I'm very happy to note that I can make a little change to that Memoir section over there on the left. I've been offered a Graduate Assistantship at U Maryland's Center for Teaching Excellence. CTE, the University's primary resource for the development of undergraduate education, has only recently created the position, Graduate Media Coordinator. I'll be producing and editing the newsletter, "Teaching and Learning News," and maintaining the website.
More on this later, no doubt.
Says the Union of Concerned Scientists:
Across a broad range of issues—from childhood lead poisoning and mercury emissions to climate change, reproductive health, and nuclear weapons—the [Bush] administration is distorting and censoring scientific findings that contradict its policies; manipulating the underlying science to align results with predetermined political decisions; and undermining the independence of science advisory panels by subjecting panel nominees to political litmus tests that have little or no bearing on their expertise; nominating non-experts or underqualified individuals from outside the scientific mainstream or with industry ties; as well as disbanding science advisory committees altogether.
This is the former CU kicker who now alleges she was raped by a teammate. The CU athletic department seems to have come under scrutiny for using inappropriate recruitment methods (ie, hiring strippers), and a few other women are stating that they, too, were assaulted by football players. Unsurprisingly, the obscene practice of attacking the alleged victim by way of inventing motives for her has begun.
In the midst of all that ugliness, though, one might reflect for a moment on the Coach's observation. Those words, "not only" play an important role in this sentence. If "X" is a standard of measurement, and anything below X means "bad" while anything above X indicates "good," the claim seems to me to mean, "Katie was not only X minus 1, she was X minus 2." Right? Even if his intended meaning was something like "It was a difficult situation because an all-male football team was not used to playing with a woman, and in addition to that difficulty, she wasn't a very talented player," the problem, according to the point's fundamental logic, is still that a woman was involved.
Apparently, being a girl is a step on the way to being a terrible athlete. Odd. I thought we'd moved beyond that. Still need a reason to explain why she seems to have waited so long before making her allegation? Unforgivable.
How is that photograph of John Kerry sitting three rows behind Jane Fonda at a 1970 antiwar rally any more damning than that 1983 photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein?
My question should not be construed as an endorsement of Kerry, nor should it indicate that I don't register the weight of historical context surrounding each image. Just strikes me as the sort of question one might consider asking.
Update: The images under interrogation can be found here and here. Probably should have included those the first time. Yes, clearly.
Attention loyal readers: all of my buses were on time Friday and today.
Thank you.
5:29 P.M. Fox News. John Gibson, on his daily program, The Big Story: "[John Kerry] speaks French, huh? Uh-oh."
Damn. We need to get more FreedomFries out there. Looks like half the country may be thinking about voting for some Frenchy.
Thanks again, Fox News, for keeping it idiotic. This was, by the way, a fitting conclusion to a trash piece on Kerry's alleged bluebood inability to "be one of the people."
On the first day of class, the bus opted not to stop for me. I walked back home over the re-frozen peaks of grey slush, drove to campus, and coughed up the parking rates. The Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority has since responded to the email in which they were notified of their driver's oversight.
On the second day of class, the first and second buses were so late, my eight or nine mile commute took two and a half hours. If memory serves (nb, it too rarely does), the temperature was in the low teens, and a substantial portion of those two and half hours passed while I waited at bus stops.
On the third day of class, the bus was simply too late. I walked home again, unhappily faced with the unwise decision to forgo heavy boots, having been led to believe that the melt had been more thoroughgoing. Again, paid to park in the garage.
On the fourth day of class, the first bus, already late to my stop, became increasingly late as hordes of profoundly slow passengers boarded at nearly every stop. Sitting in inbound traffic, waiting as the driver navigated around an inexplicably stalled car in the middle of a primary road, I watched the bus I had hoped to ride to campus pass in the other direction. I took the train to College Park and walked the half-mile to campus from the station.
In light of the above, (dave e) will follow the exploits of a bus-riding man-about-town this semester. This theme (or "meme" as people seem to have taken to calling these things) will very likely not be addressed all that regularly; that is to say, only the squeaky wheels, so to speak, will get the grease.
It seems right to mention that all this whining from me may take too lightly the fact that many of the people on the bus with me don't have the luxury of walking back home to hop in a reliable, if small-ish Japanese car, if the public transportation gods let them down. I don't mean to do that. Every time some elderly man struggles up the steps with his four grocery bags, my transportation options seem to me pretty vast. It also bears pointing out that I had the option to purchase a campus parking permit.
Those don't entirely mitigate my disappointment. I got on the bus for sound reasons. I got one more car off the road. I get work done on the bus. I don't sweat other drivers on the bus. I save serious money by skipping the steep campus parking costs.
This time, though, I wonder.
