So today I saw a 2022 US quarter for the first time. Two of them in point of fact. I believe the current plan is to have notable women on the obverse. First up is Sally Ride, whose surname is something of an aptronym.
The quarter looks pretty good, but I have to wonder about this strategy. They keep telling us there's a coin shortage. Well, is making every quarter a special edition helpful with that? Seems like it could lead to a lot more hoarding. Make change boring again.
So this came in the mail this past weekend.
All the authors got them as an announcement that the latest issue was out. My scanning was a little crooked, but I think it looks quite good. The editor, Kristi, has an eye for design, so the issues tend to look nice as well.
So yeah, this is exciting.
There have always been awful teachers. I have a friend who's a veteran high school English teacher. Some years ago I remember him talking about a woman in his department they were trying to get rid of because she wasn't teaching English, she was teaching flower arrangement. Which is kind of a neat thing to learn, but not her job.
There are individual bad teachers, though, and then there is a collective movement toward bad education. In what at least used to be the normal course of events, teachers might slag off work to pursue their own agenda, but it would just be single teachers doing their own thing. And that thing might just be laziness. The Internet and social media allowed untold thousands in cities across the nation to coordinate their efforts such as they are, and it's given them a flag to sail under.
Much of what the Libs of TikTok account on Twitter did was to show what kind of agenda so many teachers had in common. And if they weren't doing their jobs, what is it they were dong? They were planning together and showing off for each other in a way that would not have been imaginable before Web 2.0. But that meant leaving evidence out in the open where Libs of TikTok could find it. Live by the tech, die by the tech.
Not surprisingly, when the Washington Post took sides on this matter it was on the side of the politicized teachers. But that paper can't settle the argument.
One funny thing about the thumb piano in the contemporary world is that someone playing it just looks like they're texting. Or maybe playing on a Gameboy. So the melody is a surprise. I quite like this performance.
The YouTube page this video is on tells me that the setting is a Ugandan village called "No Village Beyond." Which is a great village name.
I saw The Batman yesterday. In the theater. Had to catch an early show. It is quite long. Close to three hours, so more than that when you count coming attractions et al. If I watched it at home I probably would have split it into two nights.
A three hour movie about men in spandex doesn't sound like it should work. The length isn't really a problem in context, though. Since the plot is set into play by the Riddler, who has a thing about making things unnecessarily complex, you just have to figure on the whole thing taking its sweet time to work out.
Paul Dano, who I first saw as a mute teenager in Little Miss Sunshine, has always struck me as a Bud Cort-type actor born to a later time. His spectacularly innocuous features are made menacing, once you can see his face.
Which you don't, really, until another villain is pushed out of the way. John Turturro plays a vicious but courteous gangster. While as far as I know he has never been nominated for an Oscar―which shows you how seriously you should take the Oscars―Turturro is the best actor in whatever he's in far more often than not. So he is here as well, even if he's in a secondary role.
Overall I approve. I do feel like I should be getting out to see non-franchise movies. It's just been hard the last couple of years. It doesn't help that while Providence used to have two good independent movie theaters, now it's just got one.
"It's not funny" or "there's nothing funny about (fill in the blank.) These phrases are so often used to convey that something has caused pain and is therefore off-limits.
The problem is that humor is, at its core, a method of dealing with pain and anxiety. If you limit it to only jokes about anodyne subjects it's kind of a waste.
Sure, I understand the need for tact at some times. But if I don't find something funny, you're probably telling it wrong.
Something I'm reading now is E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Schumacher was a German-born British economist, and this 1973 book would have to be considered his major opus, especially since he died just four years after its publication. Well, it's a worthy work to be remembered for.
In Schumacher's hands economics isn't just the materialist study of money and trade. Instead it's a branch of philosophy, as arguably it was always meant to be. As such he gets into a lot of different topics. His view of education is timely a half century later.
What do the six "large" ideas have in common, besides their non-empirical, metaphysical nature? They all assert that something that had previously been taken to be something of a higher order is really "nothing but" a more subtle manifestation of the "lower"―unless, indeed, the very distinction between higher and lower is denied. Thus man, like the rest of the universe, is really nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms. The difference between a man and a stone is little more than a deceptive appearance. Man's highest cultural achievements are nothing but disguised economic greed or the outflow of sexual frustrations. In any case, it is meaningless to say that man should aim at the "higher" rather than the "lower" because no intelligible meaning can be attached to purely subjective notions like "higher" or "lower," while the word "should" is just a sign of authoritarian megalomania.
Schumacher has broad concerns, and seeing an economist concerned with forces acting on the soul is refreshing.
