in with this much force and clarity. Saddam must go!

Kids say the darndest things. A girl asked me to day if I "give head". I replied that I didn't. She wanted to know if I knew what that meant. I said I did. She asked how. I turned the question around - how did she know? She replied that she just knew. I replied that I knew because I was a teenager once.
Another girl wanted to know if I'd lick her toes. First she wanted my opinion about whether she had cute toes. She insisted on showing them to me, so finally I agreed that she had pretty toes. Then immediately she wanted to know if I'd lick them. A hypotheical question to ask the substitute, you know. I demanded to know why she wanted to know. I reminded her that I was a teacher and teachers in general tried to limit their contact with students to above the waist. Licking her toes, while not as bad as some other things would probably get me fired. The kids immediately chimed in that they wouldn't tell and hey it wasn't sex. I told her no I wouldn't lick her toes. She looked hurt. "No guy I have asked has ever told me that." So I amended my response, "Ok if you were 18 and not a student, I'd lick your toes." I hope she was satisfied...

Your friend and mine Bud Selig is not a happy man just now. The Yankees lost! Minnesota won! Baseball world in disarray!