Earlier this week, The Onion had a hysterical article titled "US Government to Discontinue Long-Term, Low-Yield Investment in Nation's Youth."

I laughed my ass off... it was a brilliant take on our government's inability to fund schools properly.

Then I read Atrios, and found out that the Florida pension fund for teachers and other public employees- in other words, my goddamned pension fund!- bought Edison Schools Inc.; a financially troubled for-profit school management company.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a vocal proponent of vouchers, for-profit education and other anti-public school schemes, is a member of the administrative board which supervises the pension's investments. There is currently only one Edison school in Florida. I'm sure that will change soon.

I'm not laughing anymore.

Julie is completing a clinical fellowship in Speech-Language Pathology at the VA Hospital in Miami, and has access to some nifty equipment. Last May, under her supervisor's, uh, supervision, she performed a video stroboscopy on herself. Meaning, she used a specialized fiberoptic camera to essentially record a video of her vocal folds in motion as she sang various pitches on an [i] vowel.

She has apparently spent several hours over the last couple of days (after work) figuring out how to convert the digital images into Windows Media format, and she showed me the result tonight.

I've been singing for years, and I feel I have a good working knowledge of the physical processes whereby phonation is produced. But to actually see the vocal folds thickening or lengthening as Julie sang different pitches on the recording was amazing. Not to mention the fact that she got some masterful shots of the "mucosal wave" as the vocal folds open and close. It looked so beautiful... this totally made my night.

Counting the days...

Gigantic, the critically acclaimed documentary about They Might Be Giants, opens in Fort Lauderdale this Friday. Julie and I are checking it out that evening, and I'll no doubt go at least one additional time.

I now have comments via Haloscan. Still tweaking the code though, with the help of their site admin.

Eventually the "comments" link will be blue, I hope, to make it easier to find and because I think it'll be more visually appealing. Then again my color perception is poor- I've gone outside wearing horribly mismatched clothes more times than I can count- so what do I know?

(I do have borderline perfect pitch though, which is a nice perceptual quality to have if you're a musician. Here's an interesting NYT article on that phenomenon)

The Ten Commandments Judge: On Tour!

Roy Moore, well-known conservative judge and bad poet, is coming to Fort Lauderdale this October to take part in the "2003 Reclaiming America For Christ Conference." The shindig will be sponsored by local gay-hating megachurch Coral Ridge Presbyterian (whose website is only a couple of steps away from being a real-life, non-parody version of Landover Baptist or Betty Bowers). Funny- Julie and I were married in her Presbyterian church, my grandmother was a Presbyterian for many years (albeit before I was born), and I never had an impression of the denomination as being this wacky and reactionary.

All of these "Let's take back America for Christ" people who cite the Founding Fathers for their cause would do well to read the words of one of the Constitution's chief architects, Thomas Jefferson:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State. (letter from 1802)

And here's Jefferson on John Calvin, the nutty Reformation-era theocrat whose teachings would form the foundation of the Presbyterian Church:

I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. (letter from 1823)

Ouch.

By the way, I'm a Christian. Not in the sense that I believe in the doctrine of salvation through the Resurrection (my personal jury is still deliberating that issue), but in the sense that I believe the Sermon On The Mount is an amazing statement, and that if more people lived by it (particularly those with money and power) we'd have something close to a perfect world. I'm comfortable in the church (well, maybe not Coral Ridge), and have found the plurality of traditional Christians I've met (including "fundamentalist" believers) to be kind, giving, and reasonable people. I just think that the whole "judge not, lest you be judged" thing is often overlooked by the evangelicals. Until I enable comments, please direct hate mail to the email address above.

Ashcroft: Two-Faced Bastard

But we knew that already.

Ashcroft: "The number of times section 215 has been used to date [to spy on library patrons' records] is zero... [t]he hysteria is ridiculous."

America's Libraries: Bullshit.

The latter article quotes Sam Morrison, director of my county's library system, who states that the FBI recently contacted his office. "'We've heard from them and that's all I can tell you,' Morrison said. He said the FBI specifically instructed him not to reveal any information about the request."

This shouldn't scare me... I've checked out stuff by Chomsky and Zinn, and books on anarchism, but nothing that would profile me as a terrorist. I'm a pacifist, for Pete's sake. Then again, the FBI investigated the pacifist American Friends Service Committee for decades, and you can find the FOIA-declassified FBI files on this Nobel Peace Prize-winning religious group- all 3,498 pages of it- here. Amazing, and frightening. The FBI has a long, long history of fucking with people for political reasons.

(A year and a half ago, it came to light that the Denver Police Department kept secret and illegal files on hundreds of organizations. One of them was the AFSC, dubbed by the DPD as "criminally extremist." There is no pleasing some people.

Wesley Clark

It's going to take a lot to convince me to vote for a Democrat in 2004 instead of a third-party candidate. A big part of my decision is going to to be their views on the war in Iraq.

The question is put to Wesley Clark: If you were a member of Congress, would you have voted to support the invasion of Iraq?

"Yes."

"No."

Color me unimpressed. For someone who has never held elective office, General Clark seems to be learning the political game quickly.

Here's an editorial by Clark which seems to extinguish any perception I may have developed of him as an "anti-Iraq-war" candidate.

At this time, this story is being underreported in the prominent pro-Democrat blogs (Atrios, TalkLeft, Demagogue, MediaWhores Online). Very odd, since they were all vehemently anti-war as well. I would think that, out of intellectual honesty, they would at least mention these flip-flops. I don't know if it's because they haven't yet picked up on the story, or that they don't want people to call them hypocrites if they if they jump on the Clark bandwagon at some later point, but I suspect it's the latter. Too bad.

Best Of The Blog

The sidebar now includes a set of links to some (but by no means all!) of my better posts. I spent several minutes doing this, so all you haters better not email me with kvetches like, "Hey, Bone, where's that post where you made fun of Rob Lowe?"

Coming soon: comments! (as soon as I can find a host site I'm happy with; Blogger still doesn't support comments).

Speaking of Blogger: it's a little buggy at times, but it's free, has all the features I need and overall is a great service. I know a lot of bloggers who use Moveable Type, but I'm probably gonna stick with Blogger.

Chutzpah

Kazaa Owner Complains of Copyright Infringement

This could very well be a hoax... but if it's true, you have to admit it's kinda funny (even if you believe that the RIAA are a bunch of weasels).

For a long time, some pacifists have advocated not paying that portion of their taxes that supports military activities; estimated to be 25% for fiscal year 02 by the Friends Committee on National Legislation. That's a Quaker organization. This knowledge will be relevant later.

The Religious Society of Friends ("Quakers") is a Christian denomination that dates back to 1652 (in other words, it's not a fringe thing). Quakers believe that all people have God present in them (many Quakers call this "the inner light." I use the phrase "the divine principle," after Tolstoy). Because of this, Friends feel that to do violence against another person is to do violence against "that of that of God within them." It should come as no surprise that for the past few hundred years Quakers have generally been pacifists.

(I am not formally a member of the Quaker tradition, but I've been attending Quaker meeting for worship since 2001 and it's probably just a matter of time before I join the denomination. I haven't been able to go to meeting for a while as I've been singing at Julie's church, and I really miss it. I did meet up with some of the members of the Fort Lauderdale meeting at the rally I went to last weekend, and it was great to see them)

Priscilla Adams is a staff member for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which is the granddaddy Quaker organization in the US (think William Penn). Rather than pay the tax money that would go to the military, she loans it to peace groups and refugee assistance organizations (only intending to ask for repayment if the IRS comes after her).

Which has finally happened.

They are suing Adams and PYM... the former because they say she owes $42,000 in back taxes, and the latter because, as her employer, they are allegedly refusing to garnish her wages. They want to lodge a additional 50% penalty- $21,000- against PYM for their noncooperation.

Everything old is new again

The perception that the Right wants to take us back to the 1950s is apparently correct... in all the worst ways.

Reactionary pundit Ann "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" Coulter revises history in her new book (Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism), stating that Senator Joseph McCarthy was a hero who was slandered by the liberal left. Amazing. That's would almost be like, I don't know, an Italian prime minister saying something along the lines of "You know, Mussolini wasn't all that bad." (wait a second. Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing billionaire media mogul who occupies the PM position in Italy did just that this past week!)

Have you no sense of decency Ann, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Here's a site which is performing a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal of Coulter's screed (the McCarthy stuff is in chapters 4 and 7). This blog has some great links to reviews and critiques of Treason. And of course, Al Franken exposes Ann's penchant for distortion, ad hominum attacks and outright lying in his latest book.

Another "Back to the Future" moment (geez, we should really start a fund to buy some of these Republicans flux capacitors for their DeLoreans): This guy advocates the reimplementation of the Hollywood blacklist. Insane.

Avast!

Talk Like A Pirate Day is just around the corner (September 19th).

Here be a pirate vocabulary primer, and an English-to-Pirate translator.

If you search through the July 2003 archives of this site, you will find pirate jokes. Arrrr.

Talibama

Edited 9/11: left out a link to the article that inspired this whole post. Oops.

Alabama is ostensibly a Christian state. Most of you recall the brouhaha over the removal of the two-and-a-half-ton Ten Commandments idol monument that was placed in the state's judicial building a while back. Someone could look at that and say "Man- these Alabamites are some God-lovin' people!" Despite, of course, their inability to obey the Second Commandment that forbids one from prostrating himself/herself before a graven image.

A couple months ago I blogged about Alabama governor Bob Riley's proposal to raise the state's taxes on high-income citizens, so as to remove an undue tax burden from the poor. He claimed it's what Jesus would have done (and he's correct!). I was impressed... a Republican politician acknowledging the revolutionary practice of compassion demonstrated by Jesus in the Gospels.

Well, in an act of true Christian charity, Alabama's voters crushed the tax referendum at the polls* (68% voted against it), thus showing themselves to be a bunch of golden-calf-worshipping hypocrites. Meanwhile, 4,000 teachers are gonna lose their jobs. As a teacher who had his job cut recently, I can sympathize.

I still don't know what I believe... I go to Quaker meeting (well, not lately; I've been working as a tenor soloist at Julie's church for the past few months) and find that their beliefs dovetail perfectly with my values... but some days I have this nagging suspicion that I'm really more of a secular humanist that anything. Pretty sad for someone that spends as much time as I do contemplating existential issues. I do know, however, that I want nothing to do with the self-serving brand of "Christianity" espoused/perpetrated by these people.

Bob Riley is already trying to get back into his constituents' good graces. He's placed an exhibit in the state capitol featuring, among other things, the Ten Commandments... apparently to make good on a promise he made to supporters of the Ten Commandments Judge when the big granite version was carted out of the judicial building.

*Thanks to Liquid List for the link!

It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness

Sunday evening, I went to an anti-war rally/vigil sponsored by the Broward Anti-War Coalition. It was a powerful evening with some great speakers (including a woman who lost a son in the WTC attacks, and an ex-Special Forces soldier/army instructor with a son in Iraq, yet nonetheless is vehemently opposed to the war). I'm really glad I went- it's so easy to get discouraged reading and viewing this story in the jingoistic, Ashcroft-fellating mainstream media.

"But Bone," you say, "the war is over! Isn't it time to get over it?"

The war isn't over just because Bush says it is (for that matter, Bush isn't even President just because he says he is. Yeah, I'm still bitter about that whole "stolen election" thing). American troops and Iraqi civilians are still dying daily in that country, and military tours of duty have been extended... to me, that's pretty solid evidence that this can going to turn into an eternal, Vietnamesque fiasco.

Of course the price tag for appeasing Halliburton and Bechtel... er, reconstructing Iraq, is getting huge. In his speech, Bush asked for $87 billion dollars for reconstruction. This is in addition to the ridiculous amount of cash we've already spent. Oh, and notice the lack of the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" in Bush's chat, if you have the stomach to read it. That's because there aren't any. Even Hans Blix (remember him? He was the UN's chief weapons inspector) is saying that Iraq may have told the truth when they claimed they had destroyed their illegal weapons.

Here's a great statistic: 7 out of 10 Americans still believe that Hussein was behind 9/11. Wow. If you are one of these people I don't even know what to say, except that you need to do a little research that doesn't involve watching FOX News.

The new Al Franken book is great, if a little heavy-handed (but that's OK- it's not nearly as heavy-handed as anything by Coulter or Hannity). It's meticulously researched and funny. Yay!

The great things about teaching music at the elementary level:

It's relatively easy. It's fun. I feel totally appreciated by the kids and the other teachers. I'm great at it. The administration at Main Street Elementary apparently loves me (the administration at Stadium Elementary barely knows I exist, but I've only been there a couple of days and my placement there was as much of a surprise to them as it was to me).

The not-so-great things:

I have a hard enough time learning names (even with a seating chart, when I taught high school it would take a couple of weeks to learn everyone's name in all my classes, and I saw the kids every day). I now teach 24 classes at two schools, and I only see 'em once a week. I am never learning these names.

Oh, and the "traveling-between-two-schools" thing sucks. I go to Stadium Elementary on Wednesday and Thursday, and when I reported back to Main Street Elementary on Friday I was totally disoriented.

Fake job names

[updated 9/6/03]

There once was a time when I was updating this site daily. How the mighty have fallen.

I'm giving fake names to the elementary schools I'm working at, out of low-grade paranoia that some student or school parent will find my language or politics objectionable. Obviously, if someone Googles my name it'll most likely show this site as one of the top choices, but if someone's just searching for pages pertaining to the schools there's less chance of them randomly pulling up my profanity-laden blog this way.

So the suburban elementary school to which I was initially assigned, and at which I'm teaching three days a week, will henceforth be known as "Main Street Elementary School," after a nearby landmark. The second school is located near ProPlayer Stadium, so I guess I'll call it "Stadium Elementary School." This way, I can write about work a little more freely. I'm not going to go back and change all the instances where H-ML's name appeared... I don't teach there anymore anyway, so the potential repercussions are negligible in the unlikely event that a search on "H-ML" pulls this site out of the Googlemind. (Of course, I say that now...)

I guess I could always upgrade to Blogger Pro and password-protect the site, but giving out the password to everyone I know is more trouble than it's worth.