made of awesome
I rarely blog anymore, and I anticipate blogging less as I certify to teach. But I did want to mention that my kid is made of awesome.

He is 6. Absolutely 6. He asked for his first mohawk, and after we established that that particular hairstyle is meaningful in North American indigenous cultures as battle attire, he received it. (Because of his cowlick, it looks sort of funny. Travis Bickle, Jr.)

He is attending this week something we'll call Karate Kamp, although it's age-appropriate and not even really martial; yet how can a person resist saying "Karate Kamp"? I can't. So at Karate Kamp I observed my kid comforting a classmate who'd had a six-year-old camper meltdown.

"I'm glad you're feeling better," he said, when the kid calmed down.

Over the weekend, he made a pet of a doodlebug and named it "Ned."

As the final proof that my kid is made of awesome, I submit the following video evidence:

get my keys
Arlington's got Miltown...in the water!

Anti-war but not a pacifist
War is a huge-ass thing, not meant to be lived with on a day-to-day basis with no endgame. That's my philosophy. It should involve a clear purpose and the support of the public, who is obliged to make sacrifices and build Victory Gardens and put on a brave face. War should not be part of life's background noise.

But if your nation gets clobbered by a giant cyclone and hundreds of thousands of people are dead, and you're holding onto all the aid, you deserve to get your ass kicked by the world's superpowers. We're all in this nasty-ass polluted and depleted Earthly boat together now, and allow me to adjust my tinfoil hat and mention that we're going to have bigger storms now, all of us. And we do not actually have the Rescue Heroes, as much as it saddens my child to have to say so.

We are the Rescue Heroes.

Mission select!

Ron Stone, no!
I had to come out of hiding for this. Ron Stone died.

When I was a little kid in the 1970s, a cone of silence descended upon our house Sundays at 5:00 when The Eyes of Texas came on. Ron Stone was, like, my other dad. He was a kindly, slightly folksy, yet authoritative old-school broadcaster. It didn't even matter that much that he was actually from Oklahoma.

when an update is not an update
Oh, hey! It's my blog.

I'm taking the TExES (a.k.a. the ExCET) tomorrow. Excelsior, y'all. I'm up to my butt in educator CamelCase. Plus the usual chemistry CamelCase.

Via the excellent moon_radio, "Guilty Pleasure" by Cobra Starship. (limited time)

it's funny because it's true

political_macro.

right on, my brother
ABC News reports on "the human spell-checker".

You might have to watch an ad, but the ad might have a cute puppy, so you get that too, potentially.

And remember: "It's just really about going after the errors themselves."

hooray for government accountability!
The State Department renewed Blackwater USA's contract in Iraq.

Man, it sure does suck to be Iraqi:

"Dude, you shot 17 people!"

"We agree that 17 people were shot by our private security contractors, who cannot be prosecuted in your courts."

"We investigated it. It was unprovoked!"

"The FBI is going to investigate it because they're awesomer than you. And while they're investigating, we see no reason not to renew their contract, even though we don't have to and could in fact cancel at any time."

And what the hell is this sentence: "It is unclear whether [Blackwater] could be prosecuted under U.S. law."? Unclear?

I can't come up with words
so I made you a Muxtape.

if at first you don't succeed
So it looks like Owen and Kate are back together. I'm okay with that. She's a babymama. (gives sign)

Who's next? James Murphy, you in?

the children make the funny hats
But it is we who wear them.

Ari (l.) and me (r.), photo by Ms. Adams, teacher of the second grade.

ear buds, part deux
I thought I was being all smart when I got a pair of headphones from Savers (no, I am not afraid of headphones from Savers) as an on-the-fly solution to my ear bud problem. I've lost them already. Both sets of ear buds I still have. It's fucked up.

Side note to Leonardo DiCaprio: I got your very nice letter about the polar bears (thank you for calling me "Friend"), and I'm really sorry about what happened to your grandfather. I signed your petition. Hell yeah polar bears.

bring it on
25

That sounds about right. I had lunch at school with Baldo on Friday (a turkey hot dog and Spanish rice) and I could pretty much handle myself on the playground afterward with his class of 19. But when the second class came out, they took me down. Then again, some of them are already 6.

la arriviste
Along with Tristan Taormino, I am a source for the German Wikipedia entry for "MILF."

That's kind of weird.

also, a realization about my ear buds
Something must be done about my crappy ear buds. I spend a lot of time with something I totally hate stuck in my ears. Really, why?

I will say this for them: I have managed not only not to lose them, as I do headphones, but to retain two pairs. The bad news is that I dropped a pair into my coffee yesterday at work, and although I took them all apart and tried to dry the inner pieces, they still discharged coffee into my ear canal in a slow drip. Which was infuriating. You could do that to people instead of waterboarding, Mr. President. Coffee-ear torture. I could not be at one with my computing or my music listening while my ears slowly filled with coffee.

Now my sucky earbuds are dry and have returned to their baseline suckitude. I'm going to have to find a realistic and effective solution to the problem of my ear buds.