Category Archives: Sociology

No Cupcakes in Your School

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Google™ has about 2,090,000 results for a search on cupcakes and school.

A Michigan elementary school has banned the classroom tradition of celebrating a child’s birthday with cupcakes.

The interestingly spelled Syndee Malek, principal at the South Redford elementary school, insists that birthdays be honored with “healthy foods.”

Schools, the first bastion of fat-kids-with-high-self-esteem over performance, have had gravy on the French fries instead of vegetables and soda machines in the halls for more than a generation. Now, in 2010, the same schools promote student nutrition and fitness. Lunch at Ms. Malek’s school is very different from most schools. Nothing is fried, hot dogs are made with turkey, and she thinks the kids love the fresh fruit and vegetable bar.

Cupcakes have a nutritiously terrible ingredient list: all purpose flour, sugar, baking powder and baking soda, a teaspoon of salt, some shortening, water, eggs, and milk. Chocolate cupcakes add a little vanilla and some melted, unsweetened, baking chocolate. For comparison, Hard Do Bread, a popular artisan bread sold in West Indian stores, has all purpose flour, white sugar, water, salt, vegetable oil and margarine, and yeast. Pasta has all purpose flour, baking powder, a teaspoon of salt, some butter or shortening, and eggs.

Cupcakes also have a long and momentous history. In 18th Century France, for example, Marie Antoinette was permanently enjoined from bringing them to school for having the audacity to tell the school administrators, “Let them eat cupcakes.”

Another Internet search turned up list after list of the significant benefits of cupcakes. Cupcakes apparently cure AIDS, arthritis, and autism. They alleviate eczema and emphysema. Certain special recipes ameliorate hair loss and headaches. They mend Parkinson’s disease by flushing toxic metals from the body. All cupcakes palliate stuttering. They sweat out viral and yeast infections. And, perhaps most important, they rectify low SAT scores.

My handy Roget’s Thesaurus shows us that cupcake also stands in for any number of terms of endearment for the fairer sex: angel, babe, bathing beauty, beauty queen, broad, bunny, centerfold, chick, cover girl, cutie, cutie-pie, doll, dollface, dream girl, dreamboat, fox, glamor girl, good-looking woman, honey, hot dish, hot number, peach, pin-up, raving beauty, sex bunny, sex kitten, sex pot, and even tomato.

Perhaps they have been banned out of political correctness after all.

Whatever the benefit, whatever the reason, you still can’t bake cupcakes to send to school with your kids for their birthdays anymore.

For the record, I could have expanded this to 1,000 words or trimmed it to 100. Moderation in all things is important, so it is just 400.





I Can’t Be Arsed

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I don’t usually use George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” in public and rarely write them.

Mr. Carlin’s original words are what we now call “vulgar slang,” seven nouns, two of which often stand as verbs. Two excretory functions, four that denigrate, two action terms, and one that is every boy’s favorite body part. I’ve never been fond of bleep-censoring but it is still used by American network broadcasters to titillate us.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
–Mark Twain

Although Twain pretended he did not have a typewriter, he was a pretty smart feller. The modifiers we use in writing can take away from the message. That doesn’t stop us from specially crafting flowery, robust, descriptive text.

Some simply avoid the “dirty words” by substituting clean ones.

Liza Arden has said she “couldn’t be arsed” at work more than a few times this week. Ms. Arden is an engineer and no relation to the cosmetics conglomerate. Her cow orkers were unmoved by her phrasing which surprised her and sent me on this flight of fancy. Thanks to PBS and the Internet, there are probably few British substitutes for bothered that we haven’t heard before.

Substitutes? Google offers about 210,000 results for alternate swear words.

Bleep and fweep and meep and yeep are popular.
RedDwarf adopted smeg as an all purpose curse.
The movie peeps use airhead for rectally enhanced individuals.
Freak (and the ever popular freak off) explain themselves.

As Andy Rooney might say, “Gosh is for people who don’t believe in heck. Who the frell do they think they are?”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports on “Y U Luv Texts, H8 Calls.” Teens send 3,339 texts a month. Adults, just 323 per month. Me? I get two or three incoming texts in a busy month and those are usually mistakes.

Although Ms. Arden calls me a Luddite, that’s not because I cannot text.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “You’re too cheap to buy a data plan.”

Texters started abbreviating to save space and stay under SMS limits or to encode the looming presence of authority (LTTIC). Unlimited text plans have largely eliminated the need for brevity but typing on a micro keyboard is still typing on a micro keyboard.

I don’t text because I see brevity, misspelling, malaprops, and corruption replacing the richness of language. And I hate the tiny keyboard, not to mention picking out letters on a phone keypad.

“I sooo no ur thinking about me. So I thot I wud say hi! LH6”
“My luser cat did the CRZest thing. Off to vet.”
“Orf to home garden sho. I luv U. TBL”

DQMOT: I think the Brits do this better than we do but sooner or later it’s so satisfying just to have a good fuck.





Scrap the Dinosaurs

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The aesthetics police are alive and well in Vermont.

Vermontasaurus is (not really) held together with bubble gum and duct tape but nothing really is level or plumb. On the other hand, the Downing’s cross is straight, true, and well lighted. Really well lighted.

Vermontasaurus is a 25-foot-tall, 122-foot-long Americana folk art “dinosaur” that Brian Boland and a host of volunteers found in a scrap wood pile at the Post Mills airport in the town of Thetford, Vermont. The airport caters primarily to hot air balloons and gliders. The Town required a $272 permit for it. The state Natural Resources Board notified Mr. Boland he would need an Act 250 permit.

Richard and Joan Downing built a 24-foot cross outside their private chapel in Lyndon, Vermont. They light it during holy seasons. Lyndon’s development review board limited the number of days it can be lit. Officials now want the cross removed under Act 250 rules.

Blasphemy. Both cases.

Vermont’s Land Use and Development Act, Act 250 of 1970, created nine District Environmental Commissions to review large-scale development projects. The 10 criteria have changed little in 40 years; the reach of the environmental commissions has extended into everything from crosses to parades.

“It’s art, not edifice,” Brian Boland said. I agree.

Mr. Boland, a hot-air balloon designer and pilot, runs the 52-acre Post Mills airfield. He had a pile of broken wooden planks and other debris on the edge of his property. Volunteers spent nine days with splintered two-by-fours, half a bunk bed ladder, the rotted belly of a guitar, and one rule: no saws, no rulers and no materials other than what was in the scrap pile.

The result of random carpentry is a Shelburne Museum -sized slice of roadside American folk art that made the Smithsonian Magazine.

Lyndon’s Municipal Manager Dan Hill said that Act 250 decision came because the cross’ “aesthetics it did not meet the character of the neighborhood.”

Right. The Downings own about 800 acres of rolling Vermont land. They opened the chapel five years ago, in 2005, for their family of seven children and the 35 foster children. The chapel is open to the public. They added the cross two years later. Three other Dozule crosses have been built in Vermont.

The neighbors who apparently do not drive around looking at holiday lights in the neighborhood at Christmas, say the cross looks like a neon sign for a business.

“We just think that they’re infringing on our rights to practice our religion, and I think that they’ve gone a little too far in this case,” Mr. Downing told News Channel 5.

The state has not yet decided if a permit is required or, as Mr. Boland says he might have to dismantle Vermontasaurus entirely.

Lyndon expects a court ruling on the cross in November.

A man’s home apparently is no longer his castle in (liberal) Vermont where the neighbor and the state knows better than the landowner.

Here in Vermont, people believe the ultra-restrictive state land-use law can override the Constitution and that this is a good thing.

The Boland and Downing position is very simple. They have every right to do pretty much anything but spread bedbugs or shoot at their neighbors on their own land.





I Still Have a Landline. Sort Of.

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I miss my landline. Can never find the damn cell phone! the lovely Chris.tine said yesterday. Naturally, that got me to thinking.

I’ve become a VOIP evangelist or perhaps a voipelist for short. A few years ago, I looked at my then-Verizon bill and my dissatisfaction with Verizon-chicanery and realized that technology could save me money.

One of Verizon’s cute tricks in this market is to charge for message units. They don’t use that Jersey-centric term here (they call it “local calling”) but the bottom line is that they charged a long distance rate for calling the next door neighbor and they hid the charge in an arcane counter rather than breaking out the individual calls. I prefer knowing how much it costs me to call Rufus, so that irked me. I hate toll calls. I bought the upgrade with unlimited local calls just to keep my blood pressure in check

At the time, Ma Bell and her progeny cost us about $75 per month and I was paying another $20 or so for dial up Internet access. Remember dial up? ‘Nuff said.

Cable service finally came to North Puffin and Vonage was advertising pretty heavily. I could buy “High Speed Internet” bundled with basic cable TV and switch my existing phone number to the VOIP provider, all for less than the $95 per month POTS and dial up cost us.

Sold, American.

This wasn’t an easy step for a Luddite like me. I just replaced my VCR with another VCR, wear button-down shirts, and drive a ten-year old car and a ten-year old truck. Not simultaneously.

On the other hand I also have a cellphone. SWMBO has a cellphone. I’m thinking about dropping even the VOIP service in favor of those cells alone.

I’m not alone. The number of U.S. households choosing only cell phones surpassed households with only landlines in 2009. Verizon reports that the number of homes with a traditional copper POTS connection dropped 11.4 percent last year, to 17.4 million on their system now. That also means Verizon recently announced it would cut at least 11,000 jobs, people they don’t need to maintain landlines.

The cell phone has come a long way since Motorola introduced the DynaTAC which cost $3,995 in 1984. (Wealthy) users could talk for 30 minutes or so before performing a 10 hour battery recharge in the two-pound “brick.”

One big operator offers discounts to landline-free wireless customers who combine Internet or TV service from the company which, of course, means they still tether you to their land-based infrastructure.

Even businesses are dropping their own landline phone systems, and moving to wireless.

I’m still a voipelist for a few important reasons. I really really prefer using all the house phones because the sound quality is good, the phones are convenient, and anyone in the house can access them. Cell docks don’t do that all that well yet and the speaker phone on my cell is lousy. I call Canadian numbers frequently. We have business contacts, friends, and a dentist north of the border. The cell plans that interest me make Canada a toll call. Remember, I hate toll calls. Oh, yeah, and cell service right here in North Puffin still sucks.

Hey, T-Mobiley! Fix those problems and I’ll dump my sort-of-landline in a heartbeat.

I am never without my cell. I feel naked without it. It was the house phone I would always lose, another correspondent wrote.

I probably shouldn’t say this out loud but I have never (yet) lost a cell phone and I rarely lose the housephone(s). Some of them are hardwired to the wall and the cordless variety all have this wonderful “page” feature. At the end of the day, though, I mostly carry the phone — whether cordless or cell — in my pocket.

The most popular irritation voiced in the surveys I checked is to figure out where the darned cell phone is.

Here’s a thought. One in 50 households has no phones at all.

GoGo Days

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Henry Kissinger wrote, “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

Although often correct, the stakes are a bit bigger in the schools and colleges around Vermont right now. The University of Vermont faculty union claims the school pays female professors less than male professors.

I worked for Harris Corp. back in the grand and glorious run up to the GoGo 80s. On the Fortune 200 list with money to burn, Harris had transferred a bunch of us from Pennsylvania to meet and mingle and work with the staff of the former Sheridan Iron Works in Champlain, New York. We flatlanders made up part of the engineering and sales departments of the then pre-eminent global printing press and book bindery manufacturer. Harris wanted to consolidate us all under the 100,000 square feet of new roof the corporation had built at the venerable factory.

It was an interesting blending of cultures.

We engineers were once taught to be closed-mouth about their salaries. Some, I think, were embarrassed that the guy at next desk might be worth a little more. A few were expected to hide that they were the guy at next desk. The truth came out when a local secretary making $5/hour discovered she sat side-by-side with another secretary from “down south” making $10.

Fur flew in the boss’ office.

Harris did a nationwide search to determine what a secretary should earn. As well as someone in almost any other job classification.

With the stroke of a pen, the company changed our culture from valuing people for the way they applied their makeup to valuing people for the job they did. In developing the plan, Harris took the best practices from all areas of the industry and learned from the experiences of other R&D and manufacturing companies.

This stuff ain’t rocket science. Engineering managers usually classify employees in one of about 12 overlapping “pay grades” that range from a Level 1 “Engineer-in-Training” through a Level 12 or 15 “Technical Fellow.” Other disciplines have other titles and ranges. Administrative Assistants might range from a Level 1 “Entry Level Clerk” or Level 2 “Clerk-Steno,” through a Level 6 or 8 “Executive Assistant.” Teachers might range from a Level 1 “Teaching Assistant,” Level 2 “Adjunct,” through a Level 8 or 10 “Distinguished Professor in a named position.”

Meeting or exceeding goals triggers pay raises within any given level. Taking on significant new responsibilities triggers promotion from one grade to the next.

Any of those categories, from International Space Station designer, to Introduction to Computers teacher, to Advertising Creative Director to janitor, can be assigned to one of about 15 salary grades within a company, governmental agency, or school. The well-known Federal General Schedule (GS), for example, assigns every job a grade level from 1 to 15, according to the minimum level of education and experience its workers need. Jobs that require no experience or education are graded a GS-1. A full professor might be in GS-9 or 10. The system both promotes a feeling of kinship among employees and reduces successful litigation for the employer.

As a new hire, you start in a position based on job worth. You advance based on merit and performance.

At UVM, the teachers’ union has accused the university of discriminating against five female assistant professors. Their grievance cites as proof the salary of a man hired for a similar position. The male professor had similar education and credentials but started at a higher salary than the more experienced women already on the faculty.

For the record, Columbia University pays dermatology professor David Silvers $4.33 million.

A number of parity-equity models and studies of rational and nonrational factors on faculty salaries exist. Rational equity usually includes professorial rank, years in rank, years of experience, and publications. Marketplace equity measures average faculty salaries by rank, by school, and by department.

In one multiple regression analysis, just one percent of the variation in faculty salaries was explained by the nonrational equity factors of sex and years at university which certainly undermines any arguments the school could present.

UVM could use any of those studies to craft equitable pay grades.

This good idea gets better.

Every elementary and high school board in Vermont could use similar studies to write pay grades for their own union or professional faculty and staff. They could dump the taxpayer-maligned step system in favor of job categories that range from Level 1 “Teacher in Training” for a fresh graduate to, say, Level 8 “Senior Teaching Fellow.” If it works for engineers who are notoriously difficult to herd, why can’t it work for teachers?

The Vermont Labor Relations Board will hear the UVM grievance on Thursday.

Schools could learn a bit from industry, I’m thinking.