High school students being forced to pick majors

I have to quite seriously wonder how long will it be before this is becomes proposed for schools here in Rockingham County, North Carolina. I mean, we've already got at least one school board member who has said that students are there to learn how to "find a job" and not how to be individuals.

This same school board member re-affirmed that to me rather strongly at the meeting the following night, by the way. I honestly can't see it as being too far of a stretch for him to be in favor of something like this, either...

Students at many high schools across the country are being forced to pick academic "majors" as early as 9th grade, according to a story in today's The New York Times...

Ninth graders often have trouble selecting what clothes to wear to school each morning or what to have for lunch. But starting this fall, freshmen at Dwight Morrow High School here in Bergen County must declare a major that will determine what electives they take for four years and be noted on their diplomas.

For Dwight Morrow, a school that has struggled with low test scores and racial tensions for years, establishing majors is a way to make their students stay interested until graduation and stand out in the hypercompetitive college admissions process.

Some parents have welcomed the requirement, noting that a magnet school in the district already allowed some students to specialize. But other parents and some educators have criticized it as preprofessionalism run amok or a marketing gimmick.

"I thought high school was about finding what you liked to do," said Kendall Eatman, an Englewood mother of six who was president of the Dwight Morrow student body before graduating in 1978. "I think it's too early to be so rigid."

Debra Humphreys, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, called high-school majors "a colossally bad idea," saying youngsters should instead concentrate on developing a broad range of critical thinking and communication skills.

"Today's economy requires people to be constantly learning and changing," Ms. Humphreys said. "A lot of jobs that high school students are likely to have 10 years from now don't yet exist, so preparing too narrowly will not serve them well."

Here's why this approach is so horrible: it's trying to mold and craft people into being gears in a machine that can be installed and swapped-out. It specializes people too much. Instead of giving individuals a wide, rich foundation of knowledge and critical thinking skills from which they can draw upon throughout life as they themselves see fit, it defines them downward according to Utilitarian purpose.

In other words, it restricts the students from being the individuals of ability and free will that they are supposed to be.

But I guess that tearing down their potential isn't of much concern to some people, apparently.

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Paramount confirms: TRANSFORMERS score CD is rolling out!

Warner Bros. Records will "shortly" be releasing the album of Steve Jablonsky's orchestral score from the movie Transformers, according to a Senior Vice President in the Music Department at Paramount Pictures.

The Knight Shift blog received this confirmation a short while ago. And you've no idea how happy I am about being able to report this!

The word comes from a source wishing to identifying himself as "Sam Witwicky all the way from New Zealand" (and in case you're wondering, I already asked if his eBay username was "ladiesman217" and he said that it's not :-). "Sam Witwicky" was able to correspond directly with the good people at Paramount Pictures: the studio which along with DreamWorks was responsible for producing Transformers. Our man Sam told them about the interest there's been in a CD release of Jablonsky's score and he mentioned the online petition (which may hit 5,000 signatures in the next few days).

Here's what Sam received back...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Butler at Paramount
Date: Aug 16, 2007 4:12 AM
Subject: RE: Transformers Original Score
To: Sam Witwicky

There will be a score album released shortly on Warner Bros. Records. Thanks for your interest!

Dan Butler

Senior Vice President

Business Affairs & Legal - Music

Paramount Pictures

So there's the word pretty much from the top: soon, we'll be getting to put our grubby lil' paws on a shiny new CD containing that majestic score from Transformers by Steve Jablonsky!

To all of you who have signed the petition and have otherwise been showing support for this album and getting the word spread about how much we'd love to have it in our collections: THANK YOU!! Nothing would please me more than to be able to shake hands with every single one of ya :-)

And very special thanks to Dan Butler and the folks at Paramount for having this great news sent along to us!

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1000 MILES TO GRACELAND: Our honeymoon pilgrimage to Memphis

We celebrate many birthdays. But to the best of my knowledge there are only two people that the western world takes time out to commemorate the deaths of: Jesus Christ, and Elvis Presley. Curious, that...

So today is the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis. Which a lot of folks no doubt are going to be remembering in various ways. Here's mine: the story of how Lisa and I wound up devoting a considerable chunk of our honeymoon five years ago to the King of Rock and Roll.

I suppose all of this came about because of what you see in the picture on your right. This was taken at the rehearsal dinner on the night before our wedding at this restaurant in Calhoun, Georgia. As dinner was winding down Lisa's dad thanked everyone for coming from such far away (we had guests in from Brooklyn, Australia and Belgium!) and thought that it would be a good time to introduce everyone and how they were related to the bride and groom, and basically it was a great idea to "roast" us as he put it.

Well, I had no idea that this was coming, but Chad Austin spoke about how he and I had been friends since kindergarten, all on up through high school and it was at that point that he mentioned Chris "doing his Elvis impersonation". HOW THE %@#$ DID HE THINK TO BRING THAT UP AT A TIME LIKE THIS?!? That was something that started in one particular session of computer class when we were juniors in high school, and before I knew it there were posters all over campus advertising "CHRIS KNIGHT TONIGHT LIVE, SEE HIM DO ELVIS AT 8 PM!" Well, being a good gracious groom at my own rehearsal dinner I thought it'd be wise to demonstrate just what the joke was about, so I got up from the table and in front of everyone I did my world-famous "Elvis shaking his pelvis" routine. It was a huge hit! And that's all that I plan on talking about that. In fact, forget you ever read this much about it.

Let's move on, shall we...

So we finished with dinner and Lisa went back to her parents' house for a lil' "get-together" with the girls and a bunch of us guys - Chad, "Weird" Ed, Johnny Yow, the amazing "Lowbridge" and I - went off for a bachelor's party at U.S. Play in Marietta. The next day we had the wedding and that afternoon Lisa and I took off for our honeymoon in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. We'd planned on being there from Saturday night on 'til Wednesday but decided to extend our stay there a day. That still left us with plenty of time for our honeymoon trip but we didn't know where to spend it at.

I think it was late Tuesday that the idea hit to drive all the way across Tennessee, and make a "religious pilgrimage" to Graceland in Memphis.

We checked out at the cabin rental place on Thursday morning and it wasn't long afterward that we were on I-40 headed west across the whole length of Tennessee. We left Gatlinburg at about 11 and after a loooooooong drive we finally got to Memphis almost at 8 p.m.

The next morning, we went to Graceland. There's a visitor's center where you board a shuttle and if you like you can get this fancy audio tour thingy that you wear earphones with as you walk around the grounds.

Anyways, here's some photos from our visit to Graceland. First is the front door of the place...

There's not too much photo-taking allowed inside Elvis's house (and the upstairs portion - where the King lived and ummmm, died is strictly off-limits) but we were able to get a few good pics elsewhere on the grounds. Here's Elvis's swimming pool...

Here's Lisa in the backyard area...

And here in the Meditation Garden of Graceland is the grave of Elvis Presley, along with mother Gladys, father Vernon and his grandmother Minnie Mae...

And here's a closeup of Elvis's grave...

A quick note about the name on the King's grave marker, since it's helped fueled speculation over the years that Elvis didn't die in 1977. You see, Elvis's full name really is "Elvis Aaron Presley". But for years it's been claimed that his middle name was actually "Aron". Indeed, that's how Elvis himself spelled it for a long time, until he discovered that his legal name did include "Aaron". The reason for the "Aron" spelling was that Elvis thought it sounded so much like "Garon", the name of his stillborn twin brother. Anyways, when the official death certificate was made out for Elvis it spelled his full name as "Elvis Aron Presley"... which led some to wonder if there might be something sinister at work. And some have said that the name on the grave marker is not the actual legal name of Elvis, either. Which is which? Since it was Vernon Presley who was in charge of the grave arrangement and how the memorials were made out, I'll defer to his judgment.

There's a pretty extensive collection of Elvis's belongings that are on display at Graceland, including all the King's certified gold, silver and platinum records (this takes up every bit of wall space in one cavernous room and it's still growing). You can also see Elvis's vehicles, including his planes and his cars, not the least of which is his famous Pink Cadillac...

There's that guy again, unholying the holy ground...

We spent most of the day at Graceland, and thought it was well worth taking an unplanned excursion for it during our honeymoon. Later that night we went out to explore Memphis some more. Here's a shot of Lisa taken right before sunset, with the Hernando de Soto Bridge crossing the Mississippi River in the background...

A short while after this, since it's not everyday that you get to cross the Mississippi, we got in our car and took I-40 over the bridge. That way we also got to say that we visited Arkansas during our trip. But since by this point the sun was fast going down, I told Lisa that we had better get out of Arkansas "before the monsters come out". Look this is the state that produced Bill Clinton: that's more than enough to scare me about the prospect of being stuck there when darkness falls, 'kay?

So we turned around fast and headed back over the river and got back to Memphis. Here's a groovy statue of Elvis that we found...

And here's a statue of another famous son of Memphis, B.B. King...

Lisa and I took a nice trolley ride through downtown Memphis. We got to see Beale Street, which was just as lively as I imagined it would be. And I just did miss getting a picture of this because it it took about 5 seconds for me to realize what it was that I was looking at, but we also saw the Lorraine Motel: the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot (it's now the National Civil Rights Museum, but it's still quite recognizable as the Lorraine Motel).

The next morning - on Saturday, now a week after we were married - we left Memphis and headed back to Calhoun. To get there we decided to go through Mississippi and Alabama. Lo and behold the route included Tupelo: Elvis's birthplace! So of course to make our pilgrimage complete we had to stop and see the place. Here's Lisa at the historical marker outside Elvis's childhood home:

Here are some photos inside the place...

And here's Lisa and I on the front-porch swing...

And that's pretty much how we spent a good part of the second half of our honeymoon: paying our respects to the life of Elvis Presley. From the time I left Reidsville for the wedding, until we got to Memphis, it was roughly one thousand miles (hence the title of this post). Considering that our wedding had included wacky music, Star Wars action figures, and a garter snake, I suppose it was a quiet enough way to wind things down :-)

So, too all of my friends who are reading this: considering that this is the 30th anniversary of his passing, should or should I not likewise pay tribute to the the King by posting a YouTube video of myself "doing Elvis"? :-P

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Mike Nifong: The dog ate my law license

Mike Nifong - the disgraced former district attorney who prosecuted the Duke lacrosse case - has turned in his law license and had to note that he never framed it... because his dog chewed it up. Courtesy of The Smoking Gun, here is Nifong's letter to the North Carolina State Bar explaining the condition of his license...

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U.S. Air Force pilot is "face" of Decepticons in TRANSFORMERS

In this summer's blockbuster movie Transformers, there is a character called "Mustache Man" in the credits. He's a holographic projection that the Decepticons use in their vehicular modes to make it look like they've got a human operator. We first see him in Blackout's cockpit during the initial attack on the base in Qatar, and then later wearing a police uniform inside Barricade and then sitting in Starscream's cockpit. We never actually see Mustache Man speak, but he's got an amazing on-screen presence that really conveys the personality and menace of the Decepticons.

Well, according to the Albuquerque Tribune in a story from about a month ago it turns out that this earthly face of the Decepticons is a real-life helicopter pilot instructor in the United States Air Force. Maj. Brian Reece has been in the military since age 17, and has served in Iraq and Afghanistan several times. And then about a year ago...

...he was chatting with director Michael Bay on the "Transformers" set at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo. Bay, who was using Kirtland helicopters in background shots for the movie, was lamenting over not having cast actors for some of project's smaller roles.

"He was talking about it," Reece said, "and one of my guys walked by singing that stupid `Team America' song. I thought, `You've got to be kidding me. You're gonna walk by singing that song?'

"So I was like . . ."

Reese made what he calls "one of those death glances" — an eyes-narrowed, chin-tightened, don't-tread-on-me stare that suggests impending doom to its recipients.

Upon seeing this, something in the director's brain apparently clicked. Quicker than you can say "Action!" — or in this case, "You've got kind of a piercing stare" — Reece had a role.

"Michael wasn't looking for it," said Ian Bryce, one of the film's producers. "It happens. Sometimes you meet people and you start talking about the movie and suddenly the light bulb goes off. Michael's very good at thinking like that."

Minutes later, Reece found himself in the helicopters he'd been sent to help fly — this time as an actor with a fake mustache fixed above his lip.

Very cool! The article also talks about how Reece's wicked stare made a serious impression on Steven Spielberg.

Here's hoping that we'll see Brian Reece as the front-man for those diabolical 'Cons again in future installments of the Transformers movie franchise!

EDIT 9:39 a.m. EST: Here's the scene from Transformers where Frenzy summons the Decepticons, featuring two apperances by Reece as the Mustache Man:

I'll also say this: I really dig that Decepticon theme music, with its unearthly chanting.

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The technology of They Might Be Giants

Let's get what I'm obviously going to say out of the way. The thing that I always mention whenever the subject of They Might Be Giants comes up. Namely, that Flood from 1990 is the greatest musical album ever produced.

I dare anyone to try and tell me otherwise. Not when every single song on this album is nothing less than a work of freakin' genius.

I've owned a copy of Flood in one form or another since 1992. It's easily the most-played album on my MP3 player. So many good memories associated with this album. I sorta feel a duty to shamelessly pitch for it :-)

Anyway, yeah I'm a huge fan of "the two Johns", Linnel and Flansburgh. These guys have always been on the cutting edge not just of music but of technology. And now Gearlog has an awesome interview with John Flansburgh in two parts (here's Part Two) about the band's use of technology, going right back to the days of the original Dial-A-Song and up to Long Tall Weekend, the first album by a longtime performance group released completely in MP3 format. Well worth a read if you're interested in either contemporary music or how the use of computers and other tech has grown up around it.

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PULP MUPPETS

'Nuff said...

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Pastor poses serious question: Have Christians embraced Satan?

Chuck Baldwin - a Christian minister who I have a tremendous amount of respect for - earnestly asks in his latest essay: "Have Christians Already Accepted the Mark of the Beast?"

All I will say is that this should be a challenging read for those who think that some people in our government are "anointed by God".

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Board of Education votes to limit speakers to 5 minutes, and only 1 hour for comments

I'd planned on attending Monday night's meeting of the Rockingham County Board of Education, and would have been there had some things not arisen on this end. So there's no first-hand account this month. But the Reidsville Review already has up a story about some of what went down this time.

The board voted 8-4 to impose a time limit of 5 minutes per each person who addresses the board during the public comments portion of the meetings. Which is considerably more than the limit of 3 minutes that the board was originally considering. Elaine McCollum, Reida Drum, Nell Rose, and Nell Rose voted against the limit. Voting for it were Celeste DePriest, Ron Price, Lori McKinney, Amanda Bell, Jim Austin, Wayne Kirkman, Herman Hines and John Smith.

I suppose that 5 minutes does seem pretty reasonable. This however is not: that in addition to the 5 minutes per person, the board is also limiting public comments to one hour per meeting.

Now I wish that I had been able to be at tonight's meeting, because this was something that I was afraid might happen, although I had enough faith in the board to believe that it would be rather unlikely.

Five minutes per person, I can kind of understand. But shutting off all public comment after one hour is completely unacceptable.

Let's say that this rule was in place during the school uniforms debate. As actively a part of P.O.T.S.M.O.D. (that was the group opposing the uniforms) that I was, I would not have wanted to see one side completely dominate all the time allowed for public argument. But if this rule had been enforced during the past few months, there's no doubt in my mind that anyone who was in favor of the uniforms would have been effectively shut out from having their support become a matter of public record. That wouldn't necessarily have been a conscious effort either on the part of the uniforms opponents: naturally they would have wanted the board to hear them out. But that shouldn't come at the cost of unfairly denying the other side their fair say in the matter, either.

What this means is that at some point during a matter of contentious debate, one side or the other on an issue is going to seek to abuse this new policy by "stacking the deck" in their own favor during the public comments time of a meeting. It probably won't happen anytime soon or even in the next year or two, but it's coming. And I really don't know if allowing for the possibility of an entire meeting devoted to public comments is going to alleviate that concern.

Folks, this is laziness. It's dereliction of duty, even. Members of the Board of Education should have understood when they ran for the office that they would be called upon to make a sacrifice of time in order to carry out the duties that they were asking to take up. If they were unwilling to see that done in due fairness for all citizens, then they shouldn't have run for the seat in the first place. They should be made to stay until 3 a.m. if that's how long it takes to listen to everyone, because that's what they signed up for when they said they wanted the job. If some board members can't take this demand of their office, then they should reconsider whether they belong on the board at all.

Do I think this is, in the least bit, a lash-back against the initiative that a lot of people in the public - the ones that Ron Price referred to as "bad for the community" - took in defeating the uniforms? Not much doubt in my mind on that one, folks. I dare not say this reflects on everyone who voted for this limit tonight but there were a number of those who went in favor of this that I can't say it's a surprise to see they voted this way. They're the ones who general consensus is that they think people in the public are getting too "uppity". I've heard that from a lot of folks these past few weeks.

Well, I've seen time limits imposed from this board before, and I've seen them done away with. We'll see how long this one lasts.

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The only thing I intend to say about Karl Rove resigning

The man is not and never has been a "genius". At most, Karl Rove is a thug who has devoted his entire life toward destroying others for the most shallow of reasons: political power. Whatever "success" he has enjoyed only came about because he exploited his lack of conscience more than he used any surplus of cleverness.

I won't say that Karl Rove is the source of most of the problems that this country is facing, as some will no doubt be fast to claim. But that Karl Rove was allowed to go as far as he did certainly is symptomatic of those problems. I see no reason to praise this accomplishment. Indeed, it says much about how seared our soul has become when many of us refuse to feel anything but dire shame at possibly admiring this man.

I imagine that Karl Rove is going to die someday: as an obscure, broken man with nothing more to show for his life other than the knowledge that he helped to hurt a lot of people, if not an entire country. After all, this is the man who helped engineer the biggest wholesale destruction of Constitutional rule of law in recent memory, to say nothing about pushing the drive for the war in Iraq and this administration's criminal refusal to secure our borders.

I defy anyone to tell me that there has been something decent and "Christian" about this man worth raising a toast in his honor.

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The Burger King commercial with Krusty the Clown

"I'm behind on seven alimonies! I'm wearing paper bags for shoes!"

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Merv Griffin has passed away

Quite a few times (I even heard him once tell this to a reporter during a TV interview) Merv Griffin said that he wanted these words to someday be inscribed on his tombstone:

Merv will NOT be back
after this commercial message!

I always thought that seemed to reflect a pretty good outlook on life.

Here's the story of his passing on Variety's website.

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... Then maybe America doesn't need saving at all

Stu Bykofsky, a writer with the Philadephia Daily News, is seriously suggesting that the best way to "save" America is to have another attack like 9/11.

Two months ago, a Republican party official also said that America needs to be attacked again so that people would appreciate President Bush.

If "saving" America means not only anticipating, but openly hoping for the deaths of innocent people, then America does not deserve to survive at all.

I mean that.

Here is the biggest problem that I have with these self-styled "neoconservatives": they believe that America's strength is supposed to be in material wealth and military might. They don't give a damn about the value of individual life. How else can they sincerely consider it to be "good news" when it's reported that the death toll of American military is the lowest in several months... and not bother to ask themselves if even one life needlessly lost because of this fiasco is one life too many.

These people don't care if others die for America. So long as they aren't the ones having to do the fighting and the dying.

If America is a country where the many are deemed to be expendable assets for the betterment of the few, then that America does not merit survival. If we are ceasing to be a people that values the life of the individual and the rights that God has bestowed upon him or her, then there is no longer anything inherently good in America at all. Certainly not worth fighting or dying for.

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TRANSFORMERS makes $300 million at U.S. box office

According to it's page at Box Office Mojo, Transformers had $299,633,598 in U.S. theater earnings as of Thursday, so it's safe to assume that it's crossed the $300 million domestic mark already. It's earned almost as much overseas, too.

And we still don't have that glorious orchestral score on CD yet! The petition to get an an album of the movie's soundtrack by Steve Jablonsky currently has 3,730 signatures.

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"FLASH! AHHH-AAAAAAHHHHHHH!"

So tonight (I guess it still counts as Friday night) the Sci-Fi Channel premiered its new show Flash Gordon, a 2007 update of Alex Raymond's classic comic book. And what I saw of it... wasn't good. Easily the worst thing was getting rid entirely of having Flash and Dale being taken to Mongo onboard Dr. Zarkov's rocket: in the 2007 show they get there by dimensional rift. I don't even want to begin to get into M.I.N.O. ("Ming In Name Only").

Here's something that's much better: the opening credits from 1980's big-screen movie Flash Gordon, with that amazing theme song by Queen!

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Bush's "war czar" wants to consider a draft

From Breitbart.com...

Bush War Adviser Says Draft Worth a Look

Aug 10 06:25 PM US/Eastern
By RICHARD LARDNER

WASHINGTON (AP) - Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush's new war adviser said Friday.

"I think it makes sense to certainly consider it," Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

"And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation's security by one means or another," Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June ...

I will gladly support a draft. Provided that Jenna and Barbara and George P. Bush are the first to get inducted and put on armed patrol duty in Basra.

Or better yet, George W. Bush should suit up and take up the rifle on his own and set an example for the rest of us to follow. If Leonidas could lead 300 Spartans against two million Persians, certainly our own Commander in Chief can take point in his "surge" against a few dozen militants ... right?

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Fiat folly

The Federal Reserve announced today that it's pumping $35 billion into the economy to help overcome the credit crunch from this subprime mortgage fiasco. That's on top of the $14 billion it's already thrown into the works over the past few weeks. The mess is also causing the European Community bank to loan out $135 billion and then yesterday the Bank of Japan reported that it was injecting over a trillion yen - that's $8.5 billion - also because of effects from the mortgage mess.

And then a few days ago China threatened to dump its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds, which would severely drive down the value of the dollar.

Bear in mind that for all intents and purposes, the only thing really propping up the dollar right now is its value as currency on the oil market.

In the past day or so I've heard some say that this almost looks like 1929 all over again. I disagree: it's looking much more like the economy of the South toward the end of the Civil War. At that point inflation was so bad, and the Confederate dollar so worthless, that if you wanted to buy a piece of bread from the baker then you'd give him your round Confederate coin and he'd cut out a piece of bread exactly that size.

Nobody can base an economy on credit and debt and expect it to persist for very long. And there's not that many ways that this current situation can really turn out okay, from where I'm sitting.

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