Mistaken Identity ROCKS -or- I'm a Dick and Proud Of It

Merry Christmas everyone!

A little background... Once I was into my 30s, Daddy used to occasionally (especially after a few beers) call me Alex. Alex is Daddy's younger brother, my uncle, and quite a formidable man. I'd get a kick out of that... being in the same class of person as my uncle would make me puff my chest out and stand proud.

After Daddy died, Uncle Alex sometimes would do the same thing, calling me Dick (Daddy's first name). Again... being close enough to call the wrong name puts me in a pretty high-caliber group.

And tonight, one of Uncle Alex's oldest and best friends, Bear, called me Dick once he'd had a few bottles of Guinness. For Bear to slip and call me by Daddy's name, the name of a man who was one of his best friends' older brother, was a high compliment indeed.

I'm pretty damn proud that Daddy saw something of his little brother in me, and that Alex and Bear see something of Daddy in me. That tells me I'm doing at least a few things right.

Agent of Change

Jon-David Wells does "The Wells Report" weekday afternoons from 4-7pm here in Dallas-Fort Worth on 570am, KLIF.

I think he may have started something BIG today.

Discussing education, and the TAKS(?) test, and educational standards in general, he had several teachers call in (I didn't hear the whole show, but I heard 3 teachers) who said they had minimum grades they were allowed to assign by school policy.

As in, minimum 60 - kid skips class every day, never turns in a page of homework, and never takes a test, he can't be graded lower than 60%.

Wells asked these people to fax him copies of these policies. And he vowed to "burn at the stake" people responsible for these policies, if they in fact exist.

JD Wells, I offer you my encouragement - our educational system needs a MAJOR overhaul, not just reform. I will also offer a piece of advice:

See if you can get those policies through a FOIA action, rather than rely on faxes. File FOIA requests for ALL school districts around the ones in question. That's how you'll protect your sources. Because any teacher who sends you this material, will have his/her job and/or career in danger when you publish it and make a great big stink about it.

I think JD Wells is about to turn education in DFW on it's ear; hopefully this will catch on throughout the rest of the state and maybe even nation.

"Truth, Justice, and All That Stuff" Wait, what?

Lisa and I got "Superman Returns" this week from Netflix. I was really looking forward to watching it, and after dinner tonight, we did. Or started to.

I got to the point where Editor Perry White was telling the newspaper staff that "It's Superman! It's Truth, Justice and All That Stuff!"

Wait, What?

For my younger readers, there was a 50s TV show of Superman, and part of every episode's voice over was that Supes stood for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way".

This movie deliberately perverted that line. It could easily have been left out, as prior Superman movies did, or changed completely, to something like, "The cape! The Boots! The good of Mankind!"

But these assmunches had to take a deliberate poke. "Truth, Justice and the American Way" became "Truth, Justice, and All That Stuff".

Fuck 'em. Fuck Brian Singer. Loved his work on the X-Men, he left his political views out (or made them so subtle I didn't pick up on any bias). Fuck Kevin Spacey, unless I find out he objected to that line and was overruled.

I quit watching the movie about a minute after that line was uttered, went out to the garage to smoke a cigarette to calm down... it became 3 smokes, and I was more pissed than when I started.

Brian Singer could have left that line out of the script. It could have landed on the cutting-room floor. Nope, it was deliberately left in the film; a deliberate slam on America and "jingoistic" Americans.

I won't finish watching "Superman Returns", and I won't waste my time watching any more Brian Singer movies. He's gone into the same discard bin that the Ditzy Twits are in.

Feel free to get me any of their DVDs or CDs, though... I'll have great fun seeing how small a piece of the disc I can still hit with my .22. Burning up .22 ammo is ALWAYS fun :)

Nerd vs Geek

Thoughts please?

This topic came up between Lisa and I tonight at Olive Garden, when I subconciously, then conciously, looked at how she cut her fried raviolies.

I'll spare you all the gory details, and cut to the chase:

In my opinion, nerds are people full of random information that has no bearing on the real world (think Batman vs Superman).

Geeks are people full of random information that has a real bearing on the real world (think cooling fried raviolis off by cutting crossways vs diaganol).

Lisa called me a nerd for trying to remember the therorm of (a squared) + (b squared) = (c squared) to define why cutting raviolis into triangles was better than cutting them into smaller rectangles, if the goal is to not have them scald the mouth.

I insisted that I wasn't a nerd, I'm a geek.

Geeks are full of random, yet useful, information. Nerds are full of random and useless information.

Thoughts, comments please?