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…”

#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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This tiny town of Morris, Minnesota has one single-screen theater that was built in the 1940s — it’s a classic and historic building, where I’ve spent many hours. Two of my kids worked there through high school and part of college. It has struggled a bit, though, and several years ago there was a worrisome struggle when the owner sold it, and one of the buyers intended to turn into a goddamned church. Morris has over 15 churches, but only one theater, so that would have been a wasteful catastrophe. Fortunately, it was instead bought up by a coalition of community members committed to preserving it, and it’s now a coop. I’m a member, and I’ve actually just volunteered to work in the theater maybe once a week, starting in January. Come on out some evening, maybe I’ll sell you some popcorn.

There is an exhibit on the history of the theatre opening at the county historical museum today, and there is a video about the community efforts.

One catch, though: movie distribution has changed, and it’s really tough to book for a single-screen theater anymore.

Our next great challenge: the movie business itself. Regrettably movie studios are becoming our enemy. Studios are insisting that even small single screen theatres, like ourselves, must keep first run movies for three weeks. This means no other movie can be shown on our one screen while the first run movie is in town, which is a significant problem because our audience drops off dramatically in subsequent weeks. To keep showing first run movies we need a smaller, second screen. This will allow us to move first run movies to the smaller screen after two weeks, and bring in a new movie on the big screen. We can also use the small screen for quirky films and special events while a first run film is showing on the main screen.

That necessary second screen is in the works. The room is there. There’s all kinds of carpentry going on. But it needs more money to finish the work and get the projection equipment — once we’ve gotten over that hurdle, we can achieve a major leap in revenues, which will allow further renovation. There is a GoFundMe to raise money to complete the second screen — donate if you love movies and classy old art deco theaters! And if you do donate, next time you’re in Morris I’ll take you to the movies, my treat.

Any financial types out there who like browsing through 990 tax forms? I don’t understand this stuff at all, but I’ve been sent the publicly available stuff for Ken Ham’s organizations: the 2015 AiG 990 and 2015 Crosswater Canyon 990. It’s all fairly mundane. All I learned was that AiG’s total revenues went up by about a million dollars over the previous year, to about $22.5 million, that the Creation “Museum” is losing money, and that Ham employs 8 relatives on his staff. Nice racket.

I don’t see anything otherwise dodgy in the report, but then I wouldn’t. Anything jumping out at you tax wizards?