The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I passed my Math test, officially, with exactly the same score I had “unofficially” on July 1st. Delayed fully 40 days for no Goddamn reason at all. Remember, kids, ETS is the devil.
That’s all I’ve got for today, as we have family in town and we will have more family in town tomorrow. Must sleep.
I am probably 95% done in my classroom. I have to put some things in closets and do some cord management and things like that, but if school was starting tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be terribly worried about it. Since I have a week, we’re absolutely all good, and I can start focusing on curriculum.
Want a tour?
I’d like to point out that in my first post about the Veepstakes I said in the very first sentence that Kamala was going to choose someone who wasn’t on the list. And I couldn’t be happier with the choice of Tim Walz as Vice-President.
I think, in all honesty, the move with this guy is that after the joint barnstorming tour this week they should put him on a repeating schedule through the Midwest. Go Wisconsin-Indiana-Michigan-Ohio-Pennsylvania-Kentucky, then a day at home to recuperate, then do it again. I really and truly believe we can win all six states, and I’m not kidding.
(At this point I realize this post is going to be a rehash of a bunch of recent Bluesky posts I’ve made, so my apologies if you follow me there. Also, go follow me there.)
So, yeah, I was talking about this earlier on Bluesky, but I kind of want to record it here as something a bit more permanent. The big thing about the VP selection is it’s not supposed to matter, right? There’s always talk– I participated in it– about the pick bringing his home state, if that’s on the table, and beyond that the VP pick is basically just not supposed to fuck up. I was thinking about this this morning, and realized something: in every presidential election save one since I have been a relatively conscious human being, the winning ticket has featured 1) the VP candidate who won the VP debate, and 2) the VP candidate who, in general, was the more competent and energetic choice.
“Prove it,” you say? Sure, I love writing these.
1984: George H.W. Bush vs. Geraldine Ferraro. Bush Sr., if I don’t count Ford, who was only President during the first few months of my life, is easily the most competent and least evil Republican president of my lifetime, and he was enormously qualified to be president, especially in comparison to the loathsome, corrupt Ferraro. I will not pretend to remember the debate or even if there was one, but Reagan/Bush mopped the floor with Mondale/Ferraro, winning all but Minnesota, and a heavy storm in Minneapolis would have meant they won Minnesota too.
1988: This is the one exception to the pattern. If you remember only one thing about the VP debate in 1988, it’s Lloyd Bentsen telling Dan Quayle that Jack Kennedy was a friend of his and Quayle was no Jack Kennedy. Bentsen was also massively more qualified for the job– for any job, really– than Quayle was.
1992: My favorite VP debate of all time, featuring Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Admiral James T. Stockdale, an utter nut who turned off his hearing aid and wandered around aimlessly in the back of the stage for part of the debate. Clinton/Gore won the election, obviously.
1996: Al Gore and Jack Kemp. Four thousand people died of boredom during the debate. You don’t remember a thing about it. You don’t remember Jack Kemp. Jack Kemp doesn’t remember Jack Kemp. Bobdole remembers, though. Bobdole never forgets. Clinton/Gore reelected.
2000: Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman face off in the Politeness Bowl, where Lieberman, a supposed Democrat, couldn’t find a single thing that the most coldly evil man ever to hold federal office said that was worth even mildly disagreeing with. Cheney could have suggested feeding Lieberman’s children to lions and he would have pursed his lips, shrugged, and said that Cheney had a good point. Cheney/Bush won, and that’s not a typo.
2004: Cheney sacrifices John Edwards and his weird tongue tic to Shub-Niggurath and eats his still-beating heart raw on live television.
2008: Joe Biden vs. Sarah Palin, who most of America was already heartily sick of before the debate; it is indisputable that picking Palin was the number one factor in keeping John McCain out of the White House. (Just noticed: I flipped this and 2012 on Bluesky. Oops!)
2012: Biden literally ends Paul Ryan’s entire political career, spending the entire debate laughing in his face at everything he has to say.
2016: I was about to say “I take second to no one in my loathing of Mike Pence,” but I didn’t try to hang him on the Capitol stairs, so maybe I do take second to at least a few people. Either way, he served the purpose of shoring up the evangelicals for Trump. Quick, without looking it up: who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate?
You looked it up, you lying bastard.
At any rate, Tim Kaine is such a nothing-person that still, fully ten hours after writing this as a series of tweets this morning, I cannot recall what the fuck he looks like, or whether he’s still alive. I’m not convinced that he cost Clinton the election, especially with Palin as a recent exemplar of the breed, but it certainly wasn’t a choice that helped at all.
2020:
Also, remember the fly?
2024: I’m already ordering popcorn. I don’t even really know if this debate is going to happen, but I want to be prepared. Walz is going to demolish JD Vance. It’s going to be fucking glorious.
As I suspected, no one— and I include myself in this, for the record, I’m not trying to be demeaning– has any idea what an expensive watch looks like, at least not from pictures.
Most people thought watch B was the most expensive.
A tie for the mid-range watch, with some people thinking it was B and the rest choosing C. And finally:
A somewhat more significant majority picked watch A as the cheapest watch.
The truth: none of them are watches at all! Everything is cake.
Nah, not really.
Watch C, the Caliber 0210, is the most expensive watch, retailing at $8400.
Watch A, the Eco-Drive One, is the mid-range-for-our-purposes-but-still-holyshit-expensive watch, at $4750.
… which leaves Watch B, the humble Weekender, as the $236 watch. Which means that the plurality of votes for the most expensive watch went to the least expensive watch, and most people believed that the Eco-Drive One would retail for a price one-twentieth of its actual cost.
Now, I’m cheating just a bit here. We’re just using images, and I have no idea if it would be much more obvious in person that, at least, the Weekender was the cheapest one; I have to assume it would. I deliberately chose three watches that were as similar to each other as possible, too; I can imagine a world where I rerun this experiment using watches that are as different as possible to see if correct answers are more common.
As for the reasons for this little game: I’m annoyed with my current (and second) Apple Watch. I apparently went with a lower grade of glass when I bought the second watch, and at least compared to the first one it’s scratched to hell. I replaced the first watch after several years when the battery stopped consistently getting me through a full day, and this one is starting to head toward that neighborhood in less time, but the first watch was spotless when I got rid of it. There wasn’t a single mark anywhere on the damn thing. Not so much with this one, and I really don’t want to spend $800 on a new watch with the higher-end glass.
Also, I’m tired of being so tethered to devices all the goddamn time, and I’d kind of like a watch I don’t have to charge, which is how I’ve fallen down this current rabbit hole. I’m old enough and I have enough money that I’d like a Nice Watch; I don’t want to just go to Kohl’s and pick some $29 piece of bullshit off of a shelf, but the problem is that watches are proving to be really difficult to shop for on the Internet. You really need to be able to see a watch on your wrist to be able to judge whether you like it, and while Citizen(*) has a cool app that sort of mimics letting you try a watch on virtually, it ends up making everything look awful and so probably doesn’t work the way they want it to.
The other problem is that if I don’t want the aforementioned $29 piece of bullshit from Target or Kohl’s I have to go to an actual Goddamn jewelry shop, most of whom, at least around here, don’t really put their stock on their websites, and (I suspect) don’t really specialize in the $300-500 sweet spot that I arbitrarily-and-kinda-randomly decided my price range was going to be. Plus, clearly, no one can tell the difference between a $236 watch and an $8400 watch, so why would I shell out more than a few C-notes? I need the fucking thing to tell time, not impress people.
Also, every watch I liked on Citizen’s website had people complaining in the reviews that it was hard to read.
Also also, most watch companies appear to top out at 9″ bands. I continue to not believe I have enormous wrists, but I apparently have enormous wrists. I can’t order a single watch from Citizen that I’m confident will fit well. Which means I’m back into stores, which … rinse and repeat.
Style is stupid, is what I’m saying here.
(*) Also more or less chosen randomly, as a known Classy Brand that isn’t, like, fucking Rolex or something.**
(**) Did y’all know Swatch was back???? I’m pretty sure I went to school at least once wearing three Swatch watches at the same time. (***)
*** There is also such a thing as the South Bend Watch Company, which isn’t the original South Bend Watch Company, which was apparently a big deal in the early 1900s. They sell precisely three different watches and each of them costs $599.
I have mentioned this already, I think, but it’s always worth repeating stories where I’m stupid: in June I bought a bunch of LED light ropes and took them to work and left them in my classroom. I then forgot that I had bought them and bought a different set of LED light ropes in July, and didn’t realize my mistake until emptying my closet in my old classroom last week.
Those are the first set of lights I bought. I have the second set up too; I like these a lot more. That design isn’t meant to be anything in particular but somehow ended up looking sort of like an anglerfish (look on the left) and I’m fully expecting my students to name it. One interesting thing: the lights are from different manufacturers and run on different apps, but it’s clearly based on the same underlying architecture, as the interface is nearly exactly the same. Those lights have thousands of different “special effects” and light patterns– enough that it’s almost too many– and the other set has, like, twelve. I need to see if there’s a way I can get the good app talking to the other lights, or maybe a generic one that can run both. Failing that, I bet I can swap out the controllers; the lights themselves should work exactly the same way.
In other news, I have 200 postcards in front of me, and over the next couple of months I need to handwrite a message to a voter on each of them encouraging them to vote and then mail them all out on the same day. Handwrite a message. This is … insanely intimidating. I haven’t heard anything about being a poll worker yet; I tried a different way to sign up yesterday, so maybe someone will get back to me soon. If not, I’m calling it good and taking Election Day and the day after off anyway.
(Election Day because my students do not remotely deserve the ball of stress and anxiety that I’m going to be on that day, and the one following because no matter how the evening goes, I know good and Goddamned well I’m not getting any sleep on the night of the 5th. I need to figure out exactly how far in advance I can take a personal day so that I can sign up for that shit the second it becomes available. Under normal circumstances the district isn’t allowed to say no to a personal day request if it’s filed on time (and most of the time administrators don’t care if it’s filed on time) but I’m anticipating I might not be the only person wanting to be gone those days, so I gotta get a jump on it.
If they had any sense it would be an e-learning day anyway.
Been a slug all day today, and I’ve got nothing in particular I want to talk about. So instead I’m going to have to insist that you watch this entire video of this man trying to destroy testing a Cybertruck. I’ve seen clips of it all over the place but the whole video is so much worse than I was expecting.
Before you are three watches. One of those watches retails for $8400. A second costs $4750. The final watch is $236. The watches are all from the same manufacturer and from the same website.
No cheating: which one is which?
Please please please vote, as I’m trying to figure something out here. Feel free to explain your reasoning in comments, but that’s not completely necessary. I’ll reveal the answers in a couple of days, depending on how many votes I get.
I didn’t take any pictures at work today, but the classroom is coming along nicely even if it’s chewing holes in my bank account along the way. I really like the new room, though, and the first year in a new room is always more expensive, so hopefully what I’ve bought will last a while. I did discover, to my vague embarrassment and deep chagrin, that I managed to order rope lights twice, once very early in the summer and– and this was my critical mistake– brought to my classroom in June, and once in late July and brought to my classroom yesterday. I didn’t even notice the first set of lights yesterday since they were in the closet in my original classroom; I had a great moment when I found six boxes in my closet as I was moving stuff from one room to the other and for a few minutes couldn’t remember what the hell was in them. Then I remembered that at one point I’d been thinking I needed a powered USB hub, and I couldn’t figure out why I needed that, since the rope lights I just brought in plug in with a regular plug, and … shit.
Then I had to order a damn powered USB hub.
I have so many packages coming this weekend, y’all.
(You can still help me out with school supplies if you want, by the way. I’ll love you forever if you do!)
I am going to end up starting a fire in this room once everything is plugged in, y’all. I did find two more plugs in the room I hadn’t initially noticed, up near the ceiling next to a truly ancient tube TV that definitely doesn’t need to be plugged in and I’m going to see if I can get them to remove altogether. That brings the total to ten, two of which are simultaneously nearly inaccessible and somehow still perfect for a couple of the things I was going to stick in that corner anyway. Those ten plugs will have to power approximately fourteen thousand different things. I’m, uh, gonna have to do some extensive cable management.
I may not be able to make it over on Monday, but I’ll definitely be in my room every other day next week, since I also have a ton of curricular work to do and I want the room completely ready to go by the time I’m officially on the clock.
Anyway, in lieu of a classroom picture, please enjoy this cat.
