Author Archives: Dick

Hat Shopping

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There has been some Internet blather about the U.S. “carpet bombing” Afghanistan.

Heh. In addition to fuel-air explosives, smart bombs, and about 8,800 M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, the United States currently maintains 5,113 nuclear warheads. The United States was the first to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare–the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to a close.

If the U.S. carpet bombed Afghanistan, there would be darned few men, women, children, poppies, or blades of grass left standing.

Let us switch hats for a moment. Regular readers know I usually wear the comfortable straw hat favored by Librarians at the beach. Today, let us pretend we are wearing the bicycle helmet of the Liberal Left so we can play “Let’s Pretend” with no worrisome consequences of political incorrectness.

Today we shall imagine that history has swapped our homelands.

Sunni is the largest branch of Islam but since the 16th century the Twelver Shi’i have become the dominant Shi’a sect and one that rules in several countries. The Shi’a led a precarious until the 16th century when the Safavid dynasty established Shi’a as the state religion of Persia. That gave the Twelver Shi’a support, protection, and state money. They built major theological centers in Esfahan, Meshed, Najaf, and Qom and looked to other worlds for expansion.

The iman Hassan as-Salat made the perilous journey to the New World in the mid-1700s and settled with his brethern and his 24 wives in the fertile lands of Virginia. Hassan as-Salat and his followers largely drove the Christian settlers into seclusion and, in 1776, declared America a Muslim state and cut its ties to King George.

At about the same time, George Washington gathered a group of rebels together and sailed the other direction. They settled in the Persian lands known today as the states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, the Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Yemen, where they fought an arduous guerilla war and formed the United States of Southwest Asia, at that time the only democracy in the world.

American Muslim voters elected Mahmoud Imadinnerjacket President of the Islamic Republic of America in 1995. He reports to the Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hoseyni Khamenei. Voters in the United States of Southwest Asia elected General Colin Patton as President of the U.S.S.A. in 2008. General Patton had planned an executed a stunning attack on American infrastructure in 2001 when he burned the World Mosque Center to the ground.

The seven building World Mosque Center complex was located in the heart of New York City’s downtown financial district. Its 13.4 million square feet included over two million set aside for worship and religious studies. Although not Mecca, it was the second most popular pilgrimage destination in the Islamic world. Mecca itself, located in the state of Saudi Arabia’s Makkah township in the United States of Southwest Asia remains the most popular Islamic pilgrimage. The U.S.S.A. granted unfettered passage and automatic visas to all Muslims to cross to Mecca at any time.

President Imadinnerjacket has the entire American arsenal at his fingertips with which to retaliate.

Will he send in the tanks to root out General Patton and to burn Patton’s statue in a public square? Or will he send the B52s to melt all of the United States of Southwest Asia into a puddle of glowing glass?

I’m pretty sure we know the answer to that.

Me? I’m off to buy a new hat before they all get incinerated.

Chewing the Fat

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It is simply too nice outside to rant.

Sunny, it is. Warm. A couple of interesting clouds in the blue sky. A little breezy, but just enough to keep some of the boats at the dock and to dry one’s sweat. That’s almost the same report from North Puffin where it is actually just 74°, South Puffin where it is 80°, and Arizona where Limousine Liberals think illegals should be werry werry afwaid and it is only about 70°.

I wonder why Limousine Liberals are worried about sick birds in Arizona but you never know.

A thunderstorm threatens North Puffin but that should burn off this afternoon. The chance of rain in both South Puffin and Arizona is somewhere south of zero.

The Burlington Waterfront hosted the final Green Mountain Chew Chew (“Vermont’s Favorite Family Feeding Frenzy”) last June with chicken kabob pitas, grilled cajun chicken bites, Lion’s Club pork backribs with cannonball sauce, Lovemaker crepes, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and more. Each Chew Chew food purveyor (restaurants and farms, mostly) served three food items at their booths. No one duplicated another vendor’s menu. Each booth had one new item each year so the menu stayed fresh but retained many of the festival favorites. Organizer Rick Norcross booked two tents full of performers so music flowed almost constantly throughout the event. Depot Token Booths sold brass Chew Chew food tokens priced at 9 for $5. The menu samples ranged from one to four tokens each. More than 400 foodies grossed about $3,500,000 in the 24 weekend run.

Downtown St. Albans hosted the annual Vermont Maple Festival this weekend with pancake breakfasts, a maple buffet dinner, dancing, music, arts and crafts, performances by some of Vermont’s best bands, Vermont specialty foods, carnival rides, the “best maple syrup on the planet” and the biggest parade in Vermont. The parade stretches for miles with over 100 bands, clowns, dancers, unique floats, horses and tractors, musicians, neat cars, the odd politician or two, and the ever-popular pooper scooper following right behind the politicians. Vermont foods included Woodstock Granola, Vikki Machia’s special fudge, cheeses, Vermont peanut butter, and Richard’s sauces.

The Tempe (Arizona) Town Lake Beach Park hosted the annual St. Katherine “Taste of Greece” Festival this weekend with Greek dancing, music, specialty, and import booths, performances by costumed Greek dancers, Greek wine tasting, carnival rides, and the “best Greek food in Phoenix!” A lamb turned on a spit over coals as men flipped souvlaki. They had Greek spiced meatballs, fried and served with tzatziki sauce. How about Greek fried calamari, lightly floured, and served with lemon and red sauce. Or over-sugar yourself on Baklava, Pantespani, Karythopita, Kourabiethes cookies, and more.


Like most outdoor festivals, all three events have similar planning committees, hosts of volunteers, and cultural goodies to attract (and keep) the crowd. And like most outdoor festivals, all three events have similar problems: high costs for food, sinking budgets for entertainment, and weather worries.

The weatherman has frozen, snowed, baked, sleeted, and rained sunshine on the Maple Festival over the years. 13 inches of snow fell on St. Albans two days before the 2010 event. The perfect storm of increased production costs and crippling rain delivered a crippling 2008 loss to the Chew Chew. Only Phoenix seems immune to snow and rain although the winds practically blew visitors out of the park this year.

The food was good — visitors stood in line — but too expensive at the Maple and Greek festivals and the music stage stood silent too much of the time at both.

Cost is a real issue. The Chew Chew started out in 1984 offering little samples for a single token. Now the food costs one to four tokens per plate. The Greeks use tickets in Tempe; unfortunately, each one costs $2 and most food items range from one to four tickets. A family of four can put together a pretty nice sampler afternoon in Burlington for $25. Can do that for $100 in Tempe. The prices are pretty similar in St. Albans where you spend actual cash rather than scrip at each booth.

Tempe and St. Albans have just one stage each, so keeping the music going is a challenge but a challenge worth meeting. Food festival-goers come for the food. The music aids digestion and keeps them on the grounds longer so they can eat more.

When I booked the Main Street Stage for the Maple Festival we did everything possible to avoid dead air. The stage was divided into two performance areas so one band could be setting up while another played. The sound company (I used Tim-Kath) made sure we had good fidelity around most of downtown. And we never had more than 5 minutes of my chatter about the food between sets. People could find the food on their own.

It’s a good model and it makes the Fair food taste better.

Cool.

A Perfect Ten(ure)?

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Perfect?

Tenure /TEN-yur/ n. The status of holding one’s position on a permanent basis without periodic contract renewals or threat of dismissal.

My grandfather, a full professor (Chemistry) at Temple, had tenure. My cousin, a full Professor (Wildlife Ecology) at Perdue, has tenure. My 12th grade English teacher, the one who made me memorize John Donne’s birthday, has tenure. OK, she’s dead, now, but she still has her teaching position.

Vermont and Florida are at-will employment states. Under American law, the legal doctrine simply means the employer can fire your furry butt “for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all,” and the employee can quit, strike, or take a permanent sabbatical with no liability. There are a couple of caveats. Tenure, an employment contract, or a collective bargaining agreement all govern the employment relationship and negate at-will laws. According to employeeissues.com, “Virtually all states are employment at-will states.”

Teachers unions love tenure.

I taught in Vermont Colleges for a number of years. I have never sought nor held tenure.

There’s no real point to teacher tenure, especially in primary or secondary schools. These schools aren’t universities where professors like my grandfather and cousin create controversy through groundbreaking research and publication. School teachers teach. They need the same level of protection against bombasts, crying parents, and incompetent bosses that any professional needs. And not a penny more.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) supports California Senate Bill 955. That bill proposes to give school administrators the ability to assign or fire teachers based on their effectiveness and to clean up the firing process itself. No longer will bad teachers get the free ride.

The legislation was quickly blasted by the California Teachers Association and by my friend Lido (“Lee”) Bruhl who thinks it a mere ploy to fire all the senior (translation: “expensive”) teachers. “I do not think a teacher should get sacked just because they’re higher up the pay scale,” he said, “and I don’t think there’s enough difference between how teachers teach for that to be much of a factor.”

Lee was born on another planet. They may not have schools there.

Public school teachers across this country receive step raises every year. Year in, year out, a teacher who does nothing but show up for work most of the 179 days in the average U.S. school year gets a raise. Exactly the same raise as the teacher who works overtime every day, brings work home on nights and weekends, attends conferences, takes extra courses, and (just as an oh, by the way) happens to have classrooms full of happy, productive students who actually learn stuff.

A Los Angeles Unified School District task force has delivered recommendations about teacher effectiveness. It’s a major push toward removing outrageous obstacles to firing bad teachers and creating a robust evaluation system for teachers.

Imagine that. Judging a teacher’s worth by his or her performance on the job. Now there is an unusual concept.

“‘Worth’ is not always easy to judge, Dick, outside of the fantasies of right-wing ‘thinkers’ like you,” Lee said.

Another planet. With neither creativity nor original thought, it is difficult to design a system that measures how well teachers teach. After all, having successful students ought not be part of the equation, now, should it? The creators of the standardized tests we all took for college and graduate-school admissions, academics to a person, all claim their tests are not “objective.” The employee ranking systems now popular with B-School grads uniformly lead to disaster in employee morale and performance. After all, it is possible to have a department full of chowder heads. Do you want to grade them on a curve? Or you could be part of a department of superstars. Do you want to end up on the bottom of that curve?

This ain’t rocket science. The appraisal criteria for a teacher:

  • must be objective;
  • must be based on an analysis of actual job requirements;
  • must be based on individual behaviors (performance) rather than personality;
  • must relate to classroom actions, not what the school board or state is doing,
  • must be measurable;
  • and must be within the control of the teacher.

This ain’t rocket science. Principal communicates the job requirements to the teacher. Teacher sets measurable goals. Principal and teacher meet every now and then to measure performance against the goals.

On the other hand, my next notion may be heresy. If we look at objective measures like today’s test scores, Lee might be right. There may not be enough difference between teachers for classroom performance to be much of a factor.

January 21, 1572

Village Bans

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Not a wedding announcement.

Our Voices Exposed, a group of Enosburg Falls, Vermont, High School students met with the village Board of Trustees there a couple of weeks ago to ramp up the board about the negative impact of second hand smoke. On Tuesday night, the board passed an ordinance that bans smoking outside in the village’s two parks. The ban goes into effect on June 12, right after the Vermont Dairy Festival.

It would be bad politics — not to mention a financial disaster — to undermine Dairy Days in this state.

That vote comes on the heels of Burlington’s outdoor smoking ban enacted late last month. Burlington’s ordinance comes with hefty fines for those caught lighting up in city parks and on beaches: $50 to $200 per offense. Burlington also bans idling cars or trucks in the city.

Nannies.

My friend Rufus called them “ninnies. Imposing their stupidity on us.”

I can make all the cases against smoking. I started as a kid, filching Pall Malls from the long drawer atop my dad’s bureau. King size. Unfiltered. When I started buying my own, I switched to the smooth, mild Chesterfield. Ronald Reagan sent cartons of Chesterfields as Christmas gifts for “all my friends” in the ads he made. It is the smoke of True Romance. It wasn’t enough, though, so I eventually switched to the stronger, manlier Between the Acts. Now that little cigar was great for my cough and the smoke could clear a room faster than a dog fart.

I quit in 1976. See, I’m cheaper than I was cool and the carton price was about to hit $5. It was time.

Still, I understand why people smoke and why they want to. And I understand the dangers of second hand smoke. I don’t see much science behind a danger that says three parts per billion of tobacco tar in the atmosphere will cause global warming. Or hiccups in rats. Or something.

That’s political science.

I suspect that this Generation of Don’t wants to carry the nation to a total ban of smoking. They can’t get that passed, so they are nibbling away at it park by park. Starting with Vermont.

Maybe Rufus ain’t wrong after all.

Call for Eruption Bans

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REYKJAVIK (Reuters-United Press-FNN) — Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull continued to erupt today. Its enormous ash plume is visible from space. That ash has caused airlines to cancel thousands of flights and the World Health Organization to issue a warning to Europeans to stay indoors. Scientists say the chemical makeup and shape of the ash cloud’s dust particles will raise the planet temperature exponentially.

“Eyja” is the Icelandic word for island. “Fjalla” means mountain. “Jokull” is glacier.

Nobel Laureate, chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, and former United States Vice President Al Gore visited the Atlantic coast region of Iceland about 75 miles southeast of capital Reykjavik today where he met with volcanologist Hjálmar Hjálmarsson.

“I have seen and I have learned today,” Mr. Gore said.

“This plume is a case study about how eruptions impact this Earth,” Mr. Gore added. “We’re learning more and more about anthropogenic climate change and have determined that it is time for a major change.

“This is not the only eruption. Beneath the Caribbean Sea right now, the world’s deepest volcano spews super-heated mineral-rich liquids from chimney structures deep in the Cayman Trough onto the ocean floor. This eruption will eventually move north to melt more polar ice.

“And speaking of ice, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano has melted an entire glacier and is sending it straight to the sea.

“As we have learned in our studies of the deadly chemical carbon dioxide, the average temperature on Earth is increasing daily from the pleasant 59 degrees,” Mr. Gore said. “The average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. That has nothing to do with the fact that Venus is closer to the Sun than we are. The fault is not in our star. The fault is the carbon dioxide and the volcanic eruptions. If we allow volcanic eruptions to continue here, the average temperature on Earth could begin to look more like the average temperature on Venus.

“Depending on the continuation of this eruption a third of the human race could die in the next three years, and the survivors could be living lives of struggle and hunger and hardship that nearly doomed the world in the Dark Ages.”

With about 130 volcanic mountains, Iceland has more active volcanoes than any other land. Eleven U.S. states have volcanoes. Arizona and New Mexico have eight each, California has nine, and Oregon tops the list with 21. Hawaii’s Kilauea is the subject of a Volcano Watch Orange. A few U.S. volcanoes have produced some of the largest and most dangerous eruptions in this century including Mount St. Helens, the active stratovolcano in Skamania County, Washington.

“Once again, Americans must come together and direct our government to take on a global challenge, Mr. Gore said. “American leadership is a precondition for success.

“I have issued a challenge to the United States Congress today to pass new legislation making the dispensing of illegal in the United States. With this one action we can take the first step to making the planet cleaner and safer for our children and grandchildren.”