"Behind every great fortune there lies a great crime."
- Honore de Balzac

Warning: Rant approaching!

While driving down to Coral Gables on Friday to hang out with friends at Titanic, I became stuck in traffic on the Palmetto. NPR wasn't running any traffic updates at the moment, so I found an AM talk radio station that runs traffic reports every ten minutes during rush hour. I happened to tune in during a commercial for some investment firm, and the guy was going on and on how that only smart investments were in the ten companies that posted the best returns last year or some such nonsense.

Lo and behold, these companies included some of the most heinous organizations on the planet, in my opinion. Included among these corporations were:

Phillip Morris, vendors of one of the most addictive and deadly substances around;

Caterpillar, notorious for their attempts at union busting during the '90s (scroll down half-way on the linked page), and currently selling bulldozers to Israel so that the military can destroy Palestinian homes in the West Bank (and no, I am not a socialist in any important way, for those of you scratching your heads at the "socialistworker" URL- and I'm certainly not anti-Semetic. I just despise violence and militarism regardless of who perpetrates it);

and General "We Bomb Good Things To Life" Electric, manufacturers of nuclear weapons until the early '90s, and possessor of numerous defense contracts even today.

The most galling thing is that I probably have money tied up in some of these corporations through Florida's teacher retirement plan. I intend to find out if that's true, but I don't know what to do about it even if this is the case.

So, I get back to Florida, go to the high school, and find out that I was surplussed while I was gone. (In my school district, "surplussed" means "laid off due to low enrollment"). I have 140 or so students in chorus, enough for 4 periods, but it wasn't enough to keep me on. Miami-Dade County Public Schools are having something of a budget crisis, which is affecting hiring.

The principal managed to work it out, again while I was still in Cali (I found out all of this ex post facto as well). He did it by assigning me another class.

So on Monday, I will be teaching four sections of chorus... and one period of World History.

To ninth-graders. On "block scheduling," meaning I only see them every other day, but when I do see them it's for an hour and forty minutes at a time.

With no textbooks. Actually, that's not entirely correct. There is a class set, but it's being shared between three classes, so students can't take books home to study. The actual social studies teachers (as opposed to us imposters; yes, there are three of us teaching history out-of-area) got dibs on assigning textbooks.

Thank God I actually read history for fun, was briefly an anthropology major, and generally know shit from Charlemange, because otherwise I'd be totally screwed. As it stands, I'm only "mostly screwed." I'm going to give it my best effort and try to be the best history teacher I can (and oh, it would be so easy to not care whether they learn anything), but I can't help but feel that I'm being set up for failure.

I'm trying to maintain a good attitude about it, though. It's better to have to teach one period of history than to not have a job at all, which was the alternative. If you're surplussed, the district guarantees you a job elsewhere in the county, but it wouldn't necessarily have been a high-school chorus job, or in North Dade County; I theoretically could have wound up teaching middle or elementary school in Homestead, over an hour south of my house. At least my current position is safe, for the time being.

geez... this blog thing was rolling along well until I went out of town. Hopefully I will be able to keep this going now that I'm back.

A lot of stuff has been happening in my little teacher's world- dark, dark things. I'll write about them sooner or later, but for now I'm gonna limit this post to Cali-related info.

San Diego rocked, as always. The highlight was the Comic-Con geekfest. I ended up scoring four-day passes for myself and my brothers from a waiter at Pokeez (one of the finer Mexican eateries in the downtown SD area. Go there, now. Unless, of course, you live in Florida or something). The scalped passes were $20 a pop, which beat paying $60 at the door, or figuring out how to forge the attendee badges.

There weren't as many people dressed as Klingons as I had seen in the past (and mind you, I haven't been since '98), but there was a metric shitload of folks running around dressed as Jedi Knights.

The Hasbro booth had a number of staffers dressed in GI Joe and Star Wars regalia. The coolest one was the woman dressed as the Baroness from the old-school GI Joe cartoons. There was also a remarkable Lando Calrissian. Tone Milazzo took a pic of the guy with plans to alter the photo (using Photoshop or Gimp or somesuch) so that Lando is holding a phat bottle of Colt 45. If you don't get that reference, then you are lame.

Memorable stuff I bought: the graphic novels 2024 and To Afghanistan and Back by indie cartoonist Ted Rall; some back issues of David Walker's excellent blaxploitation-related zine Badazzmofo, and a collection of strips from Goats, the best damned webcomic out there.

The award for "Funniest Quote from the Con" goes to my brother John:

Some woman was at a booth hawking these lightsaber replicas (for $200-300). Admittedly, they had all the bells and whistles, but the whole thing was still fairly geeky. Anyway, this woman is pointing out all of the lightsaber's features, and John asks her, "Does it come with dignity?"

Must have Dr. Pepper... signing off.