Snowflakes! Snowflakes everywhere!

I’ve already expressed my opinion on Star Wars: The Last Jedi: it was a movie. It was OK. I’m not as enthused as some.

But still, there were some excellent notes in that movie that only sunk in after a while. It did a great job of inclusion. As we all know, representation matters, and also, it’s silly to assume that the science fiction future (or in a galaxy long ago and far way) would be a little bubble of contemporary American culture.

Also, the heroes of the story were all women who were representing caution and restraint and careful planning, while the bad guys were all paragons of toxic masculinity. Look at Kylo Ren, with his temper tantrums and his obsessions; Snoke, who could have been Tywin Lannister for all his greedy scheming; even the two good guys, Poe and Finn, were impulsive dumbasses whose half-baked ideas for sudden victory all failed and almost wrecked the brilliant, well thought out plans of Leia and Holdo.

And now there is the predictable petition to strike Star Wars Episode VIII from the official canon. You have got to be kidding me. Someone is taking Star Wars way too seriously.

This is not a chapter of your holy books. It’s a movie that a lot of people liked very much. There is no inviolable body of dogma; Disney did not slap an official label of “Sacred Precepts of the Prophet George Lucas” on the title screen that you can have scraped off. People will decide whether they like it or not without regard for its sanctioned status in some imaginary list of “real” Star Wars movies.

Over 35,000 people have signed this inane petition.

I should start a petition to damn all the people who signed that petition to hell. It would have as much effect.

Oh, gosh, I made the Morris North Star!

Fortune and glory surely await me. Although I suspect they only include me because a mention on my blog gives them far more attention than their cheesy alternative campus newspaper would otherwise.

That’s what passes for intelligent discourse on the right. Sadly, all they have to offer is slurs and hate speech. Well, that and highlighting how adorable I can be.

Square dancing! It’s a conspiracy!

Why does American history have to suck so bad? Last night I saw this tweet, and it led to all kinds of horrifying crap.

You’ll have to look elsewhere to find out about quicksand porn*. The subject this tweet prefaces is…square dancing.

I do not have fond memories of square dancing. In my grade school years, whenever it rained (and this was Seattle, it rained all year long), our physical education classes would immediately devolve into a) dodge ball, or institutionalized, state-endorsed bullying of all the scrawny nerds, like myself, or b) square dancing. Square dancing was horrible and pointless. First, there was all the trauma of the boys and girls being separated and then told they had to pick a partner, which effectively meant both sides would stand paralyzed and motionless, doing nothing, until the instructor got fed up and started pairing us off arbitrarily. Then the horror began.

We had to go through these dance steps — “do-si-do”, “allemande left”, etc. — while listening to annoyingly bad music played on scratchy records. The thing was, no one listened to this kind of music outside of this class. It was the 70s. It was Elton John, Cher, Janis Joplin…jesus, at the school dances they would play “Smoke on the Water” and we were somehow supposed to dance to it. We didn’t do-si-do. We didn’t form lines. There was no choreography. Dancing was The Hustle, The Funky Chicken, The Bump, and the most coordination we engaged in was to know the motions for YMCA.

Square dancing was this alien, inorganic, antiquated assortment of sterile moves that had no part in our lives and never would. So why were all our schools united in foisting it off on us?

It was all Henry Ford’s fault.

Around 1928, Boards of Education all over the United States endorsed their square dancing program. Almost half the public schools in America began teaching square dancing and other old fashion dancing. Not only was this great exercise, but Ford and Lovett felt square dancing corrected the missing fun and teamwork that one-on-one dance lacked. Ford and Lovett felt that having square dancing in schools would help train children in manners, courtesy, and social training, a quality Henry Ford wanted to see excel in people.

It was state-mandated social engineering. Worse…it was social engineering by capitalists and industrialists. Under the influence of Captains of Industry, artifical organizations sprang up to convince state legislatures to declare that this was “American folk dancing”. Never mind that my “folk”, Scandinavian immigrants and other North European rascals, didn’t do much dancing, and what there was involved lots of alcohol (my father’s side) or Lawrence Welk (my mother’s side). It’s an incredibly fake attempt to invent a wholesome united American culture by a terrible, awful, no-good racist.

Yeah, that’s the dismaying bit. Sure, if this was a fake culture that was as authentic as Velveeta cheese, I could just roll my eyes and ignore it. But this is America! We have to imbed an uncomfortable amount of hate in everything. The reason Henry Ford was so keen to contrive a bland American folk tradition was that he hated jungle music and Jews.

Despite being progressive in paying blacks equal pay to whites, Ford sponsored country music events for his workers to keep them away from the supposed detrimental effects of ‘Negro’ music.

Why did Ford hate jazz music so much? Not only was he fearful of “urban, negro” entertainment, he also blamed the Jews for it. No doubt you’ve heard of Ford’s tome “The International Jew,” the anti-Semitic rants that sometimes get lost in history while we keep buying Mustangs. In Ford’s own words:

Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of calf love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes and admitted in homes where the thing itself, unaided by scanned music,” would be stamped out in horror. The fluttering music sheets disclose expressions taken directly from the cesspools of modern capitals, to be made the daily slang, the thoughtlessly hummed remarks of school boys and girls.

Oh god.

I have two bits of good news though.

  1. Obviously, Ford failed. We all grew up on the “abandoned sensuosness of sliding notes” and “jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks”, and we liked it. Urban rhythms rule. Square dancing drools.

  2. The alt-right are going to declare square dancing the official dance of neo-Nazism. We’re going to have another reason to point and laugh.

Of course, if you happen to enjoy square dancing as a hobby and form of exercise, that’s fine, go ahead. Just don’t pretend it’s authentic or especially American.

Except in the sense that it’s rooted in racism, like so many American traditions.

*No, don’t google it! Your search history will be forever poisoned with stuff you don’t want to know!

Conversations with my grandfather

Hey! It’s the last day of classes! And you know what that means…it means I was up until the wee hours grading papers! And do you know what that means? It means that when I did finally get a few hours of sleep, I had terrible dreams. In this case, I dreamt about spending a day with my grandfather.

My grandfather never touched me or hurt me, so it wasn’t that kind of dream. It was…well, if I dreamed of a day when I was eight or nine, it would go like this:

“Let’s go make something in the shop!”
“This is how you use a lathe.”
“We can look at the old drawings I did in high school.”
“See, I wanted to be an architect!”
“You can be anything you want to be.”
<Falls asleep watching the Jackie Gleason show.>

That wouldn’t be so bad. But no, I had dreams about days with my grandfather when I was 12-15. Those were not so nice. Those days were more like this:

I’d get there in the morning. He’d already have a stack of six-packs by his chair.
<slurp>
<slurp>
<increasingly slobbery slurps>
Let’sh go for a ride.
You wait here in the car for a minute.
An hour later…One more shtop.
Another hour later, we’d creep home at 5mph, the car weaving from side to side.
Bitch! Bitches!
Goddamn J*ps!
Ni**ers!
<Falls asleep before the sun is down.>

As I got older, I would spend less and less time with Grandpa, and when he suggested a ride down to the tavern, I’d just leave. He got worse and worse as he got older — and I wasn’t around at all — and my younger sisters have stories of his verbal abuse they are not happy to discuss.

So, yeah, when I have bad dreams (I usually don’t), the old man sometimes makes an appearance. These aren’t fearful dreams at all, though — more like soul-crushing dreams of bitter failure wallowing in spite and cheap beer. It just makes me sad.

At least when I wake up I realize that I’m now the age he was then, roughly, and get to bounce cheerfully off to a good job and hang out with smart people, and then come home to a happy family…or I would, if my wife weren’t off grandmothering in Watertown, NY for a few more weeks. I guess I’ll have to settle for a very needy cat.

“Hey, cat, this is how you use a word processor…”

Wisconsin may be the Florida of the Midwest, but this looks like fake news

#NotAllWisconsinites, OK? But it does have a reputation for housing some weird and unsavory characters. Sometimes, though, the stories are hard to believe. Like this one, about a Milwaukee funeral home owner making a sex doll out of body parts. I read it and found the details kept piling up and seemed increasingly bizarre and unlikely. But it’s on the ABC News site! I looked around, and the rest of the site mostly seems to be legitimate and kind of boring news stories. Except…ABC News is on ABCNews.com; this was ABCNews-US.com. When you look more closely at the sections of the site, they’re screwy: there’s a “Sport”* section with no stories in it. Something else that was off: it has an about page, on which it claims a rich history dating back to 1898, which can’t be true. I checked the domain registry; it’s registered in Melbourne, Australia? Then I checked some of the details, and there is no “Adams Sons Funeral Home in Milwaukee”.

It’s just weird. It’s got a fairly elaborate framework of seemingly authentic news stories built as a wrapper around at least this one ludicrously bogus tale. Why? It looks like someone has gone to the trouble of trying to create a superficially credible web news site in order to promote this goofy story…or more likely, some other less stupid but more damaging story. How many of these elaborate fake news sites are around?

Someone ought to tell the real ABC News that this site has stolen their logo and other identifying marks, at least.

*Another small detail: American news would call this section “Sports”, not “Sport”.

The first of 3 nights of grading

I’m collecting lab final exams and final lab reports from each of 3 labs, one nasty big pile a day. Then at night I take them home with a pocket full of red pens and slash away until my eyes melt and drool out of their sockets.

To get in the mood, I like to have a little background noise while I’m working — I’m one of those people who can’t focus without a little static, and I get too easily distracted by the ravening beasts in my head if it’s silent. But it can’t be too engaging. So I’ve queued up a set of streaming movies that are going to be terrible and ignorable, but are appropriate for the season. The theme for the next three nights is…Christmas Horror (it’s a genre, for real: look it up on Amazon video). My work this evening, and tomorrow, and the day after, will be accompanied by screams, ugly crunching/ripping sounds, and abominable dialog.

I find the students’ work usually comes off better in comparison, so it’s all to their advantage.

If you have suggestions for awful movies to play while grading, let me know. Remember the criteria: it’s got to be so bad that I won’t actually be distracted by it, but it has to also fill the silence.

I’m not going anywhere

It’s been an annoyingly bland, warm winter so far, but it looks like that’s about to change.

… WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT CST TONIGHT… * WHAT… SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW CAUSING LOW VISIBILITIES AND SLIPPERY ROADS MAKING TRAVEL DANGEROUS. TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 1 TO 4 INCHES ARE EXPECTED. * WHERE… PORTIONS OF CENTRAL AND WEST CENTRAL MINNESOTA. * WHEN… FROM NOON TODAY TO MIDNIGHT CST TONIGHT. * ADDITIONAL DETAILS… WINDS GUSTING AS HIGH AS 55 MPH WILL CAUSE AREAS OF BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS… A WINTER STORM WARNING FOR SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL, KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT, FOOD AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY. THE LATEST ROAD CONDITIONS FOR MINNESOTA CAN BE FOUND AT 511MN.ORG AND FOR WISCONSIN AT 511WI.GOV, OR BY CALLING 5 1 1 IN EITHER STATE.

… POWERFUL STORM TO BRING STRONG WIND AND SOME SNOW MONDAY AFTERNOON AND EVENING… .SNOW ACCUMULATION FROM 2 TO 4 INCHES IS EXPECTED ACROSS WESTERN MINNESOTA ACCOMPANIED BY WINDS GUSTING TO 50 MPH MONDAY AFTERNOON AND EVENING. THE COMBINATION OF FALLING SNOW AND A VERY STRONG NORTHWEST WIND WILL CREATE LOW VISIBILITIES WITH NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ACROSS WEST CENTRAL MINNESOTA, WHERE A WINTER STORM WARNING IS IN EFFECT FROM NOON UNTIL MIDNIGHT MONDAY NIGHT. TO THE EAST, A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IS IN EFFECT FOR MUCH OF CENTRAL MINNESOTA FROM 3 PM MONDAY UNTIL MIDNIGHT WHERE THE COMBINATION OF 1 TO 3 INCHES OF SNOW AND STRONG NORTHWEST WIND WILL CAUSE REDUCED VISIBILITY AND AREAS OF BLOWING SNOW. THE PRECIPITATION WILL FALL IN THE FORM OF RAIN INITIALLY, THEN CHANGE OVER TO SNOW AS TEMPERATURES FALL MONDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH MONDAY NIGHT AS A COLD FRONT MOVES FROM WEST TO EAST ACROSS THE STATE. NORTHWEST WINDS WILL BECOME STRONG IN THE WAKE OF THE FRONT. IF YOU TRAVEL, MAKE SURE TO LET SOMEONE KNOW YOUR TRAVEL PLANS AND HAVE A CHARGED PHONE WITH YOU.

Here are my travel plans: I’m staying home. I hope my students who commute are going to be sensible about all this — I know my classes are the highlight of your existence, but I’m not going to penalize anyone for staying home in this mess, even if you are going to miss another exciting lecture/discussion today.

Music as an educational inspiration

An inner-city school in England was in trouble: funding problems, complaining parents, unhappy teachers. They reversed their situation, however.

  • The school is in the top 10% nationally for pupil progress in reading, writing and maths.
  • 74% of its kids met the nation’s reading standard, higher than the national average of 53%.
  • 74% of its pupils achieved the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, compared to a national average of 53%.
  • Feversham students are 7.1 points above the national average for reading and 3.4 for writing.
  • Feversham students are 6.5 points above the national average for math.
  • The school’s results for disadvantaged pupils are well above average.

All it took was ‘one weird trick’: they incorporated 6 hours of music into the curriculum every week.

The school bases its method on the Kodály approach, which involves teaching children to learn, subconsciously at first, through playing musical games. Children learn rhythm, hand signs and movement, for example, in a way that will help their reading, writing and maths. Idrees says teachers have found that asking children to memorise passages of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, improves reading and writing.

I don’t think music is the one magical element that makes this work, but it’s part of the recipe. Kids have to learn that applying oneself with discipline has rewards, and music is a good tool for that; I think also that the missing ingredient in education is inspiration and enthusiasm. Kids have to want to learn, and restricting the curriculum to some tiny few fragments of the range of human interest is a sure way to lock people out from learning that lesson.

In my own case, I was lucky: I was brought up with an enthusiasm for reading. Maybe soaking up trashy science fiction and fantasy novels wasn’t a direct path to educational success, but it did give me the skills I needed to do well in English and math and science. The local high school in Morris is not exactly exceptional, but one of the things that stood out about it when my kids were attending was their theater program — my son Connlann was very gung-ho about performing, and my nerdy daughter Skatje was focused on theater tech. It makes a difference when going to school to have something that makes you enthusiastic about participating. (The school made major cuts in the theater program about the time my kids graduated — a classic short-sighted bit of stupidity. I’m sure that their thinking was that since performing arts weren’t on the standardized exams, who needs it?)

I’m seeing it all the time in higher ed, too. In times of short budgets, who needs philosophy or foreign languages? Cut those disciplines so you can give more money to the STEM fields, where the money and the future lies. They never seem to realize that students are human beings with diverse interests, and our job is to expose them to the breadth of human knowledge, so they can choose how to apply themselves. Force-feeding our students through a funnel of one domain isn’t going to succeed; they’ll learn more with a smorgasbord that allows them to voluntarily stuff themselves with wisdom.

woke up got out of bed dragged a comb across my head

My phone chirped at me that Matt Lauer has been fired for sexual misconduct. Donald Trump is re-tweeting bigotry and hate from Britain First. This isn’t how the song goes.

Fed the cat, took a shower, made the coffee. I guess the whole pot is for me today, since my wife is flying off to Syracuse right now.

Checked my email — only 3 hate-o-grams that I’m a faggot who deserves to have his head cut off by ISIS? Delete, delete, delete. At least that’s a good start. Pulled up my file of review questions for my class today. Gotta edit ’em down to a reasonable subset that we can get through in an hour. They can cope with amino-acyl T-RNA synthetases and spliceosomes and Cro/CI regulation, right? Sure. They’re smart.

Second cup of coffee. Doing good.

Jordan Peterson is such an ass.

Remember to bring in the stack of assignments I’m returning in the cell biology lab today. Also printed out the list of interview questions the search committee is going over this evening — we’re beginning phone interviews tonight. I’m not getting home until after 8pm.

Hmm. I may not be able to get away for dinner today. Ate a banana. Just in case.

Uh-oh, what should I post to the blog this morning? I got nothin’. This long crowded full day ahead of me is ballooning up inside my cranium, squeezing everything else thinly against the walls of my skull, and then it pops and everything lofts loose and drifts outward and upward, through the windows and past the skeleton trees clawing at it, upwards and away, bobbing and floating.

Northwest, I see. that’s a good direction. If I were free, that’s the way I would go, too.