Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Those nuns could be secretive
morning all. thanks for the plug mickey. how does that feel? the guy gave you pass marks but is abusing chomsky!
Mudge - thanks for the kind words yesterday. means a lot coming from someone who consistently comes out with so much wisdom
Posted by michael on from scotland 03/04 at 08:20 AMI think the meaning is clear, Michael: I am much smarter and know more about language than Noam Chomsky. Right?
Even captcha sez: “better.”
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 08:50 AMGood morning Mickey & Michael,
In my goofiness yesterday evening I failed to put 2 & 2 together - Only with MZ spelling it out did I realise this was your article, Michael. The issue you raise in it is one which truly does affect everyone, whether it’s a school curriculum, or the prevailing scepticism with which a ‘non-expert’ opinion is met. Good stuff.
My catholic grade school didn’t have nuns, except to visit, and they never wore habits. I was always somehow disappointed at that.
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 08:50 AMMichael, I thought the article was excellent. Some very useful points & clearly either well researched or you have a vast array of sources ricocheting around your head. Good work fella!
Sorry not to be commenting more at present, or even keeping up with the excellent dialogue, but have work stress - extracting coursework from yr 11 pupils. If I got paid more I’d consider bribing them.
Posted by Chris Wood on from Manchester, England 03/04 at 08:58 AMthanks again amelopsis
thats it exactly mickey!
Posted by michael on from scotland 03/04 at 09:03 AMthanks chris
just annoyed i forgot to give anthony giddens some stick as a prime UK example
(for non UK people Anthony Giddens writes beginner sociology textbooks and is a close friend of bLIAR. supposed to be one of the architects of the ‘third way’ bullshit. it is fair to suggest that this colours what he comes out with whilst claiming to be objective)
Posted by michael on from scotland 03/04 at 09:06 AMsee what i did there?!
Posted by michael on from scotland 03/04 at 09:07 AMGood morning Mickey, Chris, Amelopsis, michael, and others…
That is a great article, Michael. Seems we are on similar wavelengths. My latest is also about education. In hindsight this morning, I wish that I had titled it differently. I hate it when that happens. A better title would have been, “The Teacher Who Told the Truth”.
http://tinyurl.com/kpc6hPosted by RMJ on from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts 03/04 at 09:14 AMHello Expendables. G’morning Empress and RMJ. Nice to have you back, Chris.
I like your article, RMJ. Do you want me to add it to the main post? Also, there’s something in the NY Times today, re: Vermont: http://tinyurl.com/gaq7l
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 09:25 AMgreat article RMJ - there are few things more absurd than a passionate plea for the responsible dissemination of information from sean hannity
a brief note before i begin this. here you go to primary school till you are about 11 and then secondary school. (you can leave when you are 16 or stay on till you are 18)
We had a nun as the headmaster (principle) in my primary school. she was old and deaf but relatively harmless. we use to check if she had her hearing aid on or not and if she didn’t you could swear your mouth off at her and she would just nod and say “thats nice” - which we thought made it funnier.
this was in the early to mid 80’s and things have changed a lot since then but I did see some horrible shit. it mainly came from catholic teachers rather than nuns. although it was a catholic school we had some muslim pupils and there was one teacher who was overtly racist almost everyday. i saw her taking off a muslim girls headdress. i saw her force a hindu girl to eat beef.
the worst one she did though was one day when my teacher was off. they weren’t able to get a replacement at short notice so my class was divided up among the other ones for the morning.
one of the asian boys was talking in the class. anyone else would have been told to stand outside or do lines or something. not this boy. she pulled him out in front of the class and made huddle with the back of his neck along the ground UNDERNEATH the rest of his body. that would have been extremely painful and she made him sit like that for about an hour.
i took great pleasure in hitting her with a water balloon on my last day.
in secondary we had no nuns but we did have a chaplain. my hobby was winding him up by asking him outrageous questions that i knew he would struggle to give me an ethical answer too e.g.
MICHAEL - God is everywhere right?
CHAPLAIN - Yes
MICHAEL - What the f*ck is he doing in porno cinemas then?i think he mumbled something about saving souls.
i also explained to him that david and goliath was alot of rubbish because david only won by virtue of having a better weapon. i asked him if just 3 americans wiped out thousands of vietnamese just becuase they have the better weapon is that david and goliath too?
i met him recently. he isn’t a priest anymore.
oops
(it wasn’t really to do with me. he got married)
Posted by michael on from s 03/04 at 09:37 AMThanks, Mickey. Yes, please add it to the main post.
Also, your link to the NY Times article was interesting. Vermont schools are loosing population and that is making the education industry nervous. The governor’s plan, to “partially forgive” student loans if the student stays and works in Vermont after graduation is, in my view, just one more form of corporate welfare. It is really a backdoor way of subsidizing the businesses.Posted by RMJ on from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts 03/04 at 09:39 AMRMJ: Your article is right next to Michael’s. It seems many of us were in education mode yesterday.
Michael: As a 12-year veteran of Catholic school, I can never get enough nun/priest stories. Thanks.
Anyone notice the recipe/NERD question at the end?
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 09:49 AMThanks, Mickey. The article just went up at Press Action too.
Posted by RMJ on from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts 03/04 at 09:57 AMi saw the recipe thing but was wondering about cooking for vegans ;)
also, i heard someone describe themself as a ‘macrobiotic vegan’. does anyone know what on earth this means??
Posted by michael on from scotland 03/04 at 09:57 AMRMJ: I switched the link to Press Action. I’d rather give Mark the traffic.
Michael: I usually don’t associate macrobiotic with vegan because many macrobiotic diets include fish...but here’s something:
http://tinyurl.com/pv4g4Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 10:13 AMSchool...it was interesting, wasn’t it? Not so much for me. When I was 10-12, I read the Encyclopedia Brittanica[i] (14th edition, revised in like 1943) pretty much exclusively, if only at bedtime. I skipped right past the physics stuff, and a lot of the chemistry stuff; but it was an antidote to the horrors of attending public school. Concentrate on learning, how exactly? I was embroiled in fights and aggressive behavior directed at me, and sometimes by me at others who tormented me, so I taught myself. One of my mother’s friends asked me what grade I was in once. I said, “I’m an autodidact.” She pursed her lips and told my mother I should be horsewhipped for talking about [i]such sinful behavior like it was nothing!
Anyone who wants proof that academic, didactic writing doesn’t equal dry, dull, dreary, deadening prose shold look at some random, non-scientific article in http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/ which is the 11th edition of the opus. Dry, sly wit in many of the historical articles, cultural articles, etc...even though the attitudes aren’t in sync with modern mores, it’s a wonderful work and is the only enyclopedia with a fan site (given above)—that I’ve ever heard of, anyway.
School? It was at home. School? It was a social experiment, and I have’t really recovered my sense of self-worth since then.
Captcha=problem!
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 10:15 AMOh sigh. Too early, too little caffeine and I mess up my itals.
Hi Michael! Re #1, I had no idea I came forth with wisdom. I thought I just yapped on. But thanks for the vote of confidence!
#10: Ugh. I hate, hate, hate intolerant people! [/irony] Seriously...no one thought to report this behavior to a senior administrator? Hmm, on second thoughts, my experiences in the Cat’lic school arena answer that one.
RMJ #8: I join the chorus of praise, excellent article!
#11: Back-door business welfare or no, anything that addresses the student-loan crisis is aces with me. Not much discussed, but the public’s gonna be shocked when the interest-rate bubble switches from low to high in earnest (not the Wildean one, poor sod) and defaults multiply.
MZ #12: I’ll post a contorno when the day dawns. Also, from last night’s discussion, you were wondering about the discussion timing for The Rebel...I’d say give it six weeks, which would be Friday, 4/14, since y’all’re moving and such. I’d also say, since this is a “very” dense, philosophical piece of work, that we’d do well to poll the assembled at the three-week mark to see if anyone still has the desire/will/time to finish in that amount of time. This could be a long-term read, if that answer’s no for the 14th. Kind of a background read, if you will, while we discuss other, sexier books (like Parable of the Sower perhaps...?), and a later target for discussion?
Just sayin’ is all.
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 10:34 AMGood morning Chris,RMJ, Mudge,
Nice piece RMJ.
Trying to think up some entertaining school story but I’m at a loss. I had a highschool french teacher who seemed bitter at having 2 enrichment students in his class - he really didn’t like the smart alecky shit we’d come up with, the enrichment class was at the other end of the school and often we’d get to his class barely in time for the bell. He’d literally slam the door in our faces if we failed to have BOTH feet inside the classroom when it rang. The office got so fed up with issuing us late slips that they stopped recording them altogether.
Pretty tame story. My worse escapades generally went undiscovered.I officially have the world’s stupidest troll (and my first ever) leaving utter crap at my place. A real genius. Nothing about nothing, but thought I’d share.
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 10:37 AMOh - Mickey that macrobiotic link doesn’t work.
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 10:38 AMLove the idea of a recipe exchange. This is much more interesting than talking about what we do and don’t eat.
I never really had much contact with nuns but I have a filthy joke involving one. Hope I don’t offend anyone by telling it. Maybe I shouldn’t. Hmm, I guess I will…
A priest, a nun, and a rabbi are on a chartered plane full of children on an interfaith outing. Suddenly the lone pilot comes out of the cockpit (quiet Mudge) and shouts “This plane is going down! I’m jumping and there’s only three parachutes left!”
So the nun says “what are we going to do?”
and the rabbi says “let’s take the parachutes and jump”
and the nun says “what about the children?”
and the rabbi says “#### the children”
and the priest says “do we have time?”Posted by Keir on from The Hague 03/04 at 10:40 AMsweet jaysus...there are a lot of comments here this morning. I hope I can read them all, along with the articles by RMJ and Michael and JOE’s suggested link.
FYI, I got a job yesterday! It seems like a very cool little company. It’s located in a loft space in downtown Chicago,has a total of about 9 people, 10 when they add me, 4 of whom are named James, which may be a problem. I am pretty damn excited.
I can’t stay on for long, but hope to come back later…
Posted by JOS on from Chicago 03/04 at 10:54 AMCockpit...? Going down...? Keir, it’s too early in the day here in Central Standard Time for that kind of tease!
As to nun jokes, I’m still partial to the one whose punchline is, “move over, girls, gotta gargle.”
Howdy, Empress, a troll of your very own! Lucky, lucky lassie. Gotta visit and see what’s what. Now we need to get you a Wikipedia article by your very own cheering section, much like MZ has. Such a place, this frontier town called the Internet...freedom means mess, I fear.
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 10:55 AMJOS “V” - that’s fantastic news, congratulations.
Sounds like a nice work environment - always a nice bonus.Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 10:56 AMthanks,Amelopsis...I noticed all of the well wishes I received the other day and appreciate them a lot. See you all later/
Posted by JOS on from Chicago 03/04 at 10:58 AMCongratulations, JOS! May I be the next newly employed Expendable. I have an interview on Tuesday for a temp agency that’s busy in the call-center industry. Whammies, mojo, and crossings, please!
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 11:06 AMCongratumulations JOS. Your new place reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where a suit walks into the Australian Philosophical Society, a bunch of guys with hats with corks on them all called Bruce. They ask him what his name is and when he answers Michael they say That´s going to cause some confusion around here.
Posted by Owen on from Barcelona 03/04 at 11:07 AMThat was a funny one, Owen.
Mudge arrangements have been made - Tuesday’s your lucky day.
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 11:11 AMOh boy, things got mighty busy here. I’m heading out soon so here’s my lame attempt to catch up.
Congrats, JOS. Things are really turning around for you. Mudge is next...and RMJ, too. I know it.
Keir: I’m ashamed to admit it, but I laughed out loud at your joke. Here’s a nun joke:
Two nuns are riding their bikes through an old part of Rome and take a turn down a narrow street.
Nun #1: I’ve never come this way before.
Nun #2: Must be the cobblestone.Mudge: I was an avid encyclopedia and almanac reader as a child, too. Once, on a field trip to the UN, I amswered all the guide’s questions. My fourth grade teacher called me “a walking encyclopedia.”
Empress, sorry to hear about the troll. Do you have an IP address for him?
Hey Owen…
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 11:23 AMMZ, the World Almanac and Book of Facts was the one birthday gift I could count on enjoying for many years. (My mother gave clothes as gifts...nice clothes, I suppose, but I hated then and hate now getting clothes as gifts.) The Encyclopedia Brittanica was wonderful, because its atlas was so different from the National Geographic atlas I had...borders in places I had no idea borders had ever existed. It was that comparison between atlases that taught me how very political map-making is!
I’m “still” looking forward to the day that I can afford to subscribe to the online OED and keep up with the world of words.
Here’s a weird link for the assembled:
http://www.oedilf.org/Browse around some.
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 11:40 AMHi again everyone, Things are really hopping here today…
Mudge, we all will be with you in spirit during your interview. About the Student Loan issue, I agree that anything that can be done to ease some of the pain there would be a good thing. Use the money to cancel the debts instead of redirecting it to benefit businesses as the governor wants. I have a passionate interest in this topic. The person that I love the most in the world cannot even have her name on the deed to her house where she lives because of student loans. We have a whole generation of indentured servants because of the way that the payback is structured. For years, I have lobbied (unsuccessfully) my Congressman for a change so that payments on the loans could be made as a percentage of income. As far as I am concerned the whole thing is a big scam sponsored by the colleges and universities. It is like a big money laundering scheme.Posted by RMJ on from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts 03/04 at 11:42 AMAs you may have noticed the captcha is acting up.
I found you can copy the properties and paste into a different browser page and it will show you the captcha, for now.
Make sure it’s in a different page - if you use the same page and go back, the captcha changes.Mickey’s presently trying to sort things out.
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 12:53 PMMy properties / copy paste is referring to the properties of the captcha picture.
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 12:54 PMOwen...I just saw that Monty Python episode last week on our local PBS here in Chicago.
Good luck, Mudge. Thanks, MIck...I do think that things are turning around here for the Expendables.
Posted by JOS on from Chicago 03/04 at 01:24 PMSorry for the problems here. I have no idea what’s going on and right now, there is now captcha word.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 02:16 PMIs anyone else having trouble seeing images on the main page?
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 03:12 PMtesting,testing,testing.....some images gone from main page and also “captcha” word is missing....
Posted by RMJ on from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts 03/04 at 03:32 PMNone of the images are showing with the exception of the amazon fed ones in the sidebar.
I’m all up in the air over next book choices. I’ll go along with whatever’s decided upon but from the sounds of it, Camus does need more time than the last 2.
Hey - a link from Joe - he’s emailing again? Send him our good wishes, he’s getting the good vibes too.
Mudge I can’t get your #29 link to work for me.
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 03:45 PMI’m at a loss.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 03:58 PMChildren are the among most universally powerless and tortured individuals on the planet.
I recall asking my older sister what the second grade was going to be like-- she told me, “it is very different from the first grade!”
(I loved the first grade-- and was anxious to go back to school.) I knew that the second grade would be very challenging-- and I stoically accepted my fate whatever it became, as most little children do. On top of that, I was determined “to be a good boy and not worry my mother"-- my father’s parting command to me before the military sent him abroad that year.
At the end of the school year my teacher was fired for her sadism. She had randomly beat us every day for contrived reasons. Once she pinched my cheeks until they hurt and ask why I had little blue veins showing. She described to the class how her brother cut off his thumb and didn’t “even cry”. A friend had an epileptic fit and she beat him for it. His mother came to school the day after the class was kept after school to be beaten and to run on the playground until we collapsed in pain. She asked me to see what the teacher had us doing. All we had been doing throughout the year was to meticulously copy our textbooks into our notebooks-- thinking that that was how to learn to read.
I remember once my mother looking at me to see if I was bruised. I never complained, or understood anything.
The next year our family was reunited and we moved. My third grade teacher, a woman named Mrs. Stearns, asked me what I had learned in the previous year. I had no answer. (I had taught myself to read from a book my sister had given me as a present-- The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.) Mrs. Stearns was very kind woman-- not stern at all. She would always blow a pitch pipe before she sang a song. She let me be George Washington in a school skit-- quite an honor because we lived near Mt. Vernon, and I played in the same woods as the first president. She never thwarted any desire of mine to learn about anything no matter how abstract or unrelated it was to her plans. Reading became a pleasure for me, and not a self-imposed chore.
With a few exceptions-- I spent most of my following school years reading on my own and counting the seconds until I graduated. I respect Mr. John Gatto’s ideas about education and believe that current mainstream pedagogy is still largely backward.
I have a healthy skepticism today for all authority-- even if the authority is Noam Chomsky.
I am most indebted to the ideas of Erich Fromm who often wrote that we must look deeper than words to understand the character of individuals.
Recently, I listened to Professor Chomsky reply to a question regarding increasing widespread skepticism about the truth regarding the cause of the 9/11 terror events in America (http://tinyurl.com/roxwt). My feeling, based on my own intuition about character, has lead me to lose almost all respect for him. He is impervious to acknowledging many people’s deep longing to understand those curious events because to him those events are “inconsequential” as measured in relation to greater crimes being perpetrated in the world today. There are greater crimes-- but I cannot fathom any nobility in his ethic.
Instead I look for the words of others whose characters “ring true.” As a shining example I recommend Stan Goff’s recent four part series of essays: “Exterminism and Katrina.”
http://stangoff.com/?p=263Posted by Robert B. Livingston on from San Francisco 03/04 at 04:09 PMHi everybody. I am having a lot of fun at PressAction right now. Mickey won’t mind if you take a 5 minute break from here and go over there and join in the fun. You come too, Mickey.
Posted by RMJ on from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts 03/04 at 05:43 PMEAAAARGH
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 06:43 PMMudge!
Posted by Amelopsis on from Canada 03/04 at 07:07 PMSo, Empress dear, are we to adopt aspheterism as a NUtI principle? (Hint...NO, I can’t even sew!)
BTW, I posted the following re: Bennish and education at Press Action:
Oh dear, here I go...I argue that we live under a capitalist system that more closely resembles the 19th-century “robber baron” style than the socially responsible New Deal capitalism, and therein the rub. Child labor laws were designed to make it possible for children of working-class parents to go through at least SOME schooling. It took a while for poor people to start using that system and its later development, the GI Bill, and so we had many who were “Simply Not Our Kind, Eunice” invading the halls of power on merit alone. “Shocking! Appalling! Must be stopped!” said Eunice to her husband, Wellington. “One of *them* will want to marry Bitsy next thing!” It took a long while for Eunice and Wellington to figure out how to cut the rope ladder leading into their aerie, but they did it at last. And here we all are. Welcome to what happens when you’re not paying attention.
Mr. Bennish, for all that he is being treated appallingly by his paymasters, is being treated exactly as one would expect him to be treated in a world run by a few trusts. One of the reasons for this is that the US education system is entirely local in its information- and course design-accountability. Federal officials don’t get into the works in these areas. THe local school board does, and the state education authority, in varying degrees of officiousness. Mr. Bennish’s local authorities don’t like him, or his ideas. For some pretty fair indicators of the reasons for this, look to the local community’s business base and its prejudices. Since we do not have --->full<--- Federal funding for primary and secondary education, the richest group sets the rules, and I give anyone only a single guess as to why that would be.
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 07:21 PMThanks Mudge and Amelopsis. Today is a fun day around here and over at PA.
Right now on C-span 2, book TV the book Huey is being discussed...Huey Newton and the Black Panthers......
Posted by RMJ on from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts 03/04 at 07:37 PMIt’s Sunday afternoon in Daylesford, Australia, and a hot one at that (90F), so I’ll keep it brief: thanks for this enlightening story-filled post, Mickey! Am wondering whether there were any kind nuns who were good teachers and inspired you at your Catholic school.
And hello to all you expendables.
Too hot to think of anything else, so I’ll say ‘bye’.
Posted by Helga Fremlin on from Daylesford, Australia 03/04 at 10:34 PMWhat an intersting day around here. Thanks all.
Good night, and good luck.
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 10:50 PMOops, hi Helga! I feel your pain...it was 80F here (in “late winter") and uuugh is the only sensible response. It’s gonna be that way for another full, seven-day week!
If climate is what you expect and weather is what you get, I’d like to revert to climate please. Supposed to be 69F today. THAT I can handle.
Posted by Mudge on from Austin 03/04 at 10:53 PMG’night, all. Thanks to Nancy, things are just about back to normal here.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 03/04 at 11:52 PM
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