Cutting-Edge Education

By | January 1, 2025

I am fifty-seven years old. I realize that I graduated high school FORTY YEARS AGO. I’m old, thankyouverymuch.

I don’t have children. I have, realistically, next to no idea what they teach kids in schools these days, nor how they go about teaching it. I assume computers and the Internet are involved. There are probably apps that the kids are required to download to their smartphones. I don’t even know if paper textbooks are still a thing.

When I was a kid, we still used old-fashioned paper textbooks, and given that I went to school in southwest Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountain country, there wasn’t exactly a huge emphasis placed on keeping them up to date and current. True, I went to school in Blacksburg, Virginia, home to Virginia Tech, and my father was a professor of nuclear physics, but that didn’t mean our schools were were leaps and bounds ahead of those in the surrounding, much more rural, counties. Tech had been a comparitively small school until the late 1960s (q.v.) and the community still wasn’t used to having all those PhDs wandering about. (True story: the physics curriculum at my high school was so terrible that some of the physics faculty from Virginia Tech came in to complain about the crap their children were being taught, to no avail.) So, long story short, they tended to keep using textbooks until the pages were flat-out falling out.

I was in middle school between 1978 and 1981 and in high school between 1981 and 1985: the Carter years and the first of Reagan’s two terms.

We had health textbooks that had been published during the Eisenhower administration which focused more on the importance of keeping a clean, All-American body than on any actual concepts of disease and prevention. There was a whole section on the importance of not popping zits because it could and often did lead to encephalitis — BRAIN FEVER!!!

Our earth science textbooks treated continental drift as dangerous pseudoscience and focused instead on the “geosyncline” theory of mountain formation. Mountains were formed as the Earth cooled and shrank, so the crust would crumple and form mountains. Of course!

Never mind that bathymetric evidence of ocean floor spreading and magnetic evidence showing historical alignment of plates had been pretty definitively provided in the mid-1960s.

Then there’s a history textbook we were issued in seventh grade. No kooky theory or irrelevant detail was too obscure to include.

This included the 1903 “Heartland” theory which held that the nation that controlled the area east of the Volga and north of the Himalayas (in other words, Russia) would inevitably come to dominate and rule the world. Why? Because Halford John Mackinder said so.

Who?

Exactly.

Its academic rigor was irrelevant, though; this was the era when Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist hordes were lurking just over the horizon and anything that could be done to build up the Red Menace as a serious threat, was.

My favorite part of that particular history textbook, though, was the picture from the top of this page: “Representation of the different Ways to Everlasting Life or Eternal Damnation”. Some rando named Gustav Sigismund Peters (“America’s first color printer”) threw it together circa 1830 in all its Grand Guignol awfulness. What it had to do with teaching us the history of comparative religion in America, I’ll never know. But it was in our textbook. (If you click the hyperlink immediately above, it takes you to a page where you can zoom in on various parts of the picture to get a really good look at it.)

To be fair, though, my textbooks from back in the day aren’t that different from what’s used in certain school systems in the South, where slavery is treated with kid gloves and slaves described as indentured laborers with self-esteem problems, and where it’s actually illegal to mention evolution in biology texts.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad our textbooks were. Kids tended to get promoted regardless of their grades; I never did homework because of boredom and severe depression and I still got moved on each year. (On the other hand, my classmates who did do their homework wound up at Stanford, Brown, the University of Virginia, Duke, and so on. wound up at the University of Georgia, known at the time for academic scandals involving the football team and not much else.)

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Y2K, 25 Years Later

By | December 31, 2024

Twenty-five years ago tonight. Y2K.

In late 1999 I was working as a technical trainer at a software company (the same one I’m working for today, in fact, just under another name). Our workforce had been divided into four groups — people who would work 8 pm to 8 am Tuesday through Thursday, people who would work 8 pm to 8 am Friday through Monday, and two more groups who would do the daytime equivalents. I asked to be on the group that would be on duty at midnight on Y2K proper because I wanted to be able to say “I was there when…”

However, I was the only person on duty in my building; most of the programming engineers and analysts were in the main building or the other satellite building and I was based in the building that was shared with accounting and other ancillary services. The accountants and such were all home in bed since they really couldn’t contribute anything if Y2K problems actually did occur.

Amusingly, the company did a test startup of our emergency generator at the main building on the afternoon of December 31 — and it blew up/caught on fire. So much for preparedness.

Carole was on duty at the Vermont Symphony Orchestra operations at First Night Burlington until 10 or 11 pm or so, but she came down to visit me as midnight approached. We shared a bottle of sparkling cider and did our own little countdown, wondering if the lights were suddenly going to go out or, well, SOMETHING.

Nothing did happen.

At all.

Carole went home and I spent the rest of the night web surfing and periodically standing up to restore circulation to my butt and otherwise contributing absolutely nothing to the wellbeing of humanity.

As it all turned out, maybe one or two of our customers had issues that night, and all of said issues were in third party software that interfaced with ours; our software had no issues whatsoever.

After about three days of 12-on/12-off shifts with nothing happening, the company quietly said “Never mind, go back to doing what you were doing” and we all returned to normal shifts.

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Frontiers of Medicine, Part 728

By | May 15, 2024

I’m 56 — but yesterday a dental technician from Russia told me I looked MUCH younger and didn’t believe me until I showed her my drivers license.

I took that with a massive grain of salt inasmuch as she also shared with me that two standard Russian cures for anemia are:
  1. drive a rusty nail into an apple and let the apple “suck up” all the iron, then eat the apple
  2. drink ox’s blood. Had to be ox’s blood; other kinds of blood “not as good”.

Uh huh.

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Conventioneering

By | May 10, 2024
I’m a town delegate to the Vermont Democratic Convention next weekend. We will be, among other things, electing our delegates to the national convention. People have to file to be state delegate candidates and we vote next weekend. (Regardless of how the votes come out, the slate must be gender-balanced and so on, so it’s possible for someone to not finish in the top X and still wind up a delegate.) I was warned that I’d be getting emails from delegate candidates in advance of the event and the tidal wave is beginning to commence.
I’m reasonably pleased that so far no one who’s written me has come across as deranged. It’s more boring that way, but the reason I post is because I’m quite sure that were I a delegate to the state Republican convention there’d be a race to the bottom to see just how deranged each candidate emailing could be.
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The Sorry State of Sex Education in the USA

By | April 22, 2024

When I was 22 or so, my mother noted reddened areas on the backs of my arms which I hesitantly explained were rug burns (the result of extensive fooling around in my girlfriend’s individual office) and looked at me and said “Joel, do you know how to get a girl pregnant?”

I said “Yes.”

She said “Don’t.”

And that was the entirety of my “birds and bees” lecture.

In my school system — in a college town located in a rural area — only female students got sex ed. Males did not. My mother, in fact, paid for my sisters to take a private sex ed course offered through an external organization, probably because what little the school system proper offered was hopelessly out of date. My school health textbooks had been published during the Eisenhower administration and we were using them in 1983.

And even with such a minimal exposure to biological reproductive concepts, I was probably still better off than most students who are home schooled or who attend school in states whose education systems are controlled by the local theocracy. In many cases, what is taught is blatantly wrong (“Birth control causes cancer”, and so on).

Did you know that only 18 states actually require sex ed to be medically accurate?

https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/sex-and-hiv-education

From time to time I find myself thinking how grateful I am that Carole and I don’t have children. We are rapidly heading toward the world depicted in Idiocracy.

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Hot Tubbing With The Russians

By | April 17, 2024

Little things that pop into one’s head unbidden department: the heavyset Russian guy with the diamond pinky rings who wound up sharing a hot tub with us on our first (Western Caribbean) cruise in 2004. He did not appear to speak any English and we certainly didn’t speak Russian and we didn’t know him from Adam’s off ox, but he pointed at another guy standing attentively nearby (we thought of him as “the minion”) and made a circling motion in the air taking in everyone in the hot tub, and sent the guy off for drinks. I don’t recall what the drinks turned out to be; I mean, classically one would have expected double shots of vodka but it was probably something more Caribbean-y.

Neither Carole nor I had any idea if we were supposed to return the favor and get the next round, so we didn’t, and that appears to have been the correct course of action. Perhaps he would have been insulted if we’d tried to match his largesse. In any event, we raised our glasses to him and smiled appreciatively and he nodded back at us, and that was the extent of it.

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17 years. I remember.

By | April 16, 2024
Feeling rather somber today. 17 years ago today a severely mentally ill Virginia Tech student murdered 28 students and four instructors, to say nothing of wounding many more. At the time, this captured the nation’s attention and indeed the attention of the world. All the major networks sent their anchors to Blacksburg to report. Universities across the country sent giant condolence cards. The New York Yankees, of all people, came to Blacksburg to play a charity game against the Virginia Tech baseball team. President George W. Bush came to the memorial ceremony which was broadcast live.
And yet today, hardly anyone remembers unless they’re somehow associated with the Virginia Tech community. We’ve become so inured to constant mass murder that nothing fazes us anymore.
Many of us, including me, hoped that the lives of the murdered 32 would not have been in vain, that we would learn from what happened and take steps that it never happen again.
It appears that no one learned a thing… except for the sobering fact that at the end of the day, lives simply don’t matter to a huge percentage of our society.
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Major depression update, March 2024

By | March 25, 2024

Random thoughts about depression:

I suffer from major depression. I have for most of my life, dating back to middle school at the very least.

Depression causes me to have difficulty doing things I need to do. I procrastinate significantly more and I don’t have the energy to do things I enjoy.

Something a lot of people don’t understand about depression — it’s not necessarily (or at all) linked to “feeling bad about something”, though one hallmark of major depression is that one’s brain goes looking for things to be depressed about and then points to those things as the “cause” du jour. Depression is an expression of biochemistry, life experience, stress, and so on.

I imagine that I would probably have been very depressed even if I had led the absolute perfect life. My father had undiagnosed major depression. My mom’s mom was institutionalized for most of her life due to symptoms that sound an awful lot like major depression. (The state of medical care in rural Florida was not always what one would have liked it to have been.) You can’t ignore the role genetics plays in mental health.

What helps? Talk therapy (working with counselors) does not really help me. Medicine helps somewhat, but is not helping much with my latest bout of black moods. I’ve gone through extensive DBT (dialectial behavior therapy) training and am familiar with skills like radical acceptance, distress tolerance, and emotion regulation. It’s just that sometimes those skills can only do so much.

I would probably feel better if I started getting intense regular exercise. I’ve been pretty sessile for the last year — partly because of my having been chair of my local Selectboard and always had things to do (and had a lot of stress as well), partly because it rained nonstop last summer, and partly because I made a ton of excuses all fall and winter. I have hopes that as the weather continues to warm I’ll find it easier to get outdoors and get going for walks again.

I’m heading to Bermuda on Saturday for a week’s vacation and am, unfortunately, stressing about that. Our flight leaves BTV at 5:20 am — that’s leaves, not boards. Carole is not a morning person to begin with and will probably have been up late Friday night packing (she has depression too and she’s terrible at tasks that require organizational skills like, oh, packing). Once we’re actually on the plane and in the air heading to our connection in Charlotte, I expect I’ll feel better.

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STOP

By | March 4, 2024

At some point, in a bout of what turned out to be utter foolishness, I gave my cell phone number to ActBlue, which promptly resold it or shared it with every Democratic candidate from the candidate for the Billings, Montana dog-catcher race to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I get at least one text every day asking for donations from various candidates (or, to put it another way, from whichever fundraising firm they’ve hired), and some days it’s more on the order of four or five.

I reflexively type “STOP” and send it off every time, and these do get acknowledged — that particular campaign won’t text me again. But it has no effect on the glut of other texts from other campaigns.

(I looked on the ActBlue site to see if there was an option to turn off the flood and other than deleting my account, there wasn’t — and deleting my account had no effect whatsoever on the volume.)

Until now, the texts have always been from moderate-to-liberal candidates. However, this weekend I got a text from the Nikki Haley campaign, formatted and styled just like all the texts from the Democrats.

I think it’s about to be time to change phone numbers. Imagine the hell I’d wind up in if the number finds its way next to Donald Trump.

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RIP Mojo Nixon

By | February 8, 2024

From today’s “I Has A Sad” Department: Mojo Nixon has passed away at the age of 66. Mojo, real name Neill Kirby McMillan Jr., died of a cardiac event on February 7 while on an Outlaw Country cruise where he was a featured performer and entertainer. Mojo is survived by his wife Adaire and their two sons, Ruben and Rafe, as well as a granddaughter. My condolences to his family. He will be missed.

When I was in college at the University of Georgia (1985-1988) Mojo got a decent amount of airplay on WUOG 90.5 FM and showed up late at night on MTV in strange commercials with his bandmate Skid Roper. He was known for songs such as “Elvis is Everywhere“, “Don Henley Must Die” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child.” All are worth a listen, and FWIW, the video for “Debbie Gibson” starred the actual Winona Ryder playing Debbie Gibson.

My favorite bit of Mojo trivia: he was performing “Don Henley Must Die” in 1992 in a small club in Austin, Texas called the “Hole In The Wall” when Don Henley himself jumped onstage and sang along with him. Mojo, stunned, said “Is Debbie Gibson here too?” Henley was a very good sport about the whole thing — props to him.

My favorite memory of him is from a time (circa 1994 or 1995) I went to see him perform at a club on Hillsborough St in Raleigh near NCSU. I forget which club it was, but that’s not important. It wasn’t the best show — he played a lot of stuff off his not-so-good later albums and, other than Elvis is Everywhere, didn’t play much from my college years. Also, he and his backup musicians were drinking Jägermeister shots between every song.

By the break, he was three sheets to the wind. When they did take a break, he leapt off the stage and headed toward what I assume he thought was the door to the men’s room, or backstage, or something. What he actually did was run straight into me, started to fall down, grabbed at my jacket and clothing to hold himself up, and scrabbled at my chest gibbering something incoherent. Then he got his balance back and headed off in another equally random direction, ping-ponging his way through the audience. (The second half of the show was blessedly short; I’m not 100% sure he knew which end of a guitar to hold by that point.)

I told people later that I would never wash the clothes I had on again; they were wet with Mojo’s sweat and I considered them a holy relic.

Rolling Stone’s obituary: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/mojo-nixon-dead-obituary-1234964257/

LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2024-02-08/mojo-nixon-obit

NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/08/1229964967/one-of-the-wild-men-of-rock-n-roll-has-died-mojo-nixon-was-66

Rest in peace, Mojo. Or give them hell. Whichever suits your fancy. Say “Hi” to Elvis up there in heaven for us all.

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