Tag Archives: Education

Philosophy by Limerick – Bolused and Belched

Philosophy by Limerick – The Patriot

His love for the Second Amendment
Was pure, but he wasn’t so intimate
With stuff about wars,
State religion, of course
Or due process obstructing his sentiment.

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – The 900 Pound Gorilla

The diatribe and invective
Ambiguous and defective
Neglects to report
The Chinese import
As a joblessness introspective.

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – The Bigot

In choosing a Martin Borman
He wouldn’t mind seeing a Mormon
Or else a real gangster
A rap-strutting sangster
Dressed up as a uniformed Door man.

Old Jules

Portales, New Mexico’s Multi-Phased Personality Test

I found out the other day there’s another occasional reader here shared classrooms and the seven-year drought with me in the 1950s.  Surprising, the people of that town and that vintage clicking to remember.

Every kid in Portales, New Mexico, believed Gene Brown and Bobby Thomas were lower trash than they, themselves were.  Including me.  I can’t recall now why they believed it, though both started smoking before they learned to masturbate, most likely.

But maybe the fact both kids were considered such lowlifes explained the reason I ran around with them a while, caught those freight trains to Clovis with them.  [Riding the Rap]. 

Bobby Thomas quit school, lied about his age and joined the army when we were 9th graders.  The next time I saw him he was a different person from the buzzard-necked, shunned youngster he’d been.  I’ve often thought quitting school, for him, must have been a cheap price to pay for an opportunity to be out from under the pall of scorn the town piled on him for being whatever they thought he was.

Gene Brown, on the other hand, was still vilified as one of the historical lowlifes 30 years later when I went back for a visit.  Never saw him, but I was surely impressed with how the sign the town stamped on his back stayed through the decades.  Likely he came by it honestly.  Certainly early.

On the other hand, a lot of the higher society folk who shunned those two managed to make lousy enough choices in life to earn their later reputations as lowlifes.   And some of the kicked around, not-quite lowlifes did impressive, though maybe meaningless things with their lives.

My old friend, Fred Stevens, who spent early years as a hotshot savings and loan president, went down with the ship in the mid-80s crash, was as solid a citizen as I’ve ever known.  But he assured me I’d have thought differently if I’d known him as an S&L president.

I’m sorry I didn’t get up to Seattle for a chance to reacquaint myself with the other banker from our kidship, but after he’d chosen to live under a bridge instead of running a financial institution.  [Could you choose to live on the street?]

But I think the one I’d like most to know before I die is the one walked around the corner from a class reunion at the Cal Boykin Hotel in the early 1990s.  Reunion for the grad classes 1960-1970.  Fred Stevens told me about it.  One of the attendees walked into a bank branch a block from the Cal Boykin Hotel and stuck it up.  Walked clean away with $1500 and a well-deserved place in local legend.

I hope he’s remembered.  Wish I’d thought of it and had the brass to do it.

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – Amber Waves of Grain

Michael R. Taylor, former Monsanto Lobbiest, is the Deputy Commissioner for Foods at the United States Food and Drug Administration(FDA).

Genetically engineered fodder?
Put trust in your bottled water,
While FDA lures you
Monsanto assures you
You won’t get blind staggers and totter.

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – The Engineer

Devoted his life to the noise
Of civilization with poise.
Applied science, he called it.
Obstruction?  He mauled it
With money and tinker toys.

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – The ‘Environmental Scientist’

http://spaceweather.com/

Build an arrogance fortress and man it.
Pretend you can save this old planet
You trivial beast
An infection of yeast
On the surface, too tiny to plan it.

Old Jules

The Fervent Hope of Climate Change Enthusiasts

Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8 (left) and July 12 (right). Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. In the image, the areas classified as “probable melt” (light pink) correspond to those sites where at least one satellite detected surface melting. The areas classified as “melt” (dark pink) correspond to sites where two or three satellites detected surface melting. The satellites are measuring different physical properties at different scales and are passing over Greenland at different times. As a whole, they provide a picture of an extreme melt event about which scientists are very confident. Credit: Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

The people for whom climate change is central to their countless grant and research applications, and the people for whom NO climate change is central to their business models are probably both grinding their teeth in frustration.

Sooooo. All the academians, school kids being trained to believe they can do something to ‘save the planet’, other people who just enjoy the feel of shrill proclamations, jeremiads and threats of doom briefly danced in the streets.  Whoopteedoo!  Everybody’s going to die!

And the people with business models demanding they fervently deny climate change looked around for buildings high enough to jump from.

However, core sampling of the Greenland ice soon revealed this happens occasionally, last time maybe 150 years ago at a time when nobody claims human beings were causing climate change.

Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn.  Cry the people desparately wanting the ice caps to melt, sea levels to rise and all the coastal cities of the world to drown.

Ohboyohboyohboy! Applaud the folks with the business models requiring a continuation of the kinds of behaviors the other folks think cause man made climate change.

Changing horses in mid-stream isn’t easy, but sometimes it’s necessary.  Fact is, whether climate change is happening, is man made, is going to result in a disaster is just too large an object of comprehension to convincingly argue.  Suggesting academians and school kids can do anything to influence it one way or another is too patently absurd to convince anyone besides a grant review committee from the US Department of Environment.

Besides, there’s Genetic Engineered corn out there growing hair inside the mouths of test hamsters.  The same corn those school kids and academians are having for lunch.  http://aaemonline.org/gmopost.html

There’s a middling potential for glow-in-the-dark halibut, salmon and whales swimming up out of the north Pacific with butcher knives clinched in their teeth doing a mutant invasion of Alaska to California coastlines.  Time will argue a lot more convincingly and rapidly whether those happen, and if they do they’ll render questions about man made climate change more-or-less moot.

As for business models, there’s a lot of new potential for speculation and investment in new inventions.  An inside-the-mouth electric shaver, for instance, might represent the wave of the future.  Live flashlights made from mullets caught off the Oregon coast, not requiring batteries.  No need to stamp them, MADE IN JAPAN.  That will be obvious enough.

[Insert, “It’s an ill wind that blows no good”, “It’s time to look on the bright side of things,” and other appropriate quotes here.]

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – The Genius MBA

Made his money the hard way, inherited.
Went to Yale where he struggled and merited
Every cent that he earned
With his MBA, spurned
Do-nothings with slogans he parroted.

Old Jules

From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler – Book Review

Hi readers.  I don’t know whether I’ve ever mentioned on this blog that I’m a big admirer of a lot of young adult fiction writers.  Mainly Newbery Award folk because I wouldn’t take a chance on anything else that didn’t come highly recommended.  So, when I found From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, by EL Konigsberg in a 10 cent basket at the dogpound thrift store in Kerrville, I snagged it.  Same as I’d have done with any Newbery.

I’m glad I did.  Fact is, while I haven’t encountered many books with that award I considered unworthy of the time spent reading them, occasionally I have.  But this one’s from back when writers were writers and readers were glad they were.

The basic plot’s just a brother and sister who decide to run away from home.  But beyond that summary it becomes a reading experience, as opposed to the alternatives too frequently provided in best selling books.

The kids each have talents, each balancing the weaknesses of the other, each recognizing that fact, and the entire plot and characterization orbits it, relies on it.  The brother’s the financial side of things.  The sister’s a planner.

So she plans where two youngers could probably really have gotten by with hiding in 1967 for a couple of weeks without being discovered, without getting bored.  And the brother provides the funds needed to get there with his winnings from cheating at cards on the school bus.

What’s not to like?  Hell, nothing’s not to like.  It’s a fast read, so it leaves the reader with plenty of time to read it twice, which he’ll want to do if he’s an admirer of good, serious wordsmithing manifested in plots, characters and fast moving events.

They hide in the Metropolitan Museum, evade guards, study a sculpting by a master, discovering secrets about it,  and bathe in the fountain at night fishing for coins.

Great read if you aren’t a snob who only reads really good Stevie Ray King, Norbert Robbers and Louis L’Amour.

Old Jules

We Will Never Forget 7/27/53

Hi Readers. I just got back from the County Seat in Junction, Texas.  Nice little Texas town and I managed to get the title on the $400 stolen car transferred into my name successfully.

But it was a strange experience, not only because it was raining.  The whole town’s festooned with variations on the US flag and signs declaring they’ll never forget.

As nearly as I can figure, they must be celebrating the Cease Fire for the Korean War, July 27, 1953, and declaring the US ain’t ever going to bring our troops home from Korea.

Maybe the only town in the US still remembers that Cease Fire, celebrates it, and is overjoyed 25,000 US troops are still over there keeping the commies from taking over South Korea if they could.

Junction, Texas.  Time Warpville, USA

Old Jules

Pieces of the Past

When Keith and I were in the fifth grade one of our classmates at Central Grade School , a girl named Ruth Durett, came to school with an ornate, silver-handled dagger she’d dug up in her back yard.  It was known that Coronado had camped a while in the vicinity of Portales, and in those days Portales people had a lot of interest in Spaniards and conquistadors. 

Ruth’s dagger became an object of envy, conjecture and debate.  Billy ‘the kid’ Bonney had also hidden from the law and raised cattle for a while at Portales Springs.  Some thought the dagger might have belonged to him.

Eastern New Mexico University was right there on the edge of town.  Ruth’s parents evidently thought someone out there might be helpful identifying the age, at least, of the artifact.  Took it out there and left it for examination.  Vanished into thin air, that dagger.

The people who came here a while, lived their daily adventures and died couldn’t resist scattering their belongings all over the countryside.  Nobody paid a lot of attention to them for a longish while, but sometime during the 19th Century a fascination became an obsession with many.  Acquiring them by any means whatever became the rule of thumb, on the one hand, preserving them if they couldn’t be conveniently stolen, on the other.  The British Museum’s an example of stolen ones that eventually made their way into preservation.  Same with other museums.

And naturally there are legions of academians, anthropologists, who’ve developed protocols and rituals of method for stealing them in approved ways, vilifying anyone who loots the sites without the proper credentials.  Nowadays they have the law on their side.  Probably today, ENMU would have found a light-of-day legitimate means of stealing Ruth’s dagger.

Even so, it’s not always easy to resist picking off pieces of the past.  I described in an earlier entry how Mel inadvertently tried to carry Oola’s skull home with him.  Exploring Alley Oop’s Home Circa 1947 and how something similar got Squirelly Armijo into all manner of difficulties.  ‘Squirrelly’ Armijo Survives his own Funeral

Maybe something in all that explains the popularity of Gale’s ‘Hanging Tree’ belt buckles.  A number of years ago Gale managed to acquire a mesquite tree they’d cut down somewhere with a history of having criminals hanged from the branches.  Naturally he brought it home and over the years made belt buckles, all manner of jewelry items from it to sell at art and craft shows.

Not everyone wants a hanging tree belt buckle, but a lot of people do.  I’ve never been able to quite wrap my mind around why.  For me, having my belly button rubbing against a piece of wood that was part of a long series of dangling partici-whatchallits just doesn’t have a lot of appeal.  But I hold my pants up with galluses, anyway.  Rarely wear a belt.

As for artifacts, I was never attracted to run off with Oola’s skull, either.  Though I do wear this arrow head I figure offed my old prospector on the mountain hanging on a thong around my neck.  [Recapping the Lost Gold Mine Search]

Old Jules