Bloomington High School North | The Electron Pencil

05/25/2014

Bloomberg News, Bloomington High School North, Career Workplace Specialists, Elizabeth Sweeney, Fast Food Workers, Indiana State Board of Education, Jose Cardenal, Libtard, Linda Ellerbee, Louis Armstrong, McDonald's

Hot Air

My Bully Pulpit

It’s not easy being a thought leader of the free world, especially when operating out of the bustling metrop. of Bloomington, USA. See, this burgh still has a lot of small town qualities, one of which being everybody who’s anybody knows everybody else who’s anybody.

So, unlike my early days as a scribe in my beloved hometown of Chicago, I can’t get away with insulting, degrading, abasing, and otherwise verbally terrorizing people and dismiss them all, once the feedback starts rolling in, with a blase Ah, screw ’em; they’re all strangers to me anyway.

That’s why Friday was a tough one. My post that day had to do with the state of Indiana considering allowing non-professional teachers to teach here, as long as they qualify under a new category called Career Workplace Specialist. Under this proposed guideline, for instance, a working chemist could teach chemistry classes in an Indiana high school. The state teachers ass’n is aghast at the whole notion.

Those Who Do Can Teach

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My take was the professional teachers should quit considering themselves divine emissaries, sent here to elevate our precious snowflake kids from slug-like ignorance to an enlightened swami state. Teaching, I pontificated, is something many, many, many more of us can do than only those who’ve been anointed by this holy land’s schools of education.

I predicted this stance would ruffle a lot of teachers’ feathers, and I was right.

In fact, the most heartfelt reaction came from one of the most beloved and respected teachers at Bloomington North High School. Elizabeth Sweeney told me in no uncertain terms that I was flat out wrong.

As I read her response to my screed, I could sense the undertone of pain of someone who’s devoted herself to the instruction of our town’s youth, who’s spent tens of thousands of dollars learning her craft in college, who is really on the job 24 hours a day, and who is justifiably proud of what she’s chosen to do with her limited time on this planet.

And you know what? I feel really bad about that.

I’ve met E. Sweeney on several occasions. I’ve done business with her. I like her. I respect her. Her reputation around town is sparkling. And now this person feels slighted by me.

I’ve grappled with my feelings about that this whole weekend. My conclusion? That’s the crappy part of running this communications colossus. But, as Linda Ellerbee once observed about the role of a journalist, if you haven’t made someone mad, or at least uncomfortable, you haven’t done your job that day.

So I’m going to continue to take the chance that someone on any given day will be incensed by my barkings and bleatings. I only hope the next such person is more deserving of a kick in the pants than Elizabeth Sweeney.

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A Spade Is A Spade

On the other hand, one person, whom I don’t know, told me in the comments section of Friday’s post that I am a lib-tard [sic].

Whoever you are, thanks!

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The McDonald’s Gap

Some 2000 fast food workers protested at McDonald’s world headquarters in west suburban Chicago Wednesday. Their main gripe? Pay.

McDonald’s may be one of the two or three most recognized American institutions in the world but its burger flippers make minimum wage ⎯ $8.25 an hour in Illinois. A McDonald’s employee who works, say, 37 hours in a week can expect to bring home, therefore, the princely sum of $213.67 after taxes.

MCDonald’s CEO Don Thompson makes more than $13 million a year.

More, Sir?

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A Bloomberg article published in December 2012 calculated that a starting worker at McD’s would have to work one million hours to make what the then-CEO of the outfit made in a year. Working 37 hours a week, a person totals some 1924 hours in a year. The article also pointed out that McDonald’s pays for lobbyists to fight against minimum wage increases.

My suggestion for the protesters? Forget the company’s world headquarters; just dig up Don Thompson’s address and pay him a visit.

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Hoosier Hornplay

Here’s a fun piece from Louis Armstrong:

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h/t to Jan Takehara who, BTW, is such a Cubs fan that as a young adult she lived in an unheated, rundown apartment just because it was across the street from Wrigley Field. She lived there with a cat named Jose Cardenal.

Jose Cardenal

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07/31/2013

2 Comments

All the President's Men, Bill O'Reilly, Bloomington High School North, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Gawker, Goodbye Columbus, Hair Original Soundtrack, Hillary Clinton, Jesus Diaz, Joel Osteen, R.E. Paris, Slaughterhouse Five, Slavery, Surf Thugs, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Invisible Man, Trayvon Martin, White Boys/Black Boys

Your Daily Hot Air

Some Of My Best Friends Are White

Oh man oh man! A flamboyant tip o’the lid to book babe RE Paris for this one. She points out a spot-on farcical indictment of white culture and parenting from Gawker writer Jesus Diaz.

See, a bunch of ultra-violent, scary, faux-uniformed surf thugs raised havoc in Huntington Beach, California this week. They are, of course, white as white can be. Diaz takes this phenomenon and runs with it.

Discrediting Their Race

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Following the template set recently by white navel-gazers bemoaning the black culture’s putative failings in raising children, taking responsibility, committing acts of mayhem upon each other and so on in the half-dozenth or so generation of fallout and blowback to the Trayvon Martin affair, Diaz points the finger at caucasians who are letting their race down.

“Many people don’t want to hear this kind of tough love,” Diaz writes, swiping the line from numerous white commentators. He then goes on to cite cherry-picked stats: 84 percent of whites are killed by other whites and most white rape victims are raped by whites.

Diaz calls white leaders Joel Osteen, Bill O’Reilly, and Hillary Clinton to task for not speaking out on the issue of white on white violence at surf rallies, equine events, and Ivy League campuses. He then spreads the blame uniformly across the entire white population — again, just as white self-appointed moral guardians are doing with blacks: “When did so many white parents fall asleep at the wheel?”

No Excuse

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And in a brilliant crescendo, Diaz throws the old slavery-is-no-excuse rotten chestnut back at the pasty-faced commentators. “Whites in America,” he writes, “have been out from under their European ancestros’ boot heels for centuries…. So being ‘oppressed’ is no longer an excuse for behavior like this. How long must we wait for the white community to get its act together?”

Satire, my friends, is a crusher.

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Bah!

So, sophomores at Bloomington High School North who wish to take a certain Honors English course were compelled this summer to read Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

While typing this, I pondered whether to write forced at gunpoint rather than compelled. Obviously, I went with the less dramatic verbiage, although I’m having second thoughts about it all.

Why on this green Earth would a 15-year-old choose to spend her or his precious summer vacation reading a suicide pill like CD’s DC?

Happy Summer Vacation!

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Look, Dickens specialized in writing about the hellholes of Victorian England. And while some literary titans like George Orwell and Leo Tolstoy slobbered all over themselves praising him, my own fave commentator Oscar Wilde thumbed his nose at Dickens.

Regardless of where Dickens fits in the penman’s pantheon, forcing teenagers to descend into his netherworlds seems an act of child abuse.

Add to that the fact that the Penguin Classic edition of DC runs a full 1024 pages. Sheesh! Was there any time left for a swim in the pool, a hike in the woods, or a bike ride for BHSN sophs?

Have Fun, Kids!

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of teachers assigning Disney-like pap to their charges for summer reading. I’d be even more huffy if BHSN sophomores were ordered to read the latest books of consumer-porn, vampire-porn, or other Butternut Bread boluses that pass for teen lit now.

But man, you’re hitting me where I lived some 40 years ago: The books most teachers assigned to me in high school had no connection to my life or anything I was interested in. I would have greedily eaten up The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Slaughterhouse Five, All the President’s Men, The Invisible Man, or Goodbye, Columbus over any given summer. The authors of these books wrote in a language that I understood about issues and conflicts I recognized.

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The Mayor of Casterbridge and Lord of the Flies meant nothing to me, especially since they were set among the British, who always seemed to me to be a gang of stuffy pains in my ass.

All I’m asking is for teachers to meet their students halfway.

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White Boys/Black Boys

From the Hair original Broadway cast soundtrack. This link accesses the entire soundtrack recording. Scroll down to and select White Boys/Black Boys or just listen to the whole thing. You can’t go wrong either way.

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08/03/2012

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on Earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic.” — Gore Vidal

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MIGHTY NATIONS — ONCE

Here’s the distribution of native language groups in what is now called North America, before the Europeans started coming over in the late 15th Century.

Click For Larger Image

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In other words, this is a map of nations. Each of these nations not only had common languages but cultural ties among the various groups within.

They are no different, in those senses, than the United States or Mexico. The only things they lacked were steel and the wheel.

Steel And The Wheel

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Accordingly, they disappeared.

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CHARLENE SPIERER’S TORTURE

I bet it’s killing Charlene Spierer to refrain from divulging the name of the person she’s certain did in her daughter.

Charlene Spierer

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She probably wants to shout the person’s name from the rooftops but, for obvious reasons, she can’t. There are little matters like getting a probable cause warrant, arresting the suspect, and arraigning him or her (oh hell, who am I kidding, him) that must be done first.

The Marion County Coroner’s office has extracted a tooth from a skull found a month ago in the White River in Indianapolis. As it stands right now, examiners don’t even know if the skull comes from a woman or a man.

Marion County’s Deputy Coroner tells The Journal News that the tooth will be compared to Lauren’s dental records in an act of kindness for the Spierers. Examiners generally don’t do that for specific parties who have reported missing people. But the high-profile nature of the disappearance and the Spierers’ savvy use of the media forced the Coroner’s hand.

Charlene has written an open letter to the person who snatched her daughter in the Spierers’ blog. She writes: “We were shocked when several people hired attorneys within days of Lauren’s disappearance. Five young men, five attorneys.”

That’s been my point all along: The last thing I’d think of doing if one of my pals disappeared would be to hire an attorney.

Lauren’s mom then addresses the person who did the deed: “Who are you? Did you go on any searches? Maybe you were no longer in Bloomington as thousands helped look for Lauren. Did you use Lauren’s disappearance to your advantage? Have we met? Time will tell.”

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BLOOMINGTON BLISS

Our next door neighbors’ daughter, R, a senior at Bloomington High School North, copped an Honor award at the Monroe County Fair for her entry in the Bake It with Pineapple contest.

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R’s entry was a pineapple coconut tart topped with meringue. Gotta tell you, it paled in comparison to another recipe she experimented with over the weekend: a zucchini-pineapple bread. Too bad — for my money if she’d have submitted the bread, she’d have won the blue ribbon.

All this is yet another way of saying I love living in Bloomington.

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GUILTY DISPLEASURE

Tyler Ferguson of the Bleeding Heartland Rollergirls is all agog this AM. She’s going up to Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indy tonight to see — oh, god, I don’t want to say it — Barry Manilow.

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She’s been warned: Should she come in to Soma Coffee tomorrow singing any Manilow hit and thereby implanting it as an earworm in my fragile psyche, there will be hell to pay.

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HOOKED ON A FEELING

In the category of sugary pop, you can’t beat this from BJ Thomas.

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It’s recorded directly from the 45, complete with scratch and dust noise. How can you not love it?

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Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.

❏ I Love Charts — Life as seen through charts.

❏ XKCD — “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

❏ Skepchick — Women scientists look at the world and the universe.

❏ Indexed — All the answers in graph form, on index cards.

❏ I Fucking Love Science — A Facebook community of science geeks.

From I Fucking Love Science

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❏ Present and Correct — Fun, compelling, gorgeous and/or scary graphic designs and visual creations throughout the years and from all over the world.

❏ Flip Flop Fly Ball — Baseball as seen through infographics, haikus, song lyrics, and other odd communications devices.

❏ Mental Floss — Facts.

❏ Caps Off Please — Comics & fun.

❏ Sodaplay — Create your own models or play with other people’s models.

❏ Eat Sleep Draw — An endless stream of artwork submitted by an endless stream of people.

❏ Big Think — Tapping the brains of notable intellectuals for their opinions, predictions, and diagnoses.

Click For The Quiz

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❏ The Daily Puppy — So shoot me.

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Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, games, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

◗ IU Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center — Summer 2012 Sustainability Internship Symposium; 11:30am

◗ Monroe County Fairgrounds — Day 7, 2012 Monroe County Fair, Hearts of Fire; 6:30pm — Music Makers Extension Chorus Group; 7PM; Demolition Derby; 7:30pm; Soul Patrol; 7:30pm; ; Noon to 11pm

◗ BEAD District Bloomington, Gallery Walk — Receptions & exhibits:

By Hand Gallery — Paper Art Quilts
Gallery 406 — Visual Lingua Franca
Ivy Tech Waldron Center — Reclamation: 40 Years of Artists from Pygmalion’s
Pictura Gallery — Works from the Collection
Sublime Design Gallery & Gifts — Closing Party & Sale
The Venue Fine Arts & Gifts — Abstract on Canvas
Gallery Group — The Bellevue Group
Blueline Creative Co-op & Gallery
El Norteno Gallery

◗ WonderLab — The Science of Art: Screenprinting, with David Orr: 5pm

◗ IU Fine Arts Theater — Ryder Film Series: “Kumaré: The True Story of a False Prophet; 7pm

◗ Bloomington Playwrights Project — Original musical, “Dreams & Nightmares”; 7pm

◗ Buskirk-Chumley Theater — “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast”; 7:30pm

◗ The Comedy Attic — Costaki Economopolous; 8 & 10:30pm

◗ Cafe Django — David Miller’s Art Deco Quartet; 7:30pm

◗ IU Woodburn Hall Theater — Ryder Film Series: “Polisse”; 8pm

◗ The Bluebird — JJ Grey, Mofro; 8pm

◗ Max’s Place — Kathy Gutjar; 8pm

◗ IU Fine Arts Theater — Ryder Film Series: “Oslo: August 31”; 8:30pm

◗ Max’s Place — Tarpaper Turley; 10pm

◗ The Bishop — DJ Junebug; midnight

Ongoing:

◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Center — Exhibits:

“40 Years of Artists from Pygmalion’s”; opens Friday, August 3rd, through September 1st

◗ IU Art Museum — Exhibits:

Qiao Xiaoguang, “Urban Landscape: A Selection of Papercuts” ; through August 12th
“A Tribute to William Zimmerman,” wildlife artist; through September 9th
Willi Baumeister, “Baumeister in Print”; through September 9th
Annibale and Agostino Carracci, “The Bolognese School”; through September 16th
“Contemporary Explorations: Paintings by Contemporary Native American Artists”; through October 14th
David Hockney, “New Acquisitions”; through October 21st
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Paragons of Filial Piety”; through fall semester 2012
Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, & Harry Callahan, “Intimate Models: Photographs of Husbands, Wives, and Lovers”; through December 31st
“French Printmaking in the Seventeenth Century”; through December 31st

◗ IU SoFA Grunwald Gallery — Exhibits: Bloomington Photography Club Annual Exhibition; through August 3rd

◗ IU Kinsey Institute Gallery — “Ephemeral Ink: Selections of Tattoo Art from the Kinsey Institute Collection”; through September 21st

◗ IU Lilly Library — Exhibit, “Translating the Canon: Building Special Collections in the 21st Century”; through September 1st

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Closed for semester break, reopens Tuesday, August 21st

◗ Monroe County History Center — Exhibits:

“What Is Your Quilting Story?”; through July 31st
Photo exhibit, “Bloomington: Then and Now” by Bloomington Fading; through October 27th

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07/31/2012

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.” — George R.R. Martin

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WATER!

The football teams from both Bloomington High School North and South are beginning summer workouts this week.

Normally, this development would bum me out as a sign that summer is coming to a rapid conclusion.

For the first time in my life, though, I’m actually looking forward to the end of summer. I’ve had my fill of South Central Indiana being transformed into the Gobi Desert from May through September.

Traffic Tie-Up Caused By The Bypass Construction

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LOOK TO THE SKIES

If you happen to be awake just before dawn these days, you’ll be treated to a spectacular planetary show.

Brilliant Venus shines in the eastern sky with Jupiter just above it. The two planets hang aloft like glittering jewels as the sky turns from royal blue to cyan.

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BTW: Right now, four of the five visible planets can be seen either at dawn or dusk. Mars and Saturn appear in the west after sunset.

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VINDICATION?

When I occasionally drop in to the Subway at 6th and Walnut, I have to endure the auto-tuned thump of hot hit music on the radio as I devour my foot-long veggie deluxe on 9-grain honey oat bread

Invariably I conclude that today’s pop music is mind-numbingly awful. Just as invariably, I flagellate myself for being a grumpy old bastard.

Bitter fossils have been complaining about “kids'” music ever since radio began airing records. I know one extremely old bird who still thinks the Beatles are untalented and a passing fad.

In my case, at least, there may be something valid in my distaste for the likes of Katy Perry and the execrable Justin Bieber.

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A group of Spanish researchers has released a study of nearly one half million pop songs spanning the years 1955-2010 and concluded that today’s hits are more bland, dumb, and loud than those of earlier years.

Bland, dumb, and loud — sounds like a dictionary definition of Carly Rae Jepsen.

Serrà, Corral et al: Schematic Summary With Pitch Data

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The researchers measured the music using three criteria: harmonic complexity, timbral diversity, and loudness.

In strictly technical, scientific terms, the researchers have confirmed my conclusion: today’s pop music blows.

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Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z

Are Americans more bored than ever?

It seems that way, considering the things we do to amuse ourselves.

For instance, there’s acroyoga.

Acroyoga

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Apparently, acroyoga combines yoga, gymnastics, too much free time, and access to glorious, sunny beaches. In other words, it’s the perfect pastime for privileged white people.

In keeping with the American fetish to competitize (I just made the word up, thank you) everything, it seems acroyoga pose-offs may be coming to a television near you soon. Yoga maniacs have been pestering the International Olympic Committee to include the house-wifely alternative to infidelity to include it in future Games. The IOC, thankfully, has ruled yoga is not a sport but a quasi-religious practice.

Now, acroyoga might trump that argument.

More Acroyoga

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One web site tells of acroyoga’s goals to “cultivate trust, empowerment and joy.”

Yuck. Sounds like a line from the marketing pamphlet of some corporate team-building consultants.

And we know how pestilent those people are.

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