Baltimore Diary

That Cat Shaft is a Bad Mother--Shut Your Mouth

Bill Maher: New Rule: Bluetooth headset users have to do something that lets me know you're just on the phone and not a dangerous schizophrenic. Right? We don't know if you're talking to your secretary or the evil leprechaun who lives in your head. You're not the chief communications officer of the Starship Enterprise. You're a shoe salesman asking your mom if you can bring over your laundry. If I wanted to overhear every tedious scrap of brain static rattling around in your head, I'd read your blog.

—Real Time With Bill Maher, (Season 4, 2006)

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A little while ago, inspired by something I saw over at bthesite, I spent some time tonight profile-hopping around MySpace. Some profiles are pretty dull (such as mine), some are all kinds of customized. A bunch have music that automatically plays, often before the page is finished loading. That's a bit of a pain when you're already streaming music, but I'm not going to complain too loudly about it. It's not as though it's made my life a Dickensian nightmare or anything. That's what my job is for.

Most MySpace pages have at least a little bit of the self-expression thing going on besides the usual likes and dislikes. And nearly all of the profiles that I saw tonight were pretty positive in their outlook and in the comments that appeared at the bottom: look at this, isn't it cool, glad to hook up with you again, LOL/ROFL, I had fun last night,etc.

So it stood out when I spotted a profile that wasn't quite so positive. There were some generic comments about "people who lie and cheat" and "people who go on about how great they are when they're not" and how they promise to name names. And, oddly enough, they do name names. There were specific comments about a particular female being a slut, about her being ugly, about her being fat (which is kind of amusing, coming from someone whose pictures have her sporting a double chin). Stuff of this nature, aimed at this specific person, appeared in assorted places all over this particular profile.

It was truly unique in its mean-spiritedness. And I couldn't help but think that this is a person who is spending a lot of their energy on someone whom they say isn't worth that much attention. There's a little bit of irony for you.

For what it's worth, this one person wasn't the only recipient of this person's little brickbats of bitterness, but she certainly received the lion's share. It really took me back to the days when I was in high school, back when American History textbooks could be printed on a single sheet of paper. My high school definitely had its share of cliques, and the cutting comments were fast and thick and merciless when a person didn't belong. This MySpace profile reminded me of that.

Only, it wasn't a high schooler's profile. It was that of an adult around my age. Go figure.

Fan Club!

Monica: [reading Joey's letter from his stalker] Wait a minute; this wasn't mailed to "Days of Our Lives". It wasn't even mailed. Joey, this woman was in our building; she knows where you live.
Joey: All right! I got my own stalker!
Chandler: You're so lucky; I have to share my stalker with five other guys at work.

—Friends, "The One After the Superbowl, Part I" (1/28/96)

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Last night, after I posted the Kindle thing, I checked the stat chart that Typepad offers. I didn't expect to see a lot of hits because, for whatever reason, the stat count begins around 7pm each day. Maybe they're Jewish and start at sundown? I don't know.

(More likely guess? 7pm Eastern = midnight GMT. Anyway.)

As I've said before, I don't get a huge number of hits per day. It's gone up slowly, from maybe 20 a year ago to around 40 now. So when I tune in only a few hours into the official day and see 44 hits, I have to say "Yow!".

Typepad also gives me the ability to see what pages are being accessed and at about what time, and based on that I could tell that someone was reading the site more or less sequentially, going all the way back to the start and working their way up till now.

That was interesting enough that I went to Statcounter to see what else I could find out. This person did all that reading using a Baltimore County Public Library dialup account. Too bad for you and me both, my new friend, that you won't have that account much longer. Don't feel obligated to wait another 2-1/2 years to come back.

And, as usual, feel free to comment.

Yet Another Click on the Nerd Meter

Sally Rogers: My Aunt Agnes was right. You know what she said when she saw Randy at the bowling alley? She said, "Sally, you can't tell a book if the title's covered."

—The Dick Van Dyke Show, "The Twizzle" (2/28/62)

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It took a few months, but I finally got enough money together to buy this:

This is the Amazon Kindle. The one you see here isn't vibrating or startled; I think it's a demonstration of the fact that it has a wireless connection, so those would be radio waves.

This is probably the coolest e-book I've seen. It's about the size of a paperback novel, but you don't have to deal with text getting all curvy as it dips into the center margin. The text is crisp and clear and adjustable in size. The unit, out of the box, can hold about 200  books, but there's a space for a standard SD card of up to 4 gigabytes, which is a BOATLOAD of books.

You can also subscribe to several magazines and newspapers, and a few blogs as well (such as Reality Blurred or BoingBoing). The subscription price is a little cheaper than the newsstand, and you're not getting any ads. Unfortunately neither are you getting comics or classified ads from the newspapers yet, but perhaps that'll come in the future.

The books' format is proprietary to the Kindle, which means that for best-sellers and such you have to order from Amazon. The good news is that the Kindle edition is usually $9.99, which means that even though the Kindle itself is nearly four hundred dollars, the savings over even Amazon's price means that (in my case, anyway) it will pretty much pay for itself before long. The Kindle can also handle plain text files (such as books from Project Gutenberg), and you can use it to read Microsoft Word files and PDF files, among a few other formats. You could also, if you're so inclined, store MP3 files on it and listen to music as you read.

OK, I've gushed enough, and the last time I was nearly done with this post my browser crashed and I lost the whole thing. So let me say that if you're as big a reader as I am, this is one gizmo worth checking out.

On the Plus Side

Fred Gailey: Look Doris, someday you're going to find that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn't work. And when you do, don't overlook those lovely intangibles. You'll discover those are the only things that are worthwhile.

—Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

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This is an extension of a comment I made on Epiphany's blog.

When I was working in New York schools, which happened between 1985 up until a few weeks before 9/11 (and with that two-year break at Record World), I worked in a few different places:

• Most of that time, I worked in a nonpublic school with severely- and profoundly-impaired youngsters, aged 5-21. We're talking one step away from an institution. I had kids who were fifteen years old, who were functionally nonverbal. They were two-year-olds in grown bodies.
• I was a substitute teacher in New York City for almost a year. Most of the classes I worked in were special education classes, and most of the schools were in the Queens neighborhood of South Ozone Park. PS 63Q was my "cash cow"; I got a lot of work there. The other one was the nearby middle school, IS 210. Lemme tell you, they fed the teachers well in 210's cafeteria. 
• I worked in a very small private high school in Manhattan for a year. My biggest class was five students. Most of these kids had serious money. A girl in my homeroom is now worth around $200 million.
• After that I spent about two years in the preschool program at Helen Keller Services for the Blind in Brooklyn.

So you see, I was either forgettable, or my students were so impaired that they wouldn't remember me today.

After my second marriage fell apart, a friend of mine suggested that I come down to Baltimore. They're looking for people here, she told me. My concern was that I didn't want to leave New York to have the same job I could have up there. She told me that I could work as an Instructional Associate, and she told me what the job entailed: basically, I would coordinate the crafting of the educational programs for the special ed students in a school. It sounded like exactly what I wanted to do, and here's why:

When I attended the IEP meetings for the Helen Keller students, I was given two tasks: write the progress report and develop the academic goals for the students. When I was asked to attend the meeting (which wasn't the case every time for my students; many times someone else from the school attended in my place), my participation was practically nil unless I made a point of injecting myself into the conversation. More often than not, we'd go to the meeting and someone would stick a document under the parents' noses and say, "Sign here." There was very little discussion of the student's program, the school they'd attend, the educational setting, anything. And this is what the parent is being asked to sign to. It made me pretty crazy, and coming to Baltimore seemed like an antidote. It was a way of "putting right what once went wrong" (bonus points if you can ID that quotation) and ensuring that bad IEPs weren't getting shoved down parents' throats.

So now that I'm in Baltimore, my contact with the students is a little more limited. Although many of them know my name, it's not as though they're forming fond student/teacher memories of me that they'll carry through their lives. However, there are plenty of times when I'll be at a meeting that seems to go on for EVER (and some of them do take several hours), and we go through what seems like a million details, and we walk out of the building trying to remember what sunshine looks like, and we know that we've put together a great document that truly has the student's best interests at heart; an educational plan that really seems to get this kid, and if all goes well then we've laid down the foundation for another great plan next year. And the parent who came into the meeting with the "Don't think you're going to blow smoke up my butt" attitude and the one with the "What lies are you going to tell me this year?" snarl leaves the school thanking us for our work, because we're the first team that truly heard what they have to say.

So when we get all of the other stress and grief and tsouris and the just-plain-bullshit from North Avenue and other Bigger Paychecks Than Ours, we think back on moments like those and remember that it's the things like that that make it worthwhile.

Octopus' Garden

Det. Frank Drebin: Is there a ransom note?
Capt. Ed Hocken: Yes. The butler found it. It was tied to this window and thrown into the rock garden.

Police Squad!, "The Butler Did It (A Bird in the Hand)" (3/18/82)

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A few weeks ago my neighbor and I decided to coordinate some of our gardening activities this year. With a little luck it would keep the overall cost down and ensure that both families got lots of produce. She volunteered to start all the seeds during Spring Break (because we were away), so we're looking at stuff that wants to get planted soon.

Last week S (my neighbor) and I went to the OrangeBoxOfTools to get some landscaping timbers, since I wanted a raised bed for the vegetable garden this year. Keiko is pretty good about staying out of gardens; sometimes I have to train her by using the cheap wire fences for a few weeks. But last year the vegetable garden looked kind of...I don't know, forlorn, being at ground level and all. Plus, the raised bed helps with moisture retention in the soil and is thereby a bit more water-conservative.

The bed I wanted to build is 16 feet long by 4 feet wide by 9 inches (three timbers) deep, so we needed to get 15 timbers in all, and have the OBOT guy cut three of them in half. My worry was getting these things home, but S said it was no problem, we'd take her truck.

In her parlance, "truck" is a Lexus SUV wagon. It's got space, but I'm not so sure about this. She swears they're all going to go in this, and I acquiesce. We go in the Lexus. We get 15 timbers for me, a couple more for her, a bunch of 60d nails (about as big as you can get it before they start calling it a "spike"), and a few odds and ends she needs for the kitchen that she and her husband are renovating. On this particular trip that meant one of those huge buckets of joint compound and a sheet of lattice work.

Here's an aside: the names of the nails used to be the cost per 100. Thus, a 60d nail would cost sixty cents per 100. The "d" is pronounced "penny" and don't ask me why. At some point--not that long ago--they simply standardized the names into representing specific sizes. So a nail that used to cost 60 cents per hundred now retails for eighteen cents each. 

So here we are, in front of OrangeBoxOfTools, and this is where we discover that even when you put the back seats down, there still isn't enough room for the timbers. Well, if you have to tie the tailgate down, that's the way it goes. "No way," she said. "I'm not driving around like that." Now, even if you take side streets all the way (as we do), we're talking no more than five minutes' drive altogether. This isn't a hardship. But for S, where there's a will there's a way. For her, the way is pushing the timbers through into the front seat area, and stacking them atop one another. After the first eleven we had to start a second row, which rested on the left side of the top of the passenger seat. The cut ones were much easier, of course; we just tossed 'em into the back area. And the lattice was tied to the roof of the car. We used about 700 miles of twine to tie that sucker down. If we'd attached it crosswise, the car would have actually caught air and taken off like an airplane. Which would have been cool except for the part where the wind would die down and we'd fall like the Neo-Nazis' Ford Pinto did in The Blues Brothers.

(Pictured: not my bed, but it looks enough like it not to matter.)

That was last weekend. During the week, S. called around to see whether she could get a decent deal on topsoil. I figured I'd need in the neighborhood of two cubic yards of the stuff, and she needed about half that. She contemplated a lot of different ways of getting it, including buying an entire pallet of bags. But in the end, S got someone to deliver three yards in bulk, dropping it in the alley behind our properties. That's the good news. The bad news is that I didn't get all of it into my planting bed before the rains came yesterday. And as you know, there was a LOT of rain. I actually emptied several gallons of water from the wheelbarrow I've been using. So at this point, I'm looking at a lot of mud (maybe a half a yard or so) in the alley that still needs to be moved. That stuff is going to be heavy when I get back to it.

Warning: Trite Memorial Ahead

Dr. McCoy: For a child entering puberty on this planet, it means a death sentence.

—Star Trek, "Miri" (10/27/66)

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I don't get a lot of comments, but I've gotten a lot of face-to-face conversations this week which involve some form of the phrase "HEY! When are you gonna post something new?" Freeloaders. Post a comment, ya slackers.

The fact is, I've not been feeling well since last week. My allergies are the worst they've ever been, and that is saying something. But, I'm back to being reasonably functional, so no more excuses.

I saw Daughter online a few nights ago. There was something on her IM profile that said it was a sad day, so being nosy as a concerned parent I asked her what was up. 

Now, here's the part where I expect to hear that her cat died, or perhaps her stepfather's ferret, or I don't know, something innocuous anyway. Instead she tells me that two kids in her school died that day. Then she tells the whole story: "There were three of them. They were driving at like 65 on Nassau Blvd. To get past these two cars, they sped up to 85, and crashed into a dumpster then wrapped around a pole. One died and another died on the way to the hospital in the helicopter." The school had an Open Campus policy, which meant that students could leave the school on their lunch breaks. There's a McDonald's nearby and I imagine it's a popular lunch spot for the students of that school. 

I'll give the school's rumor mill some credit; most of what she told turned out to be correct. The fact was, only one student had died at that point; the other survived until the next day. The driver was the only one who lived. As I write this he's still in the pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the hospital.

One of the reasons Daughter was pissed off was because she felt that the school administrators were dissembling as they made announcements over the PA during the day. Basically, the principal was putting it along the lines of "we don't know that it was students from our school yet" and such, but the fact is that this crash was just about within sight of the school and more than a few people saw it and recognized the car. As an educator I can kinda-sorta understand the princpal's position but this was way out of his control long before he keyed the mike. From what I've heard, he didn't really control the situation very well. But who knows how we'd react in the same place? So, no throwing stones on my part, anyway.

These guys weren't in Daughter's class specifically (she's a Junior and they were Seniors), but she did know two of them, if not especially well, and this sort of thing certainly sucks the fun out of the last three months of school. But what bothers me about this whole thing is that this horrifically unfortunate event won't necessarily become an object lesson for these kids. They're sad and morose and thank goodness it happened late in the year because at least there's a chance that there won't be a completely maudlin yearbook for these students.

But they're young, and they're resilient, and it doesn't matter because you know how it is: at one time we were young, too, and we were stupid and in the long run it didn't matter if some other kid got killed or whatever. That wasn't us. That won't happen to us, we're feeling our youth and our sense of immortality is with us and we have our whole lives ahead of us and that which doesn't kill us will make us stronger. And nothing will kill us.

I had a pretty big graduating class when I was in high school; almost 500 students, I think. None of them got killed. One was in an accident and had been in a coma for a couple of years come graduation, but nobody died. That didn't happen until the summer following graduation, when a friend of mine was in a bar (18 was the drinking age in NY then, children) after work and a disgruntled customer who'd gotten kicked out several hours earlier pumped a few bullets into the front window. So we didn't really get a chance to do the mass grief routine.

So the kids on Long Island will do the candlelight vigils (check) and the pile of notes and stuffed animals at the light pole (check)—can't leave them on the dumpster; that's been removed—and they'll attend funerals (check, check), and maybe there'll be, I don't know, a Memorial Ballfield or a Memorial Art Classroom, but then it's back to business as usual because that's the way things work.

That's the way they have to work, I think.

Sucked In

Doctor Harrison Steele: [Nick holds an M-16 on the bad guys] Have you handled a machine gun before?
Nick Deezy: Sure, lots of times, in high school. I was the captain of the machine gun team.

—Vibes (1988)

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Over on the Baltimore Sun's website, there's some debate in the InsideEd blog going on about a recent story. The short version is, a 7 year old boy was found in a Randallstown school with two loaded guns in his possession. Somehow I got sucked into the debate, but since that's not my forum, I decided to take my version of it here.

What I was originally going for was that, under "zero tolerance" rules, this kid was probably going to be automatically expelled from his school for this infraction. My concern was that this doesn't really solve the underlying problem.

(An aside: most people think of "expelled" and assume it means getting kicked out of school altogether. It doesn't; but it means that you're kicked out of the building you're currently attending for at least a quarter.)

A student who is as young as the seven-year-old in Randallstown, or the eight-year-old in Grove Park last year, is still a little too young to realize all the implications of what they've done. Sure, a third grader knows what a gun is, and they've seen them used on TV all the time, but they don't necessarily know that a gun's only reason for being is to put a hole in another person's body. And they may only be coming around to the idea that "dead" is a forever thing. You don't get to hit the "reset" button and start over. You don't even get to say "oh well, I've got two more lives before Game Over". So simply expelling a student, which is so often the only thing that happens (it wasn't, in Grove Park, but I can't say more), doesn't necessarily get across to the kid the seriousness of their action.

The other thing that happens when an incident like this takes place is that people start hollering for the metal detectors all over again. There's a lot of time and expense that goes into doing something like that. First, you have to find some way of covering EVERY entrance to a building, not just the front door. Next, you have to have somebody staffing the main entrance. Let's assume that everyone can only enter a building through a single door.  So for that one door you have a walk-through detector, which is about $5000. Plus you have to put someone on the door for the better part of the day. That's at least, say, $16,000 (for a really cheap, uneducated, untrained person), plus benefits as a BCPSS employee, so you're talking about $20,000 per year just to staff it, plus the cost of electricity, plus whatever time is involved making adjustments to the school schedule to accommodate the fact that there's a bottleneck at the front door. Oh, and you'll probably have to give the security person a uniform (or uniform allowance) and a hand-held wand for the people who flunk the walkthrough. So there's another thousand dollars or so.

This is the actual dollars-and-cents cost of reacting to a relatively isolated incident. According to a sidebar in the Sun, about 13 incidents involving guns have taken place in the schools since 2002. Three of them involved elementary-level students. Two of them were in BCPSS and one of those involved an unloaded, inoperable weapon.  Of the other ten incidents, two of them took place in Baltimore City. We're talking over 180 schools in BCPSS and a six-year period. That's an awful lot of money spent on a relatively remote possibility. I think I'd rather spend it on more books, school supplies, field trips, in-school programs...anything that's going to get our kids to view school as a place they're motivated to come to rather than another fortress that needs to be stormed.

That's enough, I think, to get the debate ball rolling.

Haunting

Faces of people shortly before, and after, they died.

This isn't a morbid link, I don't think. Some people might be a little disturbed by this, but I found it rather moving. Make sure you read the captions associated with the pictures.

I'd say more but I don't want to color your perception before you've seen it. If you comment, however, I'll be happy to respond with my thoughts.

(found via Dooce. See what happens when you look at some of your older bookmarks?)

Travels With GF

Katie Bueller: I just picked up Jeannie at the police station! She got a speeding ticket, another speeding ticket, and I lost the Vermont deal because of her!
Tom Bueller: I think we should shoot her.

—Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

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Part of our journey last week involved travel through the Great State of Georgia (motto: "Enough with the Peach jokes, already"). At one point, we ran into a traffic jam that was reportedly caused by an accident about ten miles ahead. What to do?

Fortunately, we had a road atlas in the car and determined that the next exit was a road that appears to easily rejoin our path several miles down the road. We might lose a little time not being on the interstate, but not as much as we'd lose if we stayed where we were. So GF, who was driving at the time, grabbed the exit and off we went on our little tangent.

The problem with taking a detour like this is that you wind up on a road not unlike Route 301, where it's 65 MPH for awhile, then you hit a town and the speed limit changes downward in increments to about 35, then increases again as you leave town until it's back up to 65 MPH. I'm used to doing that when I'm on 301 in Florida; GF is not because she usually does the interstate driving.

So we're passing through a town called Screven. We're in the left lane and I happen to look up in time to see a car in the right lane suddenly do a hard left across our path and into a convenience store. GF has to brake hard to avoid hitting the guy. There's lots of swearing on her part. Something catches my eye, and I see a police car with the lights flashing. We've passed the convenience store by now, so I just say to her, "That one's for you, honey."

And indeed it was. The oh-so-polite officer informed GF that he'd clocked her at 57 MPH in a 35 MPH zone, an infraction which will net a fine of $210. And the guy who'd cut us off? Cop saw nothing of the kind. Go figure.