Category Archives: Society

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.

Uphill. Both Ways.

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Do you remember where you were 40 years ago today? Jim Lovell and Fred Haise certainly do.

You kids today, you just don’t know how easy you’ve got it!

40 years ago, Mr. Lovell and Mr. Haise would have given their eye teeth for an iPad. They had two computers but they had to write down data on a scrap of paper from one computer then retype it into the other. Mr. Lovell even had to do arithmetic on paper to make sure he converted the data so it would work in the second computer. There wasn’t even any email! They had to write letters. With pens. There was no Sony Playstation with high-res 3-D graphics. There was not even an Atari 2600 with Space Invaders or Asteroids. Those games got faster and faster until you died.

As an aside, the iPad, the Playstation, the Atari, the computer that runs your Toyota, and your microwave oven all came out of space program engineering.

Apollo 13 launched on April 11, 1970, 40 years ago yesterday, at 13:13 hours CST. That third Apollo mission was expected to land on the Moon, but an unplanned event forced an ABEND to the mission. And gave us a new phrase that bridged the generations.

“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Jack Swigert, the man who announced the problem to the world, died of bone cancer in 1982, one of only 24 people ever to have flown to the Moon. Ever. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Haise are two of the 24.

There have been 131 manned U.S. missions into space including Shuttle Discovery, in space now to deliver a logistics module to the International Space Station as well as three spacewalks.

President Obama has killed the shuttle program. STS-131 is the fourth from the last shuttle mission. Ever.

President Obama has killed Project Constellation. That $108 billion program to develop the next generation of rockets and space vehicles is dead.

President Obama has no plan to build any new rocket capable of carrying men into space. Manned space travel will be outsourced just as tech support and kids’ toys and the shirt on your back has been. “We’ll just let the Russians or Chinese do that for us.” NASA will no longer be able to dream about flying astronauts beyond Earth orbit. NASA will no longer be able to dream.

Since those heady days 40 years ago, no man has had to walk twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill, barefoot. Both ways. And according to this president’s plan no American man ever will again.

Great Britain, a country entirely surrounded by water, stopped being a seafaring nation when George V stopped sending brave men in ships to the sea.

America stopped being a great spacefaring nation when Barack Obama stopped sending brave men in ships into space.

We didn’t, either country, go down in a great battle. We whimpered out of the room without a fight.

Only the Best F@%king News

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Knowing that no sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon, I shall be mercifully brief.

Calling your debate opponent a fuckwit shows two things: the caller has none of the latter and has no facts to argue.

My friend Rufus got sucked into one of the long running Internet arguments about something-or-other political. Doesn’t matter what.

Rufus has some faults. One is his belief that opinion laced with some facts is news. I know better than that. I write opinion laced with fact. I may be a journalist but I don’t write news. I may even break a story now and then but I don’t write news. On the broadcast front, Glenn Beck does opinion laced with some facts but he doesn’t do news. Jon Stewart does comedy laced with some facts but he doesn’t do news.

Rufus can be a little long winded at times. Rufus ‘splains everything. In detail. With supporting evidence. And twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was. He believes facts win debates.

He was ‘splainin’ stuff pretty well in this Internet debate until he dropped this bombshell at the beginning of a post: “If you listened to what Glen Beck actually SAID instead of just freaking out over him, you would understand that …”

Heh.

You know what comes next, don’t you?

Me, too. Replicator-827 answered with civility and aplomb, “I don’t listen to ANYTHING that asshole says, and if YOU do, that says all I need to know about you.”

DING DING DING.

Round over. You lose. Thanks for playing. Please visit our consolation prize department. It’s right behind that door marked “Egress.”

Of course, on his way out the door, the other great debater, the person who included the epithets Charlie Daniels, Cletus, “forced-birther,” invisible sky fairy, NASCAR, and “white trash,” turned around to say, “Do the world a favor and kill yourself.”

[plonk]

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
–Mark Twain