Another Well Know Expression that Irritates Me

About a year ago I wrote a post about an expression people often say that drives me batty. Today I'd like to add another...

...I hate it when people are making an argument about something and in the process of doing so present a bunch of numbers and then say, "Do the math!"

An example might be something along the lines of, "President Obama states that the total cost of his new health care program will be 900 billion dollars, but others have stated that the initial cost alone could be 700 billion dollars and then 200 billion dollars a year for the next seven years. Do the math, people! This Obama guy is trying to destroy this country!"

I don't like the expression for a couple of reasons:

1. It seems awfully bossy to me. Maybe I'm all wrong about this, but my feeling is that pretty much only math teachers should be assigning people math problems. Debators especially should not be doing so. I'm trying to listen to the person and make intelligent choices. I don't need him assigning me homework while I'm listening. And it just seems so rude to make it an imperative sentence like that. It makes me want to counter with, "If we don't do SOMETHING to stem the rising cost of health care in this country, 2 trillion dollars is going to sound like a pittance. Diagram the sentence, people! And after you've done that, make me a sandwich! And somebody change the oil in my car!"

2. I've already DONE the math. When a person makes a statement like the one above, he or she is basically speaking to two groups of people: 1) People who already understand where the person is going and have already done the calculating without being told to do so, and 2) people who DON'T understand where the person is going and aren't going to be able to do the math regardless of whether or not the person tells them to do so. In either case, the insistence to "Do the math!" is going to be a waste.

So let's all stop saying it.

...with the Greatest of Ease...

Yesterday I made a post about the Cincinnati Bengals and the Pittsburgh Steelers. In it I mentioned that when I was a kid I wanted to be Lynn Swann when I grew up, and I made a link to a great catch that Lynn Swann made, one of the most famous catches in all of NFL history.

In the process of finding that video, though, I came upon this little gem of a video, and it generated a couple of thoughts in me.
1. Lynn Swann can fly!
2. Why were there cars in the end zone?
3. Was this play a reason that you no longer see cars in the end zone?




(I can't see the video!)

Where My Loyalties Lie

I've always been torn watching the Cincinnati Bengals and the Pittsburgh Steelers play. That's because I've always been a fan of both teams. I remember as a child growing up in the seventies wanting to BE Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann--he was my hero! And I loved the Steel Curtain. And who didn't like the Mean Joe Greene Coke commercial? But the Bengals have always been my hometown team (even if they were 90 miles away when I was growing up) and I remember rooting for Cincinnati Bengals Ken Anderson and Archie Griffin when I was a kid. So as I said at the top of this paragraph, I've always been torn because I loved both teams equally.

Or so I thought.

Last night, when Cincinnati Bengal Carson Palmer whipped the ball to Andre Caldwell with just 14 seconds left in the game, giving the Bengals their first win over the Steelers in years, I leaped up from the couch. "YES!" I screamed so loudly that everyone else in the room stared at me in shock. I ran over to the big screen TV and stood maybe nine inches from it, shouting, "WE win and YOU lose! I HATE you guys!"

So now I know where my loyalties REALLY lie.

Sensory Overload

Yesterday I was out running errands with Natalie. Lisa asked me if I would stop at the grocery store and get, among other things, some shampoo and conditioner for her. I said sure, unaware of what a traumatic event awaited me.

Natalie and I had just a few minutes in the grocery store when we finally made it there because we were running on a tight schedule (She had a birthday party to get to in about 30 minutes). I walked into the shampoo aisle and I was absolutely blown away! There are WAY too many choices in that aisle!

There must be 50 different brands of shampoo out there, and each one of them has 10 or 15 families of shampoo (normal hair, oily hair, dry hair, straight hair, curly hair, fine hair, thick hair, color treated hair, wind damaged hair, hair that's been under a hat all day, thinning hair, hair with dandruff, just to name a few). And each individual family of shampoo has its own shampoo, conditioner, mousse, hair spray, gel, and on and on and on.

How does ANYONE find anything in this aisle? It's overwhelming! And is it really necessary? Are there really this many different types of hair that we need this many types of shampoo?

I use Pert, shampoo and conditioner all in one bottle. It's a bright green bottle that's easy to spot in the shampoo aisle, so I'd never really noticed before the sensory overload that comes from looking for a specific bottle in a multicolored aisle. I may have nightmares for weeks.

One of My All Time Favorite One Liner Jokes

"You know, it's 90 percent of lawyers who give the rest of them a bad name."

You can substitute "car mechanics" or "salesmen" or whatever else floats your boat.

My Job at the Chocolate Factory

I don't really have a post for today. Why? Because I've been INCREDIBLY busy at work, not just for the past few days, but really this entire school year. But if finally caught up with me last night. Rather than taking time to write a post, I sat at the computer and fixed a glitch in our Student Information System that affected about 650 student accounts.

Blah blah blah. Anyway, nothing written for this morning. It's just been a crazy year. In fact, the clip below pretty much sums up what my job has been like this year. And I have to give a shout out to my wife who--when I complained about my workload this year--said I sounded like Lucy felt in this scene...

Personal Growth

Sunday I was driving back from church coming up I-75. At the particular mile marker where my story takes place there are about 5 lanes of traffic, and traffic was moderate--everyone was driving perhaps 55 miles an hour or so and there were a couple of car lengths between everyone. Traffic was brisk for an early Sunday afternoon but nothing to complain about.

I glanced in my rearview mirror, though, and from out of nowhere came a guy doing maybe 75 or 80 miles an hour. He was jerking from one lane to another to get around other cars, crossing all five lanes in the process. He passed right between me and a trucker and I had just a moment to glance into his car. I saw that he was chatting away on his cell phone. He whipped in front of me and then right back out of my lane again and into another lane. A few more seconds and he had disappeared over the hill in front of me.

There was a time--not too long ago--when I would have looked up to the sky and thought, "Please God, let me see that car crashed into the median a quarter mile down the road!" I'm not sure what changed in me, but something has, because I no longer have those thoughts. Instead, I moved from the prayer above to "Please God, let me see that car pulled over by a police officer a quarter mile down the road!" and then moved from there to what I think now, which is "Please God, let that man make it home safely." I told Lisa about my change of heart, and she said to me, "You've moved from justice to mercy." Maybe all those times teaching The Merchant of Venice rubbed off on me! Maybe I have had some actual personal growth as a human being.

But what brought about this change? While I'm not 100 percent sure,  I do have a guess: Three years ago in March I attended an educational conference in Louisville. On the last day a surprise snow storm blew through Kentucky. My superintendent, who was also at the conference, called me on my cell phone as I was heading toward a session and asked, "What are you doing?"

I thought he wanted to meet for breakfast or something. I'd been in my hotel, which was adjacent to the conference center, and was really pretty much unaware of the weather. "I'm heading to a session on Internet monitoring," I said.

"No, you're not," he said sternly. "You're getting in your car and heading home. The roads are bad and they're getting worse."

"This is the session I really came here for," I told him. "The guy who wrote this program gives it away for free to schools with the understanding that he's not going to support it and that we're not going to ask him to. This is pretty much the only time I'm going to feel comfortable asking him about the problems I'm having with it."

"Don't care," he said. "Everyone else from the district has already left, and I want to be the last one to leave. My SUV has brand new tires and is a 4x4, so if anyone has problems I want to be behind them to help. So I want you to leave NOW and I'll leave in 15 minutes." So I made a bargain with him--I'd go ask the guy one question before his session started and then take off--and then I did as he asked. I got in my car and headed up I-71 toward Cincinnati.

And my boss hadn't been lying. The roads were bad. Very bad. And they were getting worse. I got out of the metro area of Lousiville just as things were getting treacherous, and by the time I-71 had narrowed down to two lanes the roads were ice-covered. I wound up in the right lane behind a long string of traffic. We were giving each other plenty of room and all driving about 15 miles an hour.

And beside us, in the left lane, came a number of cars doing perhaps 40 or 45. I'm not sure if those people felt the laws of physics didn't apply to them or what, but they seemed completely unaware of road conditions. A big yellow Hummer was the first vehicle I noticed. It blew by me, tossing snow and slush and sleet onto my driver's window. I watched it disappear and I thought to myself, "Please God, let me see that SUV upside down in the median in a few minutes." I'd barely finished thinking the sentence when I looked ahead and there was the SUV, upside down in the median. The driver was crawling out of the window and appeared unharmed and was calling on his cell phone. As slippery as the roads were at the time I couldn't have stopped anyway if he HAD been hurt. I continued down the road.

I never thought that vicious thought again that day, but it didn't matter. Over the course of the next 15 minutes or so maybe 10 or 15 more cars raced by me, and I saw almost every one of them either turned around in the median or crashed into the guard rail on the right side of the road or lying on their sides. It was almost as if God had decided to answer all of my prior prayers all at once so that I could understand what I was really asking for.

I made it home safely that day (and so did my boss), but I was a changed person. I'd had enough justice in one day to last me the rest of my life. Anger and vengeance are no longer the primary feelings I experience when drivers race past me. Instead, I would say worry and concern have replaced them. I guess that is growth.

But I'm not perfect. Don't get me started on the morons who wait until the last second to merge when a lane is ending and then want to cut in front of me!...

How Bigoted ARE You?

Want to find out? You really can.

Researchers at Harvard University has created a simple online test to determine the extent to which you prefer one group over another. In just a couple of minutes you can find out if you prefer white people to black people, or if you prefer heterosexuals over homosexuals, or whether or not you harbor some secret discrimination towards overweight people.

It's all scientific, and it's also all VERY interesting. I don't want to tell you much more about it because I honestly think that the tests work better if you've not seen them before.

Be warned, though: you may not like what you discover about yourself. I know I didn't. My racial test results were so apparent to me while I was taking the test that I didn't even need to see the results to know what they were going to be.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html

Website Nostalgia

It's sort of hard to get nostalgic about websites, for a couple of reasons. First, the World Wide Web hasn't been around that long, just since 1989, and I doubt that too many of the people reading this blog entry were actually surfing the web in 1989. The mid '90's is when most of us ventured out into "cyberspace" as it was called then. So must of us have only been surfing for a decade and a half. It's hard to get nostalgic about something that isn't that old.

Moreover, even if you DID have a favorite site way back in 1998, you can't really relive the experience by going to the site today. Over the last 11 years that web site, if it's still around at all, has been redesigned probably 4 or 5 times. You can't go back.

Or can you? Thanks to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, you can type an address in and see what websites looked like years and years ago. Visit microsoft.com as it looked on February 22, 1999, and note that it proudly trumpets that Windows 98 was the best selling software of the year 1998. Visit Amazon.com from March of 2000 and note that there were only about 8 different Amazon online departments, instead of the dozens online now. Or visit Yahoo.com from 1996 and see a site in its infancy.

Those sites appeal to the general population, I guess. For me, though, I enjoy seeing my school district's website from 1998, which was right about the time I took over the district site.  I wasn't sure then and I'm not sure now what the leaves were supposed to represent. I also like visiting the high school's website circa 2002, when my Integrated Web Design class was creating and updating the website. And the first web address I ever typed into a web browser was NBC.com in 1996, and it pretty much looked like this.

You can play around yourself at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

The Bengals

Last year, the week before the first game of the season, I made a number of predictions about the Cincinnati Bengals and how they would do. I then updated those predictions after four games and at the end of the season.

So why didn't I make predictions this year? I forgot. That's all. I just forgot to do so. And now we're two weeks into the season, and it seems a little silly to make predictions now. I will say that I enjoyed the game yesterday. The Bengals looked good. If you take away the freak play at the end of the Broncos game and the Bengals would be 2-0 right now.

The problem with the NFL, though, is that EVERY game means something. You can't really say that about Major League Baseball or the NBA. The Reds can lose a single game and no one really cares--there are 162 games in a season. But in a 16 game season EVERY game matters. And I think that first game against the Broncos might come back to haunt them later on.

All right! Silly or not, I can't help making a prediction: 9-7, and they miss the playoffs by a game.

Life as an Omnivore

Several months ago I wrote about life as a vegetarian. I made a slow trek from meat eater to vegetarian over the course of seven and a half years, spending the last eight months or so of that time as a true vegetarian (though not a vegan--I still consumed dairy products). And then, back in January of this year, I just decided one day that I'd had enough. What prompted the decision? A few things:

1. We'd just moved into a new house, which had necessitated Lisa leaving her job as curator of Vent Haven Museum. This put us in a bit of a money crunch, and I realized that eating a vegetarian diet was more expensive than eating a "normal" diet, so I decided to quit buying the organic dairy and the expensive soy meat substitute. It did cut our grocery bill overnight by about 20 dollars a week. Honestly, though, this was the lesser of the two reasons.
2. More importantly, I just wanted something different to eat. Also, I'd given up on meat way back in 2001 when I'd learned about the way the animals that gave us our meat were treated. I was basically boycotting the meat industry. And after seven and a half years, I figured they'd heard me loud and clear! I'd made my point!

So I started eating meat again. I couldn't tell you now what it was I ate first. Actually, wait, that's not true. I CAN tell you what I ate first that was meat. I was on my way out of town to a software conference in Louisville, and I'd left at lunch time. I stopped at an exit off the interstate to get gas, and I thought I'd eat lunch at a restaurant there. There was a Skyline Chili at the exit, and I thought to myself, "You know what? I want a 3 way!" So I had one. And that was pretty much it.

In the previous post I linked to above I talked about the hardships of being a vegetarian. But everything isn't rosy on this side of the fence, either. Here are some things I found out:

1. Fast Food still sucks. When I was a vegetarian I used to think to myself, "It's been ____ years since I've had a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Man, I miss those!" And I used to think that the reason I hated fast food when I was a vegetarian was because there just weren't many non-meat options there. But guess what? Quarter Pounders with cheese just aren't all that great! Neither are Beef'n'Cheddars from Arby's or Whoppers from Burger King. I've had them all once since I started eating meat again, and I found them pretty bad. But maybe it was inevitable that I be disappointed. After eight years of thinking about them, there was no way they were going to be as good as I imagined.
2. Beef has an off flavor. I never noticed it when I was eating beef regularly, and to be honest I don't notice anymore, either, but that first day at Skyline I thought I was going to be sick. It had been years since I'd had any beef, and I couldn't believe there was such an odd flavor to it. I guess it's the same way that anyone else feels when they eat venison or goat or anything else unusual for the first time. It took some getting used to.
3. Nine months later, I am STILL overwhelmed when I go to restaurants. For eight years when I sat down and looked at a menu at a restaurant I could quickly eliminate about 90% of what was on the menu as being not for me. I usually had about four or five items that I could choose from, and I would carefully read in its entirety the little paragraph written about each item as I tried to figure out which was right for me. Today the server seats us and leaves us with the menus, and when that person comes back around to ask us what we want to eat, I pretty much panic. "I don't know!" I say. "This is a ten page menu, and I'm only on page two! Start at the other end and get me last!" And then I hurriedly pick something, and I'm almost always dissatisfied.
4. People who couldn't understand why you were a vegetarian understand even less why you would stop being one. When most people found out I was a vegetarian, they would say something along the lines of, "Really? You don't eat meat!" And they'd look at me the way people in Jesus' time looked at lepers. These days, though, when those same people see me eating meat, they'll say, "Hey! I thought you didn't eat meat!" When I say, "Yeah, I used to be a vegetarian, but I gave that up," they say, "What?" and look at me the way people in Jesus' time looked at lepers that were oozing puss out of their skin. Apparently, if being a vegetarian is odd, being a "recovered" vegetarian is even odder.

But don't think I'm complaining. Life is good as an omnivore, though I think, after nine months, that I've eaten enough meat just to be eating it, and I may cut back a little.

Uh.

Uh.

Yeah, I can't think of a way to really wrap this blog entry up. No catchy little phrase or turn on a sentence I've written above. I keep writing hoping that at some point this thing will sound like it's over, but nothing is working. Maybe this thing's going to go on forever.

Sometimes I think maybe I need a good editor.

A Humbling Moment

Lisa and I keep track our finances using one of the many financial software packages available for computers. It's a great tool to use because it makes it easy to balance your checkbook and keep track of investments, and it has all kinds of reports that can be run to show how much money you have, where you're spending your money, spending trends, and so on.

One of the features of the program is to create "recurring payments" for bills that you pay every month. Once you've set up a recurring payment the program will remind you when it's time to pay a bill. You can set these recurring payments up manually, or the program actually monitors your spending and will suggest that you set them up automatically. Make three payments to the power company within a few days of each other on three separate months and it will pop up a message saying "It looks like your transaction to DUKE ENERGY is a recurring payment. Would you like to set up a recurring payment for DUKE ENERGY?" Hit the "Yes" button and boom! Your transaction is created.

That's all well and good, but in the ten years we've used the program I've gotten a smackdown from this feature maybe three or four times. The latest was yesterday when I got a message that said, "It looks like your transaction to DIXIE CHILI is a recurring payment. Would you like to set up a recurring payment for DIXIE CHILI?"

This is a pretty clear sign that I'm eating too often at Dixie Chili. And it's pretty humbling. On the other hand, maybe I should thank the program--it's a friendly reminder.

And I guess Dixie Chili is better than Dunkin' Donuts!

Facebook Lite

Here's a tip for all of my friends on Facebook, especially if they occasionally access Facebook from their cell phone: Facebook released earlier this week a new version of their web page. It's called Facebook Lite, and it's a scaled down version of Facebook's main page. Basically, the normal Facebook has three columns on its home page: a narrow left hand column that shows a picture of you and how many friends you have, a larger middle column that includes the meat of the site--all of the updates of your friends, and another more narrow column on the right side that usually contains a bunch of useless ads and junk that no one cares about.

The new Facebook Lite page only shows the larger middle column and leaves out the other two. It's not much to look at on a computer screen, and at first I didn't even see the point of it. But when I pasted the address into my cell phone's browser I realized that the page fit perfectly, and it was a much more satisfying experience than using either the web page designed for all mobile phones or the web page designed specifically for my Nokia 5800 (a phone which I hate, by the way).

My problem with the http://m.facebook.com/ page is that you can see that there are comments to someone's post, but you can't see what they are. Also, only status updates show on the home screen, not photos or anything like that.

Photos and other such updates DO show up on the web page custom built for my Nokia 5800 (a phone which I hate, by the way), but my problem with this page is that it doesn't say AT ALL on the main page whether or not there are comments to anything posted. I have to click through to the item to see if there are comments. This is a waste because--for my book--the comments are sometimes better than the actual posts.

Anyway, all of that is solved with Facebook Lite, which can be found, if you haven't already guessed, at http://lite.facebook.com/

The New Phone Book, part two

I came home from work last Friday to find sitting on my doorstep a copy of the new yellow pages, as well as a smaller copy of the county-only regional pages, which includes both the yellow AND white pages for the county alone. As I mentioned in a previous post, our local phone company is no longer delivering a city-wide white pages.

Anyway, as a result of this delivery, a couple of different things happened.

First, I was absolutely aghast to open the white pages of the county-wide book to find that my name, address, and phone number were in there! I've been living on my own for 20 years now, but this is the first time in my life that my name has appeared in a phone book. And unlike Steve Martin in the clip on the link above, I was NOT happy. I felt very naked knowing that someone could open up this book and instantly know my name AND where I live AND what my phone number is. I would think that identity thieves look forward to getting the new phone book the same way that little kids look forward to Christmas!

But after about a minute of being upset--and I WAS upset because I thought I was paying my local cable company for an unlisted number--I thought to myself, This is ridiculous. I voluntarily place on this blog TONS of information about myself, and I'm worried because someone knows where I live? If someone REALLY wanted to know where I live, they could figure it out by piecing together clues from this blog, and in addition to knowing that, they'd know my kids' names, my wife's name, how much I like milkshakes, what I was doing on September 11, and my problems with drug commercials, especially those involving Sally Field. All of this among many other things as well. There was no reason for me to get upset about being in the white pages!

The second thing I realized was what a waste these books are anyway. I mentioned this in my previous post at the top of this page, that they almost never get looked at, but this year my wife and I took things one step further. She was in the office working on something when I went into the bottom desk drawer, pulled out the old phone books, placed them in a plastic bag for the recyclers, and started to put the new phone books in their place.

"I didn't know we even still HAD those," she said to me. "You shouldn't even bother putting the new ones in there. I never look at them."

So we didn't. We placed both the old AND the new phone books back into the plastic bag the new ones came in and put them all out for the recyclers. We can get all of the information we ever used to get out of the phone books off of the Internet. It's more convenient and gets updated more than once a year.

Print isn't dead yet, but it's certainly dying.

Cloud Computing

I'm always amazed at my inability to see the "big picture" sometimes when it comes to technology...

...I first heard the term "cloud computing" probably ten years ago, and it sounded like the dumbest idea in the world to me at the time. "One day," I remember reading, "you won't purchase software and install it on your computer. Instead, the software will be available over a network like the Internet, and you'll pay a subscription to use that service." How dumb, I thought. I want to buy software ONCE and OWN it, not keep paying to use it.

The problem, though, is that software never works that way. After a year or two a new version of the software comes out, and the new version has new features that you want or need, and the only way to get it is to buy the new software.

Cloud computing, though, elminates that problem, as well as eliminating a lot of other problems, too. But it's always been difficult to explain.

The federal government, though, has announced a major initiative to introduce cloud computing in federal offices, and they've created a web site that explains the process. The website is http://apps.gov, and once the page loads, on the right, there's a little video that explains what cloud computing is. Maybe this video will make cloud computing understandable for people who have better vision than I do.

Digital Cameras

So I've been sitting at this computer for ten minutes now, staring at it, trying to think of something to say. I don't have anything to say really. I looked in our digital photo album, thought maybe I could upload a recent photo. Nothing much there. I even considered digging back to see what was the very first photo we ever took with a digital camera. I found it. We took it on December 31, 1999. But it's just a picture of Natalie digging through some cabinets in our house. She was eleven months old.

I guess, though, since I have nothing to write about, I COULD go ahead and write about that picture. It's interesting that this December 31 will have been ten years since we went digital. We're on our fourth digital camera now, and the difference between it and the first one we had is pretty phenomenal. I remember how proud I was of our digital camera in 1999 because it was a 1,000 pixel camera, a "megapixel" camera! Today's cheapest cameras are 3 or 4 megapixels in size, and if you click on the photo above you'll see what a single megapixel shot looks like. That's not a reduced size photo. That's as big as that picture gets.

But getting back to my point, it's been a decade since we've purchased film, a decade since we've had to drop photos off and get them developed, a decade since we had to wait for more than a second or two to see what the photos looke like, a decade since we've had to worry about how many pictures we were taking. I just looked, and in the almost ten years we've taken photos digitally, we have taken 9,808 photos. And that's just the ones we've kept! There are no telling how many we've deleted. We've also recorded almost 60 hours of video, and I've written lots of poems and blog entries and journal logs about my children.

Our children's lives are well documented.

The Bungles Once More

Here's the great thing about being a sports fan: the transient nature of it all. Yesterday, when the Cincinnati Bengals' defense tipped the ball up into the air and the Broncos' wide receiver caught it and ran it back for a game-winning touchdown with 11 seconds left in the game, I was absolutely devastated. I couldn't believe that the Bengals' offense had worked so hard to come back in the game, only to be let down by the defense, which had played great all afternoon, on what was basically a freak play. I was almost sick to my stomach.

But then I thought, Oh, well. This doesn't mean anything to me anyway, really. Win or lose, it's just a way to pass time. And I had no REAL reason to feel bad. I wasn't involved in the game, and I'd had a pretty good weekend. I'd gotten a room of my house painted, I'd spent time with my family, I watched Meredith participating in her first band competition and having a great time, I made it to church, and while the game was on I sat and worked on my laptop between plays and during commercials and got caught up on a lot of work I was behind on.

It was a good weekend, and the antics of a group of men playing a boy's game were not going to get me down.

Besides, there's always next week...

Sometimes I'm on the Kids' Side

I was frantically called on the phone by a teacher at one of the schools a couple of years ago. She said that something was terribly wrong with all of the computers in her computer lab. When I asked her what the problem was, she said, "All of the screens are backward!"

"What do you mean 'backward'?" I asked.

"I don't know!" she said. "They're all backward!"

I couldn't get any more intelligently out of her, so I told her I'd get to her lab as quickly as I could. About ten minutes later I walked over to the computer lab at the school. I walked in and immediately laughed. The screens weren't backward. They were upside down. Some students had gone into the graphics properties on the computers and rotated the display on every one of them 180 degrees. The displays were upside down.

And the teacher's solution: she had turned all of the monitors upside down so that the displays would be correct. The monitors were rolling back and forth on top of their curved tops with the stands flailing back and forth in the air. And kids were sitting in chairs trying to type on these monitors.

"What are you laughing about?" the frazzled teacher laughed. "Do you see what I mean? They're BACKWARD!"

"I'm sorry I laughed," I said sincerely. "It's just that...well..you have the monitors upside down!"

"What else was I supposed to do?" she yelled at me. "I have classes to teach!"

"You're right," I said. "I'm sorry. And you did what you had to do to get back to teaching. I think it's great that you found a solution. Here," I said, pointing her to one of the computers where no student was sitting, "let me show you what's wrong." I got on the computer and showed her how to rotate the monitor's display.

"Oh my God!" she exclaimed. "That's so easy! How did you know how to do that?"

I shrugged and smiled. "It's what they pay me for. I can help you get the rest of these fixed if you'd like."

"No, no, no," she said. "I can do the rest of these! I'm just glad you came over. How do you think something like this could have happened?"

I glanced over at the students. Two boys in the corner were trying hard to stifle their laughter. They weren't very successful. "I don't know," I told her. "It could be several things. My guess is that there was some kind of update to the graphics card that was downloaded automatically last night and that might have done something. I wouldn't worry about it. You know how to fix it, and unless it keeps happening," I said as I raised my eyebrows and shot a meaningful glance at the two boys, "I wouldn't spend too much time on it."

"Well, thanks again!" she said, and I thanked HER for being willing to rotate the other monitors herself, and I went out the door.

Why didn't I call out the kids for what they did? Technically, they were vandalizing the equipment. They had violated the "Acceptable Use Policy" that they had signed. They could have been given discipline ranging from detention to a ban from computers for the rest of the year. Why didn't I give them the punishment they'd earned?

The answer is simple: when I was a student, I would have done the same thing.

Vincent

I am not a fan of Tim Burton's stop motion films. It's not that I have anything against The Nightmare Before Christmas or his other films. It's that I've never watched them before. Just never been interested.

Because of that, I really have nothing to compare this short video to, but I still was blown away by it. I found it when my older daughter asked if she could watch Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video on the computer. I was telling her about Vincent Price, and as I was looking up some info on Price with her I stumbled upon this video.

It's short, but it's precious. A treasure. It's Dr. Seuss meets the macabre, with hints of Where the Wild Things Are. I also hear echoes in this of Calvin and Hobbes. And I can hardly believe that director Tim Burton was only 22 years old when he wrote AND directed this thing. Take 6 minutes and watch this. It's worth it.

A Truly Crazy Day

Saturday I made a post about what a crazy day last Friday was. That day, though, was nothing compared to the mother of all crazy days at school...

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On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was teaching in my senior English classroom at Lloyd High School. I honestly don't remember what I was teaching on that day. Senior English at the time was British Literature, and it was fairly early in the year, so my guess is we either would have been working on writing or working on Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. At any event, it had been an uneventful first period.

My high school did not have homerooms at the time. Instead, first period was five minutes longer than the other class periods, and morning announcements and other such tasks were handled at the end of the class period. And though I don't remember what I was teaching that morning, I DO remember the morning announcements. They were completely routine, and I didn't think there was anything remotely wrong until the principal had completed the announcements. "Finally, I have some tragic news to report," he said with a quaver in his voice. "Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center Towers in an apparent act of terrorism. Teachers, you may want to turn on televisions to watch this. Don't worry whether or not it's in your lesson plans" (That was a point of emphasis in our school that year). "I think this is going to be a pretty important day, and everyone should probably see it."

I turned on the TV and immediately was struck by the image of the second jet slamming into the second tower. Everyone in the room was absolutely shocked by the image, and talking in the classroom, which had begun in earnest after the announcement, instantly stopped.

"Turn it up!" someone in the front of the room shouted (My TV was mounted to a wall in the BACK of the room). I turned up the TV using the remote and everyone sat in their seats, stunned. After a minute or so the bell rang to end class, and everyone quickly shuffled off to their next classes. Students had five minutes to get from one class to another, and though that was plenty of time there was always a fairly large contingent of students who arrived late to class on any given day at any given class period. But the halls were almost completely clear in about 2 minutes that morning as everyone rushed to their next class and sat down.

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At the time I only taught half day. The other half of the day I had release time as Lloyd's School Technology Coordinator. I went around and fixed broken computers and handled other technology issues at the high school. After first period I was STC for the next two hours. As I went from classroom to classroom I was amazed that NO ONE was talking. Everyone was just staring at the TV's in silence. Everyone was frightened, including the news reporters. The words that were coming out of their mouths were calm and controlled, but you could hear the undercurrent of anxiety behind them.

I had to walk over to the Board office to get something (I don't remember what now), and as I crossed the high school parking lot I saw a jet in the sky. My school district is fairly close to a major airport, so seeing a jet in the sky wasn't a big deal, but on that day it filled me with a sense of dread. I remember that the jet I saw was fairly small in the distance and was coming in for a landing. In fact, it sort of looked like a little check mark floating in the sky. Today, whenever I see a jet that looks like a floating check mark in the sky, I recall the sense of dread that jet gave me on that day.

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When I came back from the board office I stopped by the attendance office. All three of the building principals were huddled just a couple of feet away from a small TV. It was rare to see even two of them together for long on a busy school day, but there they all were.

"What's going on?" I asked them.

"Another plane just crashed into the Pentagon," they informed me.

"Son of a bitch!" I remember saying. "If these people keep this up, we're going to have to land every plane in America!"

"We already have!" they all three said in unison. And then one of the assistant-principals said, "They ordered every plane to land at the nearest airport."

We all stood for maybe a minute in silence watching the images of the Twin Towers on fire. And then I pointed at the screen and said, "Look at that second tower, the way it's burning. It's going to fall down."

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I was in a science classroom installing the software to connect a microscope to a computer when news reports began airing about a possible fourth plane. Images were shown of people running--RUNNING--from the U.S. Capitol and the White House. Famous politicians that I had seen debating on the floors of the Senate and House were running for their lives.

The computer I was working on was in the back of the classroom, and I watched as the news station replayed for the umpteenth time the image of the second jet crashing into the second tower. I was able to see the entire classroom from my vantage point, and when the jet hit the tower, everyone in the room recoiled. This was at least the tenth or fifteenth time all of them had seen it, but they were reacting like it was the first time. I looked around the room, and this was the first time that I became very worried about the students in the building. Several students in the room were crying, and many of them had the same look in their eyes that I had the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead as a 12 year old, only their look was maybe two or three times more intense. I honestly thought--and still think--that several of them were close to going into clinical shock, and a few of them may actually have been in shock.

And it was then that--for the first time--I really missed my family, and I wanted to be with them to hold them and comfort them (and frankly, to be comforted BY them as well).

Meredith was four (almost five) years old, and September 11 was her first day--her FIRST day--of preschool, her first day of any kind of organized schooling. We have a photo of her all dressed up for that first day of school, which began at 9 AM. She's showing off her backpack for the camera, and Natalie, who doesn't quite understand why everyone had to get up and get ready on that day, is sitting on the steps wrapped up in her trusty blankey. And when I see that photo today I think about how cute they both are, sure, but I can't help but also remember that that photo was taken right at about the time the first plane slammed into the tower.

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I left that classroom and was immediately met by Richard Dube, a first year teacher originally from Quebec. He has a fairly heavy French accent, and he looked as shocked as the students. And he was looking for someone to talk to. I forget sometimes how isolated teachers are. He'd been with 30 students a class for two hours, but he had not had time to talk with any other adults.

"Zis is unbelievable!" he said to me. "Vat is going on? Can you believe it!"

I am ashamed of what happened next. I stared at him and I thought, "What do you care? You're not American!" I didn't SAY that. I just thought it. But it didn't matter. My knee jerk reaction was isolationism and withdrawal. I think I said to him, "I don't know. It's crazy, isn't it?" but I felt towards him the same way I felt about the check mark in the sky.

We stood in the hallway talking for a moment more until we heard several loud screams from a classroom, followed by a female voice (in too much pain for me to tell if it were an adult or a teenager) shouting "Oh my God!" over and over. We ran in to see what was going on. The tower had collapsed.

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Once lunch was over I left my job as STC and was once again a teacher in the classroom. And I was pretty emotionally drained by then. So were the students. They came into class as quiet as they had been all day long. By now the images on the TV screens were not of the towers being hit but of people that looked like ghosts wandering through the seemingly snow covered streets around the collapsed World Trade Centers. The news reporters on TV were exhausted, and frankly they were running out of things to say. They were mostly conjecturing at this point about who was to blame, how many people had died, where the President was, how we might respond.

I turned to my class, "Look, everybody," I said. "I don't know about you guys, but I can't take much more of this. I know Mr. Riehemann [the principal] said we could watch this, but would it be okay if we turned it off and just had a normal class?" There was an almost unanimous "Yes!" Almost. One student wanted to leave it on. We might miss something important. I told her we'd watch for five minutes and if there wasn't anything new we'd turn it off until the last five minutes of class, and then we'd turn it back on. She said okay, and I went on and had a regular class. I did the same for the remaining class period, too.

Like I said before, I don't remember what I taught that day, but I do remember saying two things. First, I remember in a fit of anger saying, "When we find out for sure who did this, I say we level whatever country they're from. I mean send every last warplane and soldier we have over there and FLATTEN the place! Pave it over, turn it into a parking lot, and then say to all of the other countries around it, 'Here! You can park here! Free parking!'"

Second, I remember asking one class, "Have you ever looked at your life and thought that nothing exciting historically has ever happened in your life, and wondered what it would be like to be alive when something truly important happened?"

I remember that because a girl in the class shouted out, "Yeah! Yeah! I was just saying that the other day, actually!"

"Well," I said to her, "this is what it feels like."

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It's been eight years, but it doesn't feel like it. We've been forever changed by it. Two wars. Anthrax. Taking off our shoes at airports. Having our bags checked when we enter athletic events. Not checked for illicit booze, like in the good old days, but for something much worse. We'll never get on a plane again--never again--without thinking about it, without looking around for someone suspicious.

It was a truly crazy day.

Guest Writer

Once again, I will be taking the day off, and Meredith will be writing the guest spot for today's blog...

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Hey I'm like really bored... I also am having chocolate problems right now. I need chocolate, like, BAD! and plus I'm totally un-hyper... you wanna know what's weird? This word: WEIRD! Is is weird or wierd? It doesn't look right either way!!!! Isn't it funny how that works.... so, how's life? :/ :) :( :p I just felt like doing that, I have no idea why. Look, I can also do this: ----> See? It's pointing to the RIGHT. So... guess what? Sara chased me around outside today... it was really fun... I'm having an urge to write KEY LIME PIE ROCKS! so I just did. So Ashley drew me a picture today... it was really funny... when Ashley dies, I'm going to dissect her brain and keep it, because she's GENIUS! So, Mackenzie and Sydney and Julia and Lindsay will get mad if I don't give them a shout-out too, so HI!!!! I also have this cousin who I saw like two days ago, something like that, and we all hung out out their house. ;p. Also, I have to say that... OMG, I like had something to say, but I lost it... typical. Anyway, I'm going to go hang out now, probably read... or write... or listen to music... or play my clarinet... or just sit in a chair and stare at the wall. BYE!

Nice Picture

Over Labor Day weekend Lisa traveled to the Boston area to see ventriloquist Jay Johnson perform and to visit with him. While she was there she snapped this photo of some workers "clamming." I told her it looked as good as any professional photo I've ever seen, so I thought I'd put it up here for others to see. Looks like it could be a jigsaw puzzle! Click on it for a larger view.

The Picture

This one is for my sisters, Ann and Jane.

It's a song that's been a favorite of mine for years and years, though this is not the version that I'm most accustomed to nor that I first heard. The song is written (and here sung) by Loudon Wainwright, and it's an autobiographical song called "The Picture." The first time I heard the song it brought tears to my eyes, but not because it is dead on my life. It's not. There are a number of lines in the song that don't fit in with my life. My father, for instance, is not dead (Thank goodnes!), and my sisters are older than I am and not younger (again, thank goodness!). But it isn't the details that matter. It's the spirit of the song. The narrator of the song feels the way I feel about my sisters.

And like I said, this isn't the version that I'm most familiar with (the version I know and have a copy of is sung by a woman, making the relative ages thing actually work for me), but I like it nonetheless. I know the song is based on a real photograph from Wainwright's family album, and I think that actual photo is shown in the middle of the video.

Jane and Ann, I think BECAUSE you were older than I was, I leaned more--to put it in the language of the song--towards the "torture" side than the "protecting" side when we were growing up, and so I didn't tell you two often enough that I loved you. I think, instead, I hit Jane over the head once with a Fischer-Price toy radio, and I got into hundreds of verbal fights with Ann over who was the more "retarded."

Well, here's my effort to make up for that now. Publicly, in front of the world, let me say it: I love you both. Enjoy the song.

(I can't see the video.)

The Healthy Majority

You may have noticed (or may not have noticed) that I haven't had a heck of a whole lot to say about the whole health care debate. Part of the reason for my silence is that the whole thing is really, really complex, and I don't think I know enough about it to make an intelligent comment about the pending legislation. Another part of the reason is that there is so much SHOUTING going on in regards to it that I felt like what we didn't need was one more person talking about it. So I've kept my mouth shut.

Until now.

That's because I've found a solution to the whole problem! Two, actually.

Before I get in to that, though, let me tell you why I think we're a long way away from making any serious changes to our health care system. There are two reasons, I think:

1) We're a government that is ruled by the majority, and at any given moment in time the majority of people in this country are NOT sick. When you're not sick, the health care system is working great! You don't even NEED health insurance at all when you're not sick. It's only when you're sick that it matters. And it's only when you're REALLY sick that it REALLY matters. Most people are NOT really sick, and most people aren't aware of the people around them that are really sick and that are really struggling to make ends meet because they don't have the money to pay their hospital bills, or maybe they're struggling because they can't navigate the maze of the insurance industry's bureaucracy to get the company to pay for something. I'm not saying those people aren't around. They are. They're everywhere. But they don't wear t-shirts that proclaim they're struggling due to medical insurance issues, so we don't know.

2) No one in this country, regardless of ability to pay, is denied medical care when a situation is life-threatening. As long as that's the case, as long as we're not really dealing with life and death situations, politicians and lobbyists won't be willing to take health care seriously.

And those two realizations led me to an epiphany. I have two ideas, either of which if they were implemented would almost guarantee major medical insurance reform in this country. Here they are:

1. Bright Idea Number One: Don't reform health insurance. Reform the AMA code of ethics. The American Medical Association's code of ethics states that doctors are REQUIRED to care for the poor, regardless of whether or not the indigent can pay. Those code of ethics should be reformed to make it unethical for doctors and nurses to knowingly give medical care to anyone who cannot pay. Congress should even make it a law: any doctor who gives care to a person who cannot pay would a) lose his/her medical license and b) risk a fine or time in jail. If we made this change, poor people would start dying in droves, and people would be in an uproar. Can you imagine how people would react to the story of the caring mother of 4 who worked a minimum wage job rather than go on welfare and who had a mild heart attack and was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, only to be turned away in the ER when it was discovered that she didn't have an insurance card, and as a result she died a few hours later? Can you imagine hundreds of stories like that making their way to media outlets?

We'd pass major health insurance reform in a month if that were the case.

Bright Idea Number Two: Out people. In the same way that the government will advertise in the newspaper when a land owner has outstanding real estate taxes, we should change the laws to allow hospitals to advertise the names of people who owe money to the hospital because they didn't have health insurance or couldn't afford their co-insurance. The hospital would include in the advertisement the person's full name and the amount owed. Once healthy people start seeing names of friends and neighbors in the paper, they may start to realize that our current health system is causing a lot of hurt. Maybe we'd all be a little more sympathetic.

Of course, neither of these things is going to happen. And there's also not a chance that any kind of major health reform is going to pass, whether or not President Obama gives another press conference.

Not as long as the majority decides...

My Last Entry about Bad Songs

...and I think I'm going to go to hell for this one!

Please, people, don't be mad at me about this, or think I'm insensitive. This started out innocently enough. In fact, I was thinking of YOU people when I wrote this, that you were probably getting tired of me posting about bad songs, that maybe I should go out with a big shebang (Oh crud! There was another song I could have used!). I wasn't being insensitive. If anything, I was being TOO sensitive. Yeah, that's it!

Anyway, as I said, it all started innocently. Yesterday morning I was thinking about all of these posts I've made recently about bad songs, and it occurred to me that it's not the music that ever bothers me about songs. I know other people have musical tastes different from mine, and so if I don't like the music I just turn the dial on the radio.

It's the LYRICS that always get to me. If they're really, really bad lyrics it doesn't matter to me how good the music is. The song will drive me crazy. So it occurred to me that I could just post a bunch of bad lyrics to a bunch of different songs and let that be that as far as my posts about bad songs went. But then a voice in my head said, "Sometimes, even bad lyrics can sound good if they're sung with intensity and feeling" (a point made clear, I think, by the Blues Travelers' song "The Hook). "So maybe I should find a way to remove the singer's voice from the song." I thought about filming myself just blandly reading the lyrics, or maybe even dramatically reading the lyrics. In the end, though, I was camera shy, so I placed the lyrics into a text to speech engine instead. And I found that so funny that I just kept going. But once it was all done, and I started to make the video for YouTube, I thought to myself, "What am I going to put up as a picture while the lyrics are being read?"

And I ended up with this.

I swear I wasn't setting out to callously make fun of the handicapped!

It just turned out that way...

(I can't see the video.)

Crazy Day

When I went jogging yesterday morning I noticed that the moon was full. And after yesterday, I'm starting to believe those stories about people getting "looney" when the moon is full, because yesterday at work was CRAZY! Mostly for three reasons.



Reason #1: A Break-in. Someone broke into Miles Elementary School yesterday. The criminals were caught in the act (though no one's sure whether "the act" was theft or vandalism) by the daytime custodian. Apparently these crooks didn't realize that custodians and kitchen workers begin their days VERY, VERY early. They were wearing masks and they ran away, but they left some forensic evidence behind that might get them in trouble. I can't go into a lot of specifics because a) there's an ongoing investigation and b) I don't know the specifics anyway, but there was enough evidence there that the police didn't want to disturb the crime scene until experts--Gil Grissom I guess--could arrive to collect the evidence. Thus, staff and students were not allowed into the building until some time after school normally starts. That was an interesting way to start the day.



Reason #2: The Swine Flu. People are really starting to get worried about the swine flu. I guess I don't blame them. All of the TV reports talk about how children are the most susceptible to the disease. I can tell anyone reading this, though, that my school district--and I'm sure every other school district across the country--is doing everything we can in regards to the swine flu. In fact, if you REALLY want to know more about what my school district is doing, you can read about it here. Still, I fielded two calls yesterday from people in a panic about how they will know if we close school due to the flu.



Reason #3: The President's Address to the Nation's Children. Far and away, though, the biggest complaint that we're getting is from people calling and complaining about the fact that the President is going to address the nation's children on Tuesday.

I can't imagine what has gotten in to people! Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or someone must be encouraging people to call schools and complain, because I can't believe that people would be acting this way on their own. People yesterday called and complained that they didn't want their child to sit in a classroom and hear this "propaganda from some communist Hitler" (an actual quote from one parent). One person even went so far as to say she'd campaign against EVERY member of the school board if ANY child in the district were allowed to see the President's message.

People in the United States have gone absolutely bonkers in regards to politics. I've been pretty evasive about politics in most of my writing, but I will come out and say this right now: I think history will look back on George W. Bush's Presidency as an absolute failure. I think he is easily the worst President of the last 100 years. Maybe only Woodrow Wilson comes close to screwing up the country as badly as Bush did. All of that said, if President Bush had wanted to give an address to the nation's children, I wouldn't have had a problem with it. There's no way that any politician is going to use an address to children to tackle a really sticky political issue. He'd get butchered in the press and in the court of public opinion for doing so.

But don't tell that to the literally DOZENS of parents who called the school district office yesterday complaining about the speech. In fact, it was such a barrage of calls that it pretty much shut the office down in the afternoon. It was all the secretary and assistant superintendent had time for. And so, this became how tax payer money was being spent yesterday--office employees becoming the toilet that angry conservatives could vomit their vitriol into. I heard from the principals at several of the schools that they were similarly overwhelmed (in no small part due to the fact that that's where we were sending people who complained).

I think everyone is glad that there's a three day weekend now. Maybe some of this will pass over the next three days. I hope everyone calms down a little.

Okay, I REALLY like this song

Over the last few weeks I've posted a couple of '80's songs that I hate so much that I absolutely love. For some reason that I can't fathom now, this morning Lisa and I were quoting lines from an '80's song that many people hate. But I have to admit: when it comes to this song, I enjoy it because I enjoy it, not because I hate it. When it comes on the radio I turn it up, not because I hate it and like torturing myself (as was the case with Video 1 and Video 2 mentioned above), but because I actually like the song. It's not necessarily the lyrics, though I find them kind of endearing. It's the guitar riff. This song has me in the first 10 seconds.




(I can't see the video.)

Scares Me to Death

Yesterday morning I was reading my latest edition of Newsweek while eating breakfast, and I came across an article that startled me. It was about the latest efforts to stop global warming, and it involves a plan to create 100's of unmanned boats that will troll the ocean and spew salt and water up into the sky in order to increase the cloud cover of the planet. This cloud cover would reflect more of the sun's energy and cool the planet. The last sentence of the article said--almost as a throwaway--that some scientists were worried that there could be unintended consequences.

Of course there are going to be unintended consequences to something like this! Man-made global warming, if it's real, is a result of us monkeying around with the environment. We dug up all of those long buried fossil fuels and set them on fire. We weren't TRYING to increase the temperature of the earth. We were trying to charge the batteries on my cell phone. That's all. But in the process of doing that we've caused all kinds of climate change.

And if we build these ships and deploy them, they may decrease the temperature of the earth. But what else are they going to do? Increase the amount of rainfall and cause massive flooding? DECREASE the amount of rainfall in areas where the clouds aren't being created and cause massive droughts? Do something else that no one can even imagine? It's scary as hell to me.

It's battling a man-made creation with another man-made creation, and it just seems like a bad idea to me. It's as if a homeowner were leaving crumbs everywhere and found ants in his kitchen. Rather than picking up the crumbs he sprays poison all over his kitchen. Now he's got ants AND poison.

Anyway, I couldn't find the article I read on the Newsweek website, but I didn't want you to think I was making this up, so here's a link to an article on a different site that discusses this.

Statistics

As I drove into work yesterday morning on I-75 I ran over one of those long rubbery hose-like thingies (how's that for a description?) that are used to count cars. Apparently someone is interested in how many cars travel up and down I-75 each day.

They could have saved themselves the trouble and expense. I can give you a pretty quick, pretty accurate answer to that question: lots.


Lots of cars go up and down the interstate. In the morning, more go north towards Cincinnati than south towards Lexington. In the afternoon it's pretty much the opposite. At peak times, there aren't enough lanes for all of the cars.



That's honestly all you need to know about this. But I know--the Department of Transportation or whoever put the long rubbery hose-like thingy (I still don't have a better way of describing it) down needs hard statistics. They can't go to the legislature or the federal government or whomever and tell them that "every day LOTS of cars travel up and down this stretch of interstate."



But it's the truth.

Dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot

How many times have you seen a scene like this in a movie? An important character is separated from the rest of his group and trapped in an isolated space. Maybe he's being held captive. Maybe he's trapped in a cavern after a cave collapse. Regardless of why he's separated, the character's situation seems desperate, and you can see the discouragement on his face. Suddenly, though, his expression changes to a sly one, and he pulls out something hard and starts furiously tapping.

Meanwhile, the other characters are valiantly trying to get to this distraught character. They're doing their best, but it sure looks like the bad guys are going to get there first or the walls are going to collapse or whatever. But then one of these characters shushes everyone else and says, "Quiet down, everybody! Do you hear that?" Everyone stops talking, and the faint sound of the other character tapping can be heard.

Another character jumps up. "Hey! Wait a minute!" this character says. "I know that! That's Morse Code! I took a semester of Morse Code as an undergraduate!" And then this character puts his ear to the wall and without batting an eyelash is able to translate the code without even having to refer to a Morse Code guide or anything.

This always strikes me as just plain silly. I've been alive for more than 40 years, and I have literally met NO ONE who knows Morse Code, at least not well enough that he or she could type out a message using Morse Code. Worse, even if a character in a story DID know Morse Code well enough to type out a big long message--what are the chances that there's going to be another person on the other side of the wall who knows Morse Code, too? And who could translate it so quickly? No one takes a semester of Morse Code as an undergraduate!

And I worry about this second Morse Code character, too. How do we know he isn't ALWAYS jumping up and shouting that? The first two years I worked as a teacher I taught in a room with the old steam radiator style heating system. And let me tell you, when that system got cranking it sounded like someone was pounding on the radiator with a plumbing wrench. If that character had been in my class would he have jumped up? "Wait a minute!" he would have shouted. "Do you hear that banging? It's Morse Code!"

"What's it saying?" someone would ask.

After a moment the character would frown. "I'm not sure," he'd say hesitatingly. "I think he just said his glassware has rabies!"

I think, in the same circumstance, I MIGHT be able to figure out that the person on the other end was using Morse Code. But I wouldn't be able to translate it. I'd jump up and say, "Hey! Wait a minute! I know that! That's Morse Code!"

"Well, what's he saying?"

"Oh, I don't know," I'd say. "It's Morse Code, but who knows how to translate that stuff?"