For this story to make sense you need to know three things up front:
I’m under a religious vow to La Madonna Della Cava not to eat meat on Wednesdays
The Diner less than a five minute walk from my door makes the best fried Haddock I’ve ever tasted but my wife doesn’t like it.
Yesterday was my birthday
Me: Hmm shall I have a Frozen Celeste Pizza or the Red Baron French Bread Pizza for lunch?
DaWife: Aren’t you going down the street for your fish?
Me: I thought I’d just have a frozen pizza
DaWife: But you love that fish, it’s your favorite!
Me: I thought I’d save a few bucks and have a frozen Pizza
DaWife: It’s your birthday. Go down the street and have the fish you enjoy.
Me: Hmmm, it’s like you’re trying to get me out of the house. Does that mean that you’re planning to surprise me when I come back by greeting me in a sexy nightgown and then take me upstairs for an afternoon of passion for my birthday?
On the way to work last week I saw a hawk circling over Water Street in Fitchburg. Last week there was a Coyote in the parking lot of the warehouse I work at in Devens.
As little as two decades ago that would have been unthinkable, but then again as little as three to five years ago I never saw a rabbit in town. Now their not only all over my back yard but every day on the way home from work I see at least 3-5 darting around all over town.
Given that I grew up with a back yard abutting woods and a stream this change is even more dramatic.
I started attending adoration of the Blessed Sacrament ten years ago taking over the hour that my mother had done at the Chapel after she died and I’ve noticed a significant change in the decade this has been going on.
When I first started the adorers where I’d say 80-90% women. A man, particularly one in his late 40’s was an oddity. Not completely unique but an oddity.
Now when I go to adoration more than half of the people are men.
I can’t place when this started happening but it has happened.
One fact of life that is often ignored is that even on bad decisions there are some winners.
Remy is exactly right in his parody of Old Town Road that new Stadiums rarely workout for cities in terms of economic growth.
However when Worcester took the RedSox AAA franchise from Pawtucket there were two groups of winners.
The first was those was anyone who drove in Kelly Square before the change because that seven way intersection was one of the most dangerous bits of road I ever drove on. To me it’s amazing that there wasn’t an accident there every single day.
The second group of winners were baseball fans like me who now have a AAA stadium under 30 minutes away. The truth that it is likely a bad deal for Worcester will not take away my enjoyment of the ability to see baseball at practically a major league level affordable both in terms of price and time to get there.
It may be that sooner or later another city might decide to outbid Worcester and the team will move but until such a day comes, if ever, I’m going to enjoy every season of it.
I do most of the grocery shopping in the house and it’s become over the last year one of the most depressing tasks there is.
I find myself happy to pay “sale” prices that are at or above what was the standard or the high price on items just two years ago.
I can see my shopping habits chance as prices do and while I always had an eye for a bargain but with the knowledge that it will cost double to heat my house this winter I find myself scrimping now so I won’t have to suffer in the cold.
Being the son of depression era parents it’s not that hard to get in that habit but it feels like failure on my part as a provider. I know that’s not a popular idea these days but I wasn’t raised in these days.
Finally as I get older I find myself reflecting on my life more. I done a lot of different things from owning a business, to writing a book to occasional public speaking. I’ve had two radio shows, one still in progress interviewed mayors, governors, Cardinals, congressmen, senators and questioned one future President on the campaign trail. I even won a civil case before a jury acting as my own lawyer once against the real thing.
I’ve failed a lot too, I failed in business, My radio show while syndicated locally never broke through, I didn’t make it nationally and instead of a comfortable living in my major I find myself working full time at a warehouse while drawing only a quarter at best of the blog traffic I once did never managing to break though to the point where I could make a living at it as others have. And there are times when my failures, particularly my financial ones, press against me rather heavily.
But in the end I have a good wife and a marriage in its 34th year and two good honorable God Fearing Catholic mass attending sons both making a better living than I am.
If that’s not a successful life I’d like to know what is.
SHREVEPORT – In shocking, absolutely SHOCKING news, the Baton Rouge Advocate reports that “Only 43% of kindergarten students read on grade level, 54% of first graders, 56% of second graders and 53% of third graders.”
(Insert sarcasm).
Seriously, who didn’t see that one coming?
After teaching ELA at the high school level for twenty-five years, I am not at all shocked by these numbers; in fact, I’m surprised they aren’t worse.
One of the main reasons I left the classroom when I did, rather than get my thirty years in, was because of the terrible Louisiana Believes ELA curriculum. When the program rolled out, I ranted and raved and went into fits of depression. There were tears shed over this curriculum at the time by gifted ELA teachers I worked with who knew this program was terrible yet were powerless to change anything. All reading for pleasure was removed from the curriculum. Most fiction was stripped out. And while I’m a nonfiction fan, the nonfiction pieces my 10th graders had to read were the dullest, driest, most soul crushing texts you can imagine.
I’m all for challenging a student. That wasn’t what was happening.
The word “rigor” became code for all we loathed about the reading materials. Teachers were expected to embrace the new “rigorous texts” and lead students through multiple, yes, multiple readings of them; and students were expected to read these eight page speeches or scientific articles multiple times while annotating, highlighting, examining, discussing, and writing.
No tenth grader I’ve ever met is going to get excited about reading Carrie Chapman Catt’s speech on women’s suffrage.
Teachers were given this curriculum and the accompanying prepared slides, and a script, and we were expected to follow it “with fidelity.”
Meanwhile, students mentally checked out.
When I tell you that there was ZERO fiction, I’m not kidding. And the ELA supervisor at the time told me that if kids want to read for pleasure, they will do it on their own.
That was about six years ago. Each year since then the curriculum has been loosened a bit, and a bit more each year. Teachers were given a little more flexibility but not much.
To combat the growing apathy toward English from my students, I brought in a classroom library and man was the excitement back in the classroom! Kids clamored for books they wanted to read.
But by then, my own future was sealed. I had to leave the classroom because I had lost faith in the program. Trust was broken. Teachers lost all voice, all input, all creativity and freedom over their classes. I could not in good conscience lead students through material that crushed their desire to read and learn; and for the record, the great test scores the admins were looking for never happened. They started to rise a bit once the bonds loosened, but this new curriculum did not solve the ills of literacy.
There has been a lot written about the rise (?) and fall of CNN+ but of all the words written the most interesting to me was this bit from the Wall Street Journal that I found via Insty
Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in CNN+ describe a culture where excitement over what one top producer described as CNN’s “Apollo Mission”—a reference to the program that successfully landed the first humans on the moon—gave way to the realization that failure was arriving swiftly and mercilessly. Many employees of the streaming service started in the past six months or even just a few weeks before the service launched. Several said they left stable jobs or freelancing gigs.
emphasis mine
Now anyone on the right knowing the CNN ratings numbers could see that there was no prayer that they would get people to pay for the damn thing, as Daniel Greenberg put it last year (again via insty)
CNN President Jeff Zucker billed CNN+ as being for “CNN superfans, news junkies and fans of quality non-fiction programming.”
The existence of CNN superfans is as improbable as Bigfoot and UFOs. No one has ever spotted a CNN superfan in the wild and not even the most exotic zoos have them in stock.
Those same ratings number were available to folks outside the right as well as inside them but to those people who live in the MSM bubble no information that reflects badly on the left is real unless some MSM outlet reports on it.
If you’re rich enough or connected enough as a lot of the high level network “talent” is that reality doesn’t matter. Like runaway inflation you shrug it off and wonder why the plebs aren’t still ecstatic over the departure of the Great Maga King.
But if you are a regular person in the real world that loss of job in a bad economy that you gave up a good position for is going to have consequences that will pop your bubble faster than you can say “Chris Wallace”.
And CNN+ on your resume is not going to look all that impressive either will it?
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 