Month: February 2014

A brief rant

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy15 Comments

ingredients-of-an-all-natural-egg1I apparently have yet to regain my jovial equanimity.

A request for the world’s dumb people and woo addicts:  If you have ever complained upon finding out that a “chemical”  (ooooh, SCARY!!!) that is part of one thing that you eat is also part of another thing that you do not eat, and said discovery caused you to consider no longer eating the first thing, or especially if you complained to others about the presence of the chemical in the edible thing… well, telling you to kill yourself is probably a little extreme and I’m not quite that far gone today but suggesting that you begin practicing the fine art of shutting the fuck up would be good, and perhaps also I should tell you some incredibly terrible things about oxygen that would totally ruin your day.  And hydrogen, which is in both water, which you need to survive, and gasoline, which you should never drink obviously is perfectly potable since water is.

Here’s a definition of “chemical substance,” you nimrods.  You don’t get to use that word again where I can hear or see you until you understand why complaining about things having “chemicals” in them is dead goddamn stupid.

Okay?  Good.

And because apparently I have decided to be in a bad mood today, I’m off to find a politician who has done something stupid.  Gimme five minutes.

In which politicians make a good decision, plus a bunch of bullshit

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching6 Comments

ku-mediumIt has not been a good week.  I’ve been tired, sick, crabby, stressed out, and not reacting to the kids well at all, and the fact that in general they’ve had a bad week themselves has not led to anything good happening in my classroom.  We had school today; I’m still crossing my fingers that we’ll be off tomorrow morning since it’s supposed to be a bazillion below zero again, but we were open today.

A bit of good news I just discovered: the state board of education has voted to extend the testing window for the first ISTEP test by a full week and a half, which is fantastic news.  Means that all the snow/weather delays won’t kill us.  Great news.

Anyway: good news aside, shit like this doesn’t help.  I took my morning class on a bathroom break this morning.  I generally follow the boys into the bathroom because if I don’t they fuck around and make a lot of noise and generally act like assholes; once everyone’s occupied with actually doing what one would expect one to do in the bathroom, I head back into the hallway.

I discovered another student– one of mine, but not in my first and second hour class (so he was out of someone else’s room)– trying his damnedest to climb over the stall door into the handicap-accessible stall.   You read that right.  Climb over.  Which, the way our bathrooms are designed, would have required him to haul himself seven or so feet off the ground.  He is not remotely athletic enough for this task.  He’s hanging by his hands, scrabbling with his feet and trying to get purchase on the door to climb over.

My response was probably not nearly as profane as the situation deserved.  I did not ask him what in the blue fuck he thought he was doing, for example.

“The door’s locked.”

I did not ask him if he had considered that perhaps the fucking door was locked because there was a person taking a fucking shit inside the bathroom stall.  As you would fucking expect there to be if a bathroom stall was closed.  Somehow, I managed to get through that conversation without swearing or using the words “imbecile,” “moron,” “fucknut” or “halfwit.”

I don’t know how.

Later, when he was in my room, we’re going over some simple bell-ringer work.  My kids understand what factors are, and they understand how to do prime factorials, but they frequently forget what they are.  In other words, it’s an annoyingly persistent vocabulary issue and not a math issue per se.  At any rate, they’re supposed to be finding all of the factors of 36 and then doing a prime factorization of 28.  I give them a few minutes to do both, ask a couple of kids to explain what they did, correct a couple of misconceptions, and then work both of the problems on the board in a couple of different ways, emphasizing that they need to show their work for these kinds of things, even if they’re able to rattle off factors of 36 off the tops of their heads, ISTEP scoring demands that they show how they came up with their answers.

I walk past this same kid.  Note that I’ve spent five or ten minutes going over exactly how to do this shit and it’s still on the board.  Note also that the problem is on a Powerpoint projected on the board and is manifestly impossible to miss.

He has written 35 x 28 = 7 on his piece of paper and nothing else.

Again, I do not swear.  I do not ask him what in the merry fuck he is doing.

He says– and I swear to God I’m not making this up– “Oh, was I supposed to divide?”

I could have been a doctor or a lawyer, people.

——————————————————————-

The other thing that happened today was one of my girls from my second math class being pulled out of class to be told that her house had burned to the ground this morning.  There are three girls from the same family in my building; I’ve had two of them, one this year and last year and the other three years ago.  The fire apparently started in the girls’ room, so everything they own is completely gone; the upper floor is apparently a total loss and most of what was on the bottom floor is thoroughly water-damaged by now.  All of the humans living in the house are uninjured; to the best of my knowledge they have not found the cats.

I can’t even imagine.

In which we should be dead by now

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography9 Comments

2014-02-05 19.47.25My wife found this weird-ass thing under a tree in our front yard last summer, and I just noticed it again.  I’m vaguely disappointed that no eldritch horrors ever spewed forth from it to destroy my house.

Hmm, maybe that’s a story.

 

In which I’ll just leave this here

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching, Writing5 Comments

2014-02-04 21.35.39…unexplained.  And maybe ripped off from somewhere?  I hope not?

Let’s see.  When I got up this morning, I was expecting to discover that I was going to have to go to work.  Our final forecast before I went to bed was that we were going to get between three and six inches of snow overnight, and unless it’s paired with crippling cold or some other external circumstance three to six inches of snow just isn’t enough to close school around here.  I woke up at six, checked my phone, and discovered that not only were we open, but so were the other two big districts in the area.  Generally if one of the “Big Three” closes, it seems to create a domino effect (probably, mind you, entirely imaginary) where the other two quickly follow suit.  I lazed around a bit, looking at Facebook and Twitter, and then randomly went back and looked at the closed list again.

Big District #1 had closed in the five minutes I was web surfing.  And make no mistake: waiting until past 6 AM to close is a late decision.  But… still.  Domino effect?

I find that it doesn’t matter what I say at night, and yesterday I very much did not want school to close.  At 6 am, when I’m in bed and warm?  Close close close close close I don’t wanna go to work.

I gave up at 6:25 and finally jumped in the shower, but the list got a lot longer fast after Big District #1 closed.  #2 and ours never followed suit, though.  I’ve got my eye on Friday now; I’m expecting school tomorrow, but it’s looking like we’ve got yet another wave of subzero temperatures heading our way Thursday night and Friday morning and the cold will close us a lot quicker than the snow will.

Driving to work was fun, too; what looked like three inches in our driveway turned out to be seven or eight (turns out the huge ice dams on either side of the driveway– which, as you can see in the last post are nearly two feet deep now, are seriously screwing with my ability to estimate how much new snowfall we’ve gotten) and getting home involved destroying nearly two feet of built-up plowed ice at the foot of my driveway before my wife got home with her non-4X4 car.  

I still like winter better than summer, but I think I’m ready for spring now.

Two quick notes: if you’re a comic book person and you didn’t buy G. Willow Wilson’s relaunch of Ms. Marvel today, get your ass to a comic store before they close and get one now.  That good.  Also, I think I just figured out what BA 6 is about.

Man, fuck this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography3 Comments

20140205-164558.jpg

DO YOU REMEMBER LAUGHTER???

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography4 Comments

IMG_0249…or, hell, at least summer?  I remember when it was nice outside.

 

Equality chicken!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking10 Comments

2014-02-04 18.13.05If you are a sensible human with sensible human tastes in food, you already recognize Chick-fil-A as the king of the chicken sandwich, serving chicken that is much like unto God in deliciousness and tastiness.  (What’s that you say?  God isn’t delicious?  To which I respond:  have you ever eaten God?  I thought not.  And then I respond again: Catholics, shuddup.)(*)

Unfortunately, if you are a good sensible human with sensible human tastes in food, you recognize that Chick-fil-A serves their delicious chicken with a side order of bigotry and discrimination, and you don’t ‘specially want to give bigotry any of your money.  Even if the chicken is delicious, chicken fried in the hate-oil of intolerance ain’t edible.  Or some such overwrought figure of speech, I dunno.

This puts us decent folk in a bit of a quandary.  Chick-fil-A is delicious.  But we can’t have the delicious, no, we must deny the delicious, like Christ thrice denied Satan, or something like that.

But I love you.  I love you so very much.  

And so:  I give you knockoff Chick-fil-A, courtesy of sliceofsouthernpie, who may well be horrified to see me linking to her recipe in these particular terms but I hope not because she seems like a nice lady.   I am slightly modifying her recipe, which technically is for nuggets, so I’ll reprint the version we used here:

  • Chicken tenderloins (Boneless.  Aren’t they always?)
  • 1 cup of milk
  • 1 egg
  • 1/4 cup pickle juice (we used the juice from zesty dill spears and it worked fine)
  • A cup or so of flour
  • 1/3 cup powdered sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon paprika
  • Fryin’ oil (we used vegetable; CFA’s website confirms that they use peanut oil; I doubt it matters much but let me know if I’m wrong)

First, marinate your chicken: use the egg, the milk, and the pickle juice, whisk the hell out of it and put your chicken pieces into it (you don’t need to beat the hell out of them first or anything) and leave them in the fridge, airtight, for a few hours.  Bek put ours in at lunchtime.  Once you’re ready to start cooking, mix together all of the dry ingredients in a  bowl.  She suggests dredging through once; I think I’m going to authorize the dredge, dip back in marinade, then dredge again method, as our chicken came out slightly under breaded.  Then fry ’em up.

Serve on a white bread bun, preferably heavily buttered and then slightly toasted in the oven (note that we didn’t do this), with exactly two pickle slices, preferably pickle slices dripping with pickle juice and pressed into the top bun.  And one more thing: mine didn’t quiiiite taste right until I sprinkled a couple turns of sea salt directly onto the meat.  Once I did that, other than the slight under breading, they were perfect.  And marriage-equality-friendly, too!  Wheeee!

(*) Yes, that’s a transubstantiation joke. I know, they’re not terribly common.

Ebook panic of the day and some school notes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Writing2 Comments

Yesterday I signed up for a Kindle Direct Publishing account at Amazon; when the book goes live it’ll be at Amazon first and then I’ll try and get it up at B&N and iBooks and everywhere else.  Before I do that, though, I need to make a couple of decisions: one relatively inconsequential, and one a pretty big deal.

Inconsequential:  The collection itself is going to be called The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1.  It’s the stories inside that I’m wondering about.  As it stands now, they’re named numerically, and numerically they’re out of chronological order– they’re just numbered in the order I’ve written them.  Two, notably, isn’t finished, and two has the potential to be much longer than the others– it may, in fact, be a novel.  I’m currently thinking that the first volume will contain at least four stories:  BA 1, 3, 4, and 5, possibly also 6 if I’m able to get it written in the next week or two.  1, 3, and 4 together are about the length of 5, so toss in a brief foreword and we’re looking at around 30K words for the entire collection, for, I think, $1.99.

At any rate, I like the numbering scheme for the stories, but it may prove confusing, especially if I envision a world where I continue to write these things, and BA 2 ends up being in volume 4 along with stories 6, 8, and 12, only none of them are in chronological order.  Seems potentially troublesome.  So I need to come up with names for these things.  This isn’t really a problem, I just suck at names.  But it’s fixable.

A bigger problem is the cover.  The cover, for obvious reasons, is huge for casual sales.  I can handle the basic typography bit myself and between me and my former newspaper editor wife I think I can manage to avoid any major rookie mistakes like putting the title of my book in Comic Sans or Papyrus or something like that.

No, the real trouble is the image.  It’s a sci-fi book, so finding something I can just take a picture of is effectively impossible even if I were a talented photographer, which I’m not.  I considered using some sort of public domain nebula picture from NASA or something, but the problem is that while a star field would communicate the idea “science fiction” fairly effectively it’s not going to be an especially striking image, especially when boiled down to a small Amazon thumbnail, and it would be pretty generic, too.

Then I thought about something like this.  Recognize these?

Unknown300px-Rebel_Alliance_logo.svg
Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but they’re the symbols for the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance, respectively, from Star Wars.  The Benevolence Archives are heavily influenced, by design, by Star Wars; I just hope I’ve differentiated myself enough that we’re clearly in “homage” territory and not “ripoff.”

But I’m thinking if I can come up with a stark-looking, black-and-white symbol for the Benevolence, and put that image on a textured background along with my title and author information… that just might work.  Something simple and instantly memorable, and hopefully not outside my meager skills as an artist.

I just need to, uh, come up with something.  I have an idea in mind but I haven’t tried to actually put it together either on paper or in a graphics program yet.  We’ll see how it goes.

—————-

Quick Jihad note:  I’ll dig up the link later, but you might remember that he came back from his expulsion and promptly got suspended for three days after lunch, not even making it half a day.  He returned on Friday of last week, made it through the entire day, then didn’t even make it to first period on Monday (yesterday) before getting suspended again.  At this point Mom is being strongly encouraged to withdraw him before we expel him again, which will be happening the next time we see him in the office for any reason.  I’d give him one more day, the way things have been going.