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I didn’t know this media personality in Sangamon’s major media market went to my middle school. He did a feature for Good Morning Sangamon about going back to Rotterdam Middle School where he remembers being a sports legend but everybody there remembers something different. I had never heard of the guy, but it was an interesting outside look at my middle school. He did fly down to film the segment (or maybe he was in town anyway). It was obviously meant to be comedic, but I liked seeing my middle school in a TV segment, including pictures of him in the same football uniform I wore!
It was a little weird, though, in that it felt like a fictionalized version of the school. Other than the aforementioned uniform, almost nothing looked familiar. I did recognize one coach, but that was about it. He was talking about “the principal who had been there 20 years” and it was somebody I’d never heard of. There was Principal Warfield, who was there before I was. He was followed by Principal Snidely, who left my seventh great year to be replaced by Ms McDonald whom I don’t remember as particularly impressive but apparently impressed somebody because she was the Superintendent of the entire district by the time I graduated from college and now has a school named after her. Then Warfield came back shortly after I left when Mossman got promoted en route to fame and fortune. Who was this person they were interviewing?!
I had originally thought that they might have taken some liberties or something, then I realized “Holy crap, I’m old.” As in, someone could have been there for 20 years and would still be “after my time.” Indeed, the only teacher/coach I recognized was new my eighth grade year. I remember him as seeming old at the time, but that probably meant he was 25 or something. (Tangential, but another teacher/coach friended my brother on Facebook and it turned out that he was in his twenties despite my remembering him as old.
My friend Clint and I went back and visited the middle school towards the end of our junior year in college. It was… pretty anti-climactic. I thanked the first teacher I ever had that flunked me, which turned out to be a really good thing and turned my academic career around (I got a lot of just-passing grades in elementary school that I am pretty sure were sympathy grades). We had always planned to do an open house at the elementary school one of those years, but they actually discontinued it at some point and so we couldn’t. And since our schools are bunkers now, you can’t just stop by without people assuming you’re some pedo creep or something.
My elementary school isn’t my elementary school anymore. We were re-routed somewhere else. My high school isn’t my high school for the same reason, and also it doesn’t exist because they demolished and rebuilt it. My middle school, though, remains my middle school. Even if they replaced all of the cast.
Well, not just the government. But it played more of a role than I realized.
One of the ways in which Law & Order evolved is that in early L&O, Ben Stone might be arguing against some sleazy defense attorney would be trying to argue that his client is not responsible because of violent video games, and in later L&O Jack McCoy might be trying some video game company executive for some customer’s murder under pretty much the same rationale.
Also, a cartoon unrelated to the original observation:
No matter who wins the game, one bourbon rules the turf. Touchdown, Team Beam. #makehistory pic.twitter.com/SmfmpueTQd
— Jim Beam (@JimBeam) January 13, 2017
Some people might use superpowers to save the world. Others to destroy it. She uses them to do cool stuff with liquor. I dig it.
This creates something of an electronic papal death watch, though, as I wait for certain things to die so that I can replace them. Sometimes I watch with excitement, though usually if it’s that bad it falls into the category of electronics to be replaced. So usually, it’s a pain. But at least when it’s dead, it’s dead. The worst is when a computer or device just lingers. It mostly works, except when it doesn’t, but it fails to work enough that it ceases to be useful in primary duty. So it needs to be demoted, if not replaced. Unless it starts working again.
I’ve had two such instances occur over the last couple of months. The first was my computer, which worked fine most of the time but five or ten seconds every two or three minutes when there would be some issue with hard drive data swapping. Which was not a big deal, except that I couldn’t use it for audio or video. Next to it is another computer that’s fine most of the time, except that it randomly reboots. The third computer at the console is from 2008 and is reaching the end of its lifecycle. This meant that, with the problems of the first machine most recently cropping up, I lost my only primary duty machine downstairs. So it was time to buy a new computer (put randomly reclycling computer on tertiary duty, and retire the oldest).
Kind of a bummer since, but for the aforementioned problem, I was satisfied with what I had.
But I started getting the parts in my online shopping cart. I was starting to get excited about finally having a new computer for the first time in five years. And then… suddenly the stuff started working again. I was doing some diagnostic stuff that I assumed would be fruitless. I don’t even know what fixed it. The diagnostic software couldn’t even find a problem with it. But when it was done, the problem was gone.
Now I feel cheated, almost, out of my new computer.
Then the same thing happened with the smartphone. I’ll spare you most of the details, but basically the battery life just collapsed to 2-3 hours. Worse, the battery monitor stopped working, so any time the battery was at less than 40% I had to worry about it going out at any minute. Further, it was chewing through batteries really quickly. I tried switching to my backup phone, but it kept trying to go into international roaming mode. So I went around shopping and finally decided on a brand and model to buy, was getting excited, and then as I was explaining the problem with the backup phone to my friend (who used to work with Verizon) the international roaming mode mysteriously went away. Meanwhile, the phone with the battery problems was fine as a backup (and as a backup was demonstrating much better battery life.
So no new phone. Meanwhile, every time I see an ad for an LG V20 I think to myself “I should have one of those!”
Dead electronics need to stay dead, in my opinion.
What the… pic.twitter.com/ukBYg4wMbM
— Tim Carlson (@thecivilcomment) December 31, 2016
The best thing that's happening today is watching videos about how to make sure your poop doesn't smell. pic.twitter.com/qiMoj436i8
— Tim Carlson (@thecivilcomment) December 31, 2016
Back when Serbia (Yugoslavia) was still a Communist Country, a doctor was visited by St Thomas Aquinas in a dream and thereafter refused to participate in abortions.
January as Divorce Season makes a lot sense to me. Remembering when a girlfriend and I inconveniently broke up in December and tried (and failed) to keep appearances until the new year.
McMegan’s piece explaining that Medicare negotiation may not save the money people hope is also good.
Conflict in Canada as the University of Toronto as the psychiatry folks are rather pissed at a new scholarship for anti-psychiatry.
When looking at religious observance and engagement, nobody beats the Mormons.
Arguments such as this – that inequality is itself bad for physical health and the like, actually sort of make an argument against unskilled immigration.
It’s so cold in Alaska that even Alaskans are complaining
“It’s just miserable,” Erickson added. “I hate everybody who lives in a warm place.”Fairbanks dropped to 50 below zero for the first time in five years Wednesday, Anchorage climatologist Brian Brettschnider said, triggering spooky ice fog across the city. Ice fog occurs when tiny ice particles are suspended in the air when temperatures fall lower than about 22 degrees below zero.
We’ve been getting semi-daily texts from my sister-in-law about how utterly miserable it is. Too cold to do anything but text.
In a conversation at the Southern Tech football forum, conversations about high school came up, which reminded me somewhat of of an odd thing that’s not so odd. It turned out, people who didn’t know each other had gone to the same high school. There are roughly 150 public high schools in the greater Colosse area, and a lot of people who went to Southern Tech weren’t from Colosse to begin with, and others went to private school.
Yet, as it happens, when people who are generally from Colosse get together and start chatting, the same high schools keep coming up. Very few from Colosse Consolidated School District. Most from the suburbs. And even then, most from the “right” suburbs. I went to Mayne High School, which is very well regarded and thoroughly upper middle class or lower upper class. Next door to us is Southfield High School, which is about the same size and is a little more economically mixed.
Some of you know of Vikram Bath and others remember him by his previous name. He and I had never met until we ran across one another in blogs. And lo and behold, we went to the same high school (at the same time, it turned out, with a few friends in common). This happens with Mayne High School. Before I asked, I half-expected that we might have gone to the same high school. I almost never run across anyone from Southfield out in the wild. And even high schools that I have very limited contact with, on the other side of the city, I meet people who went there.
I’m sure it comes down to economics and class. The places I am likely to run into people are going to filter through whether or not they went to college or not, and Southfield kids go to college with less frequency. The same applies to the other high schools that come to mind, most of which are upper crest. Most of which located near their own Southfield, where I far less frequently run into someone I know.
But it has the weird effect of seeming like contrived writing. Like Colosse is a fictional city (heh) and the writers only have so many high schools that they’ve bothered to identify, so characters all come from those schools.
Somewhat relatedly, a decade ago they closed one of my middle school’s rival middle schools. Sort of. What they did was built a nice fresh new school a few miles over. They then didn’t invite any of the kids that went to the old school to go to the new school. By sheer coincidence, the new school was places do that it would mostly draw affluent kids from nearby schools, thereby giving the kids who went to old school space at some other old school. My school district really was ruthless when it came to such things.
This is going to be the subject of another post, but they’re in the process of demolishing Mayne High School and rebuilding it. Same spot, same kids going there. The district recently expanded to add two new high schools, and it just wouldn’t do for Mayne – the wealthiest – to have the second oldest facilities.