look, i twittered today!

• 08:08 i'm feeling pretty good. maybe i'll find a dead bird, and some serial killer will give me $20 for it. that would be cool. #
• 10:11 fucking spyware. fucking windows. i would like to hurl my work computer out of my 44th floor window right about now. #
• 13:20 @butterflyfish1 congratulations on finishing the finals! :) #
• 19:35 tonight's holiday party was actually pretty awesome. #
• 19:40 "bullies on vacation" by the verve pipe rocks my world. #

don't blame me, blame loudtwitter.

galoshes!!

everything's covered in snow!

it's gorgeous and awesome, but it highlighted something that my wardrobe lacks: boots made for inclement weather. i was walking down the mostly-unshoveled sidewalks gingerly, hoping to get as little snow as possible into my work shoes. of course, this didn't work out so well. the street corners were the worst, though--every single one of them had huge puddles of dirty slush, puddles so big that you'd have to walk halfway down the block to avoid them. since the el was running late anyway, i just had to slink through the puddles, hope i picked the shallowest part, and deal with the consequences. sometimes i picked something shallow...and, sometimes, it was several inches deep and my foot was submerged in the muck.

but, next time it snows, i will be ready. ohhhhhh, i will be ready. i will be ready with tall, steel-toed, heavy-duty rubber military-surplus galoshes.

bring the snow on.

telephone trivia...

useless fact of the day: the word "ethics" and the name "duggar" require the same combination of telephone keys to type them.

this is entertaining, in that oh-so-disturbing way.

a spouse!

today's Dinosaur Comic is AWESOME.



this is one of those gags that only the golden rule stops me from doing. it would be so, so, so, so funny to pull on someone else--and only the knowledge of how pissed i'd be if someone did that to me stops me from doing this.

this is officially Duggar Day at the last refuge of the persecuted crack smoker.

Taryn is a naughty, naughty Taryn. she sent me a link to the duggar family website, which i started reading out of a horrific sense of train wreck syndrome. sure, i have been on that website before, but not in a year or two...so, it's probably time go go back on there and see what sorts of things i had forgotten, or what sorts of things had been added.

i clicked on the FAQ and started reading. in the section discussing what the family does every day, it mentions some of their homeschooling rituals:

"Momma & older children gather around the table at 2:00PM for Wisdom Booklet group studies - science, history, law, medicine - part of our ATIA curriculm."

[yes. curriculum is misspelled just like that. clearly they've been spending so much time studying science, history, law, and medicine that they forgot to study spelling.]

i had never heard of the ATIA, although i could only assume that it was some kind of fundamentalist christian homeschooling organization. i started poking around the ATIA website, and found out i was right. i clicked a few links to see what sorts of information they had on their curriculum, and i found the mother lode: one of their wisdom booklets, posted online for all to read.

the whole thing is priceless, but it gets REALLY good at page 43--when they start discussing the rules of cross-examination. some of the rules themselves are actually things you would learn in a trial advocacy class--such as always knowing the answers to the questions that you ask before you ask them, or never making the questions more complicated than necessary. but others? like never cross-examining a witness unless you can prove he is wrong? i never remember learning that one, and in fact i remember learning how effective it is to cross-examine a witness about facts favourable to you--things they aren't wrong about, but just so happen to agree with your side on. however, the reason the cross-examination rules are total gold is not because of what the rules actually "are." it's the explanations that are given, and the suggestions for how you should repeatedly cross-examine your heart.

the "medicine" lesson, which discusses a rather pained analogy between anorexia and getting addicted to mourning, is also brilliant.

if that book is not enough, you can poke around here and see even more exciting "features" of these wisdom booklets. they're all hilarious.

***

but, amusement is not my only response--half of me is cracking up, and half of me is PISSED OFF. they're hilarious in the abstract, and infuriating when taken into the context in which they're actually used.

it's just so cloying--these books just can't present a kernel of knowledge without building some strained analogy to tie it into something biblical. it's such an educational disservice to these children, who have no control over the education they're getting, to be "educated" in an environment where every piece of knowledge has to be so carefully rationed off and so couched in analogies to religion. it doesn't lead to breadth of knowledge at all--it leads to tunnel vision, and leads to the anti-intellectual idea that any knowledge that doesn't fit into the nice little box is not worth knowing.