Murder, Grammar, and Dead Ducks ,,,,,,!!!!!????

I'd like to start today off with a grammar rant.  I'd like to talk about ",,,,,," and "???????" and maybe some "!!!!!!" for good measure.

Let's start with the obvious one--the multiple commas.  Like that MEANS anything.  What does that mean?  Is it like stage direction, indicating a particularly long and meaningful pause?  Like a POWER pause?   Because we already have ellipses and commas and semi-colons that do the job super-nice without making you look like you've gone twitchy on the comma button.  Perhaps this is "text speak," but it's creeping into more formal written communications, and it's making people look like . . . well, like texting children.  Who haven't quite mastered the written language.

Now, let's talk about "?????" and "!!!!!!!" for a second.  We all know what "?" and "!" mean.  So are the multi-packs indicative of MORE?  How can you be MORE inquisitive than inquisitive?  What, it's not just a question, it's a SUPER-question?  If you're trying to communicate interrogative disgust, "Are you KIDDING me?" is usually pretty effective.  On the "!!!!!!" front?  Okay, you're excited.  You're REALLY excited!  You're MEGA-excited!  Fine, use two.  But dang, please stop with the 10+ exclamation points, wouldja?  Nobody's that excited without dancing on the edge of cardiac arrest.

This came across my Facebook feed yesterday.  Would be funny if it weren't so close to the truth these days.

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I've been following the news about the toddler shot in his stroller by muggers near Atlanta.  Checked out the Facebook page of one of the accused.  His "about" blurb? "ME IN MY NI**A"S A TURN UR BLO5K IN TO MURDER SCENE"  (the ** are mine, to keep from getting grief from Blogspot).  The photos?  All baggy pants down past his ass and gang signs and obscene gestures.  All "thuggin" and "thug4life fo sho."  Class act, typical.  STEREO-typical.  Living DOWN to that awful stereotype.  Exactly who you would expect to do what was done.

We have a problem.  We have areas in this country that are absolutely disconnected from humanity.  So bogged down in poverty, in substandard education, in violence, drugs, and stupidity. We have one generation of people lost to this rearing the next generation, which will rear the next.  It's self-perpetuating, and this sort of festering gob is what it produces.  We can't just build a fence or a wall--one, that's crap, and two, no such thing as a "forever" fence.  We need to stop futzing around and sort this disaster out before it's too late.  You should SEE the writing of this kid, of his friends and family--barely literate, barely even comprehensible.  It's like a swamp with utterly turned around ideals and goals and ideas of what is and isn't intelligent or right.  Posts hailing a small child dressed as a gang member, calling her "lil thug girl" and proclaiming "SHE A STR8 THUGGG ! ... LOL!" and "lil cuzz killin idth !!"  Some of the posts demanding, in the most broken excuse for English, that the accused be released because "he din do nuthin, crackrs!!"  Seriously.  We need to fix it--it's hurting ALL of us.  Not just the poor little boy who is dead, not just his devastated mother.  We are ALL diminished by this, and allowing poverty and horror and prideful stupidity to take hold in our streets and separate us is what's brought it into being.

We need to fix this.

I'd post a horrific rap video one of the accused killer's friends posted to his wall--all about killing these folks and killing those folks and mutha this and mutha that, but I do actually try to keep things somewhat "clean" here.  Kid's not hard to find, though.  Look him up if you're curious.  As an example of what I'm talking about, here's a snippet from his page, going back to the dressing little girls up as gang bangers:

"Omg ! Ni Av'yianna .... U kno better she look ah hot mess today my granny hve her lookin me kinda way and idk whe she get this fang banging Frm ...lol I love her doe she look so throwed away today! Ugh"

 English?  Mmmm, I don't know.  What I DO know is that THIS is what our poorer-area schools are turning out.  What good does that do us?  Seriously, even if we're not going to look at the lives and the prospects of these poor, barely literate, barely understandable kids, let's look at what good it does SOCIETY to have schools acting as holding pens and pumping out illiterates, many of whom are caught on the "high school to prison" assembly line.  What good do we get from this?

NONE.  NO good.  So let's fix it.

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Hubby and son are off to play paintball today.  Breathtakingly expensive, but it's the BIG b'day present for our boy.  Was supposed to be last weekend, but it was rainy, windy, and in the low 40s.  Today?  Sunny and fifties.  That's better.  I want it to be a good time for him.  It's something he's wanted to do for a couple of years, and it's not something we'll be able to afford again until around Christmas, most likely.  I hope it's everything he wanted it to be.

The Paintball Layout

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Do you like duck?  You know, like eating duck?  I ask because I had a hellish ducksperience when I was a kid.  My dad came home from hunting with two dead ducks and made me pluck them in the kitchen sink.  I was maybe eight?  It took hours, it was horrifying.  See, I liked duck--I liked seeing them fly, I liked feeding them at the pond, I loved finding the stray feather here and there; stuck them in my hatband, called it "lucky."  This?

This was a nightmare.  And my dad kept coming in, checking my progress, and telling me I needed to do better.  I was missing things.  I was messing it up.  I was breaking off feathers instead of cleanly plucking them.  For hours, this went on.  Finally, my dad took over.  Angrily.

I've never liked duck, meal-wise.  But I hadn't had it since my first husband totally screwed one up by COOKING IT IN THE MICROWAVE.  Understand, this was winter of 1983.  Yeah, not quite the defining era of microwave cooking technology.

So, when hubby ordered duck with our Chinese meal a while back, I decided to give it a shot.  I mean, it had been almost 30 years since the microwave disaster, and it had been almost 40 years since the plucking nightmare.  I figured it'd be palatable, at least--after all, it was drenched in orange sauce, right?

WRONG!

I never even got past the smell.  I don't know what other people smell when they get a whiff of cooked duck in orange sauce, but I smell blood and metal and dead and feathers.  I didn't even perceive the orange or other things--just the gore.  It was intense, it was immediate, and it was gut-wrenching.

No way that's just an emotional thing--not when I haven't smelled it in decades.  No, this somehow indelibly marked my neurons, changed my brain in some way.  It was horrifying, and I felt bad because it was my husband's dinner and I literally recoiled, gasped, and clapped my hands over my face.  I said terrible things.  And he had to eat it!

I was going to post a pic of a duck being plucked,
but turns out I don't have the stomach for it.

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Watched a documentary the other night, name of "Kumaré."  In a nutshell, it's about a guy who's had it with religion and had it with the gullibility of people, and so, as an experiment, he starts his own religion.  Or, rather, he borrows heavily from eastern/Indian traditions and adds in his own completely nonsensical gobbledygook.  I won't tell you how it goes or where it ends up.  I will tell you that some of it is painful to watch because there are people who are so pathetically, desperately dependent on being told what is, what to do, what to think, and how to see the world.  People who cannot exist without believing in some supernatural this or that--like they can't just trust themselves, they have to be led.  It was sometimes funny in a not-nice way, and sometimes heartbreaking in a very human way.  I enjoyed it.  Here's the poster--it's a link, too:

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Still no red paneling.  I suck.

Do not reprint without permission. © KAQ

Teacher, Teacher

So, I read an article today in the Washington Post about Michelle Rhee and her ideas about education and kids.  This comes on the heels of watching a Frontline special about her last week.  I remember Michelle from a few years back, and all the uproar with her treatment of ineffectual teachers.  I remember liking the heck out of her then.

I still do.  She's not perfect, but she's smart and she's insightful and she's trying.

Living where I do, the idea that Ms. Rhee's policies have "sucked the joy out of the classroom" or somehow "unfairly burdened" teachers with the responsibility of learning strikes me as ludicrous butt-covering.  Many of the schools in the DC area have long been nothing more than holding pens, where some teachers have been observed sleeping through class, handing out printed out worksheets with no instruction or explanation, etc.  Many of these schools are violent, they're dirty, they're underfunded and under-supervised, and they're definitely NOT hotbeds of learning.  I've heard the "holding a teacher responsible for academic achievement is like holding a dentist responsible for cavities" argument, but that's a lousy analogy that only holds if the dentist has the kid in his office FIVE DAYS A WEEK, NINE MONTHS A YEAR, walking him through dental hygiene each day.  No, I'm not laying it all on teachers (they're a big part, but certainly not the ONLY part), but teachers need to be FIREABLE.  Teachers who are observed being slackers or otherwise ineffectual need to be counseled on how to improve their performance, and if they fail to make those changes, they need to find another line of work.  I feel strongly about this because I believe strongly in the power teachers wield.  We cannot have unassailable teachers--that serves children in NO way.  How could it?  How are students served by being "taught" by teachers who don't care?  Who make substandard effort?  Who don't put forth their best effort because they know they can't be fired?

In some cases, who are barely literate themselves?

I don't hate teachers.  In fact, I think teachers can be THE deciding factor in a child's success and achievement.  And, while I have known some crappy, cliquish, disdainful teachers who reject students based upon their popularity or faith (hello, Utah!), and I have had the occasional teacher who didn't really seem to know much about his subject (hey, Coach C.!), I have never had a teacher who was so lazy and so uninspired and unskilled that they couldn't do their job in most cases.  Plus, I've had a few real stand-outs, too.  That said, I wouldn't say I received an inspired or above-and-beyond education from most of my teachers.  I would, however, say that Utah did okay.  These days, Utah could do a lot better.

But DC?  Wow, what a cesspool.  What happened to classroom integration?  Have you SEEN Anacostia?  From where I'm sitting, it looks ALL black, ALL poor, and TOTALLY underfunded.  It is, to be blunt, a disaster, where kids can't possibly hope to learn.  Now, call me a socialist (go ahead, everyone else does), but I think that the schools in poorer areas need MORE funding than the schools in wealthier areas.  Why?  Because the kids in the "nice" neighborhoods already hit first grade knowing how to read.  They have homes full of attention and books and opportunities to explore and grow.  So they don't need all the bells and whistles at school because they've already got them at home.  No, I'm not saying they need crappy schools to "level the field," but rather that they don't need three or four times (or more) the per-student spending.  In fact, it should be flipped so it's the poorer neighborhoods who get that sort of funding.  After all, there are a lot more obstacles to be overcome living in Anacostia than in Spring Valley.

And we do want kids to overcome those obstacles.  Don't we?  Don't we want those poorer schools to turn out kids who can succeed?  Kids who can rise up and out of poverty and become healthy, happy, contributing members of society?  Don't we want that?

Because it sure as heck doesn't seem like it sometimes.  Especially when we're saying things like "You can't hold a teacher accountable for the education of his or her students."

What?  We can't?  Then what CAN we hold teachers accountable for?

Watch The Education of Michelle Rhee on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

And enough of that.

I'm sick.  Been that way for a few days.  Voice mostly gone, I sound like an adolescent boy being strangled. A LOT of snot, of the bloody, gluey variety.  Contrary to popular belief, snot isn't color coded for our convenience, so who knows what my deal is?  But it came on gradual, like your average head virus, and I'm not too concerned.  It didn't hit like the flu, so that's something.  Yes, I've been vaccinated, but this year they didn't match so well, so that may not be any guarantee.

When I started writing this, the boy had lost my Galaxy Tab, but hubby has since found it.  We really need to work with our boy on effectively searching for things.  At fourteen, he's still terrible for looking straight at things and not seeing them.  No, nothing wrong with his vision, it's perfect.  He's just inattentive.  Maybe we need to do more puzzles and optical illusion-type things.

And finally, because I know you've waited so long, here is that masterpiece of bad paneling, that Tenacious D of DISASTROUS DECORATING, the Big D (kindly provided by Leif over at Ugly House Photos:

Bonus points to anyone who can 1) explain the WHY of the shape here, and 2) tell me what the awful, squidgy-looking brown spots are supposed to represent?  Tuscan-style sponging?