Beware the Spotted Anchelin!!

The Spotted Anchelin - "so dumb, so bitch" and is to be found all over the place. Don't know about the Spotted Anchelin? Someday you might.
At any rate some inhabit the great city of New York, which we recently visited to see an Off to the Power of Ten Broadway comedy production of "Laundry Day" put on just for fun by Sara and some of her Girdle (former Penn girls who were Bloomers until they graduated and became Girdles) associates now residing in Gotham, at a hole in the wall in Greenwich Village. Don't know about "Laundry Day"? Well, they had only one show and made a few bucks so that's it.
The Village is a zoo. A livelier  zoo than, say, Fort Lauderdale at Spring Break, but a zoo nonetheless. College kids and the usual big school (in this case NYU) hangers on that just can't leave and who probably should not have arrived in the first place. But fun to see.
Visited Brad and Sasha in Astoria which we found to be very lively and much cooler than its general reputation. Cooler than Brooklyn, if not as hip. They are very big on brunch in Astoria, and they do it well.
No visit to NYC is ever complete without those oh so special subway ads. This one was the best of the crop we saw-well worth the subway fare and much more fun than a cab-

 

Now THIS is ADVERTISING!!!

Literacy and Numeracy

I've written before about the first grader I coach in reading. He is Luis, and now it turns out that he is autistic based on a real diagnosis. Just another hurdle for this kid from our poorest ZIP code. Thinking back, it should have been clear something was amiss. The real clue was how his classmates would watch out for him, lend him a hand and worry over him. Aside from the kids, only his teacher paid attention until parent (or possibly, but unlikely, parents) bothered to check him out. So very sad.
Some think autistic equates to stupid or ignorant, but with Luis this is not so. When he comes downtown for the Reads program, he often gazes at the other office buildings in an obvious state of worry and talks in a language all his own - neither English nor Spanish, its just his, and he made it up.

Recently I have begun tutoring an adult - an entirely different matter, the organization trains one to tutor and tutors have to make lesson plans, etc. My "learner" has waited for two years to get a tutor. He is 37 years old. He writes pretty well since he had to write letters from prison, and can easily handle articles from the newspaper. He is finally getting the idea that he need not fear or hate reading. Math however is a subject that he completely slept through. Lost his house, his wife and his kid when he "went away" for a few years, and now is trying hard to get a real life again. Long road for him, I'm real glad to try and help.

Its amazing to me how critical it is to learn stuff, and how costly it is not to.

Overwhelming

Our mayor, governor and archbishop have just returned from Rome, where they and other area luminaries spent the better part of a week trying to convince the Pope and his gang to come to Philadelphia. This is in connection with a real big family celebration hoo-hah slated for the not too distant future.
It seems that the hoo-hah all by itself will supposedly attract a few hundred thousand Catholics to our fair city.  But add the Pope and voila! we get a million. And as our emissaries hung about around the Holy See, the number of potential visitors climbed - first to one million and a day or so later to two million.

"Glad to be here, hope you are too!

A few hundred thousand steaming asses yearning to be free is one thing, but two million? In the span of less than a week? We have had a good number of several hundred thousand crowds before but two million guests is more than we have hosts.
Where will they stay? Hotels around here are already booked for this deal, and the ones in the burbs can fit only a small fraction of such a horde. So even if they just sleep in parks, or stay awake all day and just wander around, where will they excrete? How many Port A Potties are there? Can we get them by rail, like the Bakken crude coming our way from one of the Dakotas, in mile long trains? Has anyone thought what could happen if our sewer and sewage treatment facilities overflowed? Is there enough food? Those guys in clashing plaid suits at city hall should be working on this stuff now.

Could happen on a street near you

Like many big cities, ours is short on cash, so perhaps we could utilize this opportunity to haul in some much needed revenue by charging folks to leave town when they are all done their huzzahs?
Just a thought...

Dumb and dumber

I quote below from an unrecalled source-

"A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation.
The survey of 2,200 people in the United States was conducted by the NSF in 2012 and released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
To the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly.
In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that "The universe began with a huge explosion" and only 48 percent said "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."

Add to this the number of our fellow citizens that believe that the Loch Ness monster (which does not actually exist) proves that cowboys could have ridden dinosaurs. This makes me sure that my feeling that we are getting stupid as a nation is correct.
I blame this on glowing screens. First came television, which early in its history was touted as a wonderful educational tool. It turned out to be a real stack of crap, a thoughtless void that deadens the mind. Then we got the internet, touted in much the same way. It too turned out to be a mostly useless pile of garbage, the most popular selections being god and pornography, neither of which do much to improve one's thinking.
Thinking is not really hard, but since, for the most part, we don't have to, we don't. Thus we become stupider day by day.

Hate Filled Bits of Evolutionary Garbage

Sometimes bits of information coalesce into brilliant ideas.
Here is one of the info bits, from niece Betsy. Betsy does social work in Denver, and has discovered over time that whenever she has to extract kids from abusive homes in which a dog is present, the dog is always a Chihuahua. Not sometimes; not often, but always.
Another bit of info: from elsewhere I learn of neighborhoods in Arizona and perhaps other places, being over run by packs of these mongrel creatures.
A third bit: my Abby is going on a cruise after she graduates college. I know this because I am paying for it, otherwise I would just wonder where she is.
From these bits, a brilliant idea:

CHIHUAHUA HURLING CRUISES



Communities with too many of these hate filled bits of evolution's garbage could capture them and supply them to cruise operators, claiming they are sending them to beautiful places. Once on board, passengers would be able to sign up to hurl these doglets into the ocean. Toss out some chum, and when the sharks begin circling near the ship, and heave ho the rat dogs. Points could be awarded for hurling style and distance. Catapults or bats could also be used. It could, possibly, become a recognized sport.
Remind me to write about Rat Eatin' Frogs someday...

: .

Bath Salts??

In case you have not noticed, there has been a rash of strange happenings around the country wherein men become crazed when confronted by law enforcement, yell gibberish, attack people for no apparent reason, and race about, stripping off their clothes. I have noticed these especially in Florida, which is an extremely odd place, full of nut jobs (just check out http://www.reddit.com/r/FloridaMan). Here is a San Francisco man in a subway station - http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/naked-man-san-francisco-bart-subway-video.html.  The phenomenon is not limited to Florida, but has also occurred here in my hometown and California and Maine that I know of.
It reminds me of a long lost but unforgotten misbehavior called streaking. Drunken college kids would dart about naked, usually un-confronted by law enforcement. Perhaps they spewed gibberish, perhaps not. They did not attack people, just gave some a bit of a shock.
The current phenomenon seems to be fueled by bath salts, according to some reputable New England sources and others. It turns out that this is all quite legal and pretty common, especially among hicks and stupid people; according to daughter Abby some of her college mates from Pennsyltucky are familiar with such things.
Some fun, eh?

Personal Ponderings

Inspired by a recently received grand bathroom reader (True Remarkable Occurrences; John Train, Clarkson N. Potter) I began wondering about some common figures of speech than do nor make any sense. To read this fine book, I go and take a dump. I can also take a whiz in the snow out back. Take it where? Is it just lying around somewhere it should not be? One would think we would wish to leave such things, not take them with us.
Recently I have noticed the phrase "on the ground" cropping up all over the place - my morning paper, the radio, TV; everybody is citing "sources on the ground " or "activists on the ground", or "facts on the ground". Even NPR and the BBC do this. So are there airborne activists, sources and facts? That fly around and look at stuff? Why don't we ever hear from them? Perhaps some are in the rivers and oceans? Why not just say where these sources etc. actually are? Of course they are on the ground, unless they are birds or drones. Or fish.

Activist on the ground?

Here is something else I ponder- do deaf people worry about the sounds of flatulence? Does being deaf enhance the sense of smell enough to give them the same joy of flatulence that hearing people have from the sound of a robust release of pent up wind?

Just a few items to occupy the mind on a cold winter day.