People sure are prone to weather-induced hysteria. This kind of hype used to be confined to the local teevee news channels, but I guess the Weather Channel has made it mainstream.

(More substantial blogging will resume in the near future.)

But wait: there’s more!

It’s hose or be hosed, friends, so I’ll proudly vote Canada this year. It will only be a few more decades when global warming will make them our masters, anyway. All of that sweet, fresh, water and melting arctic ice. . . I say surrender now while it still seems kind of cool and not completely desperate.

“I had so much respect for my own professors,” I tell myself. “Yet these students seem to be mocking my efforts.”

It’s easy to understand why those who have been doing this for their entire lives might get frustrated, isn’t it? It’s depressing, to think that the college experience now is so degraded, compared to how we remember our own college years, a time of discovery and the excitement that comes with acquiring knowledge.

But then he remembers how it really was, and even comes to suspect that the “respect” he had for his professors meant that he didn’t get the most out of his education.  Fear of admitting his own ignorance kept him from asking the big questions:

The student who had “so much respect” for his own professors, in fact, consistently fell asleep in his first English class — a survey of British literature that met at the ungodly hour (for an 18-year-old) of 8 in the morning. He once handed in a research paper without a works cited page because, you know, he had better things to do than edit his own paper before handing it in. He even showed up for a late-afternoon psychology lab after spending the early afternoon working on a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best and proceeded to giggle like an imbecile every time the untenured, undoubtedly overworked instructor said the phrase “sexual arousal.” The topic for the day was — you guessed it — sex, which meant that the juvenile snickering went on longer than even Beavis and Butthead would have found tolerable.

.       .        .       .      .       .      

So, though I respected their obvious intelligence and valued the insights [my professors] shared with me, my own admiration for them prevented me from asking them the questions I knew they could answer. My fear of looking foolish caused me to choose ignorance.

As a professor and as a human being, I’m very aware of how ignorant I remain to this day. And I know, now, that those professors I idolized — and idealized — must have been aware of how limited their own knowledge was, and were probably plagued by the same doubts that plague me. Part of being an educated person, of course, involves acknowledging how much we don’t know.

I admire Bradley’s honesty.  And, by the way:  that was me, too in college, only maybe worse:  the Friday afternoon Western Civ lectures I attended only once in two semesters Freshman year; the evening seminars I blew off to go visit a boyfriend in the city; the 9 a.m. Art History course senior year (SENIOR year!) in which I regularly dropped off shortly after the lights were dimmed for the slide lecture.  What a callous, self-centered jerk I was–and I was a scholarship kid, too! 

Cue Bill Cosby’s bit about children, only substitute “college students” for “children:”

(The bit begins around 1:30 in this clip.)

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President John Tyler, 1841-45

I clicked on this link over at Politico yesterday, as it was billed as “Tyler’s Grankid:  Newt’s a ’jerk‘.”  Who the hell is Tyler, I wondered?  Surely not President John Tyler (1790-1862).  Could anyone alive today really have a grandparent who was born in the eighteenth century?

Most Americans think Newt Gingrich is a jerk–that’s hardly news.  It seems to me that the bigger headline should be that Tyler, who after all ran for Vice-President 172 years ago and became President in 1841 upon the death of William Henry Harrison, still has two living grandchildren!  That’s some pretty solid DNA he passed on, for a dude who was referred to in campaign slogans limply as just, “Tyler too!” 

Take that, Tippecanoe!

Doesn’t President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan remind you of the time that George W. Bush went to Notre Dame and Bob Jones and told them to stop being such one-issue whiners about abortion?  Or like that time he went to Haliburton and lectured them about keeping costs down, otherwise he would de-fund the National Security State?  Yeah:  just like that!

Personally, I liked this response– mysteriously, it was the final paragraph in the Denver Post this morning, rather than the lede:

Although I have nothing against her politics, I’m glad that Gabrielle (Gabby) Giffords finally resigned.  Her recovery appears to be remarkable so far, but it’s been apparent for months that she is not up to really serving her district in the way it deserves.  It’s monstrously unfair, and I still think her shooting and the deaths of so many others should be discussed in terms of a political assassination attempt, but still:  she can’t represent Tucson at this point in her life.

Some bosses offer dating tips. Diane Sawyer counsels her colleagues on freezing their eggs.

The anchor of ABC’s World News has long been a sounding board for her famously hard-working staff on a host of personal issues, from dating to the more complex realities of a demanding career. A recurring theme with women: finding time away from the office to meet a partner and have kids before they hit 40. It doesn’t always happen, as Sawyer, who first married at age 42, well knows. When it doesn’t, Sawyer sends her workers to New York University’s Fertility Clinic.

.       .       .       .       .       .      

Three quarters come in because they aren’t ready to have children yet. Some are sent by their parents: I know you want to work, but I want grandkids someday. Many are furious their doctors didn’t tell them about egg freezing sooner. “I want to send Diane a basket of flowers for what she’s doing,” says one childless 40-something in the media.

The idea that one could be a woman in her 40s in the media and not be aware of fertility issues is just completely laughable.  This is the same news media that for at least thirty years has been bullying women to get pregnant before they’re 25 or else!!!  That “childless 40-something in the media” probably spent her college internships back in the 1980s writing scripts that scolded women who didn’t get pregnant by 25, then worked as a producer for TV segments in the 1990s discussing the heartbreak of infertility and the joy of international adoption/IVF babies/donor eggs/babies via surrogacy, and then was promoted to create shows in the 2000s recycling these scripts and story lines on daytime TV, the nightly news, and evening news magazines.

Never mind that women in their 30s or 40s who don’t have children might not have them because they don’t want them.  I wonder how many of Diane Sawyer’s employees submit to this expensive procedure because they’re afraid to tell their bosses or co-workers, “no, thank you, I don’t want children.”  I wonder how many women in their 50s and 60s feel pressure to cast their decisions not to have children as some kind of bad luck or physiological failure, because of the opprobrium they might face if they say, “I’m really not into children, so I didn’t have them?”

But, really:  the notion that these stories offer some kind of secret wisdom that women have never heard of before is just too stupid to believe.

And it’s 1-2-3, the kids love the monkey
And it’s 4-5-6, the monkey’s got a hockey stick
7-8-9, havin’ a good time, yeahhhh. . .

I sure hope those children save the monkey from medical experiments.

Apparently, prayer finally worked:  the central mountains finally got a nice storm with several inches of fresh powder.