The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

I watched the debate tonight as all good Americans should. It was very interesting, as presidential debates are wont to be.

Kerry was good. He didn't talk down to people, which was good, though he directed most of his talking toward Jim Lehrer and not to the camera. He did look at the camera, however, when making the points he felt were most important. He never really tripped up on what he was saying and was pretty clear in getting his point across. I thought he did well.

Bush gave a Bush-like performance, which I assume republicans will be happy with. We all know that he's not the most articulate guy on earth, but his answers basically outlined his policies.

There were a couple of times where Bush asked for extra time and then didn't have anything to say. I thought it was kinda weird. Like he asked for extra time just because he thought it would look good. He kinda repeated himself a lot.

A couple times it looked like Kerry wanted to get extra time and Lehrer didn't give it to him. At least Kerry didn't sigh all he damn time like Al Gore and say "lock box" over and over again.

It was pretty clear that all the post debate spin was written days in advance. Rudy Giuliani said at least three times "George Bush talked to the American people and John Kerry lectured them," when that really wasn't true. They also tried to make him look like a flip-flopper within in the debate about his Iraq policy, which didn't really happen either. I saw the John Edwards spin but he didn't really talk about how Bush sucked, but more about how Kerry was dope.

Bush has won every debate he's ever been in pretty decisively, which is surprising. This one was basically a draw, which makes Kerry viable I think.

I get kinda nervous when Bush talks sometimes because of his cadence. It's like trying to listen to John the Stutterer on the Howard Stern show for more than 15 seconds. My stomach just starts to spin. Bush is obviously not that bad, but it's not even what he says that bothers me. I can listen to "Big Time" Cheney or Donny Rumsfeld outline policy and stomach it. I can listen to Colin Powell outline the same policies and think it sounds intelligent and well thought out.

Anyway, interesting debate. The fake town hall debate is going to be wack. Why give people pre-scripted questions? Get a moderator if it's going to be scripted. Do a real town hall, or just have a regular debate.

I'm watching the Daily Show as I'm writing this post and Samantha Bee is doing an awesome piece on undecided voters. She sat them all down like she was gonna ask them questions about being undecided and then yelled at them for being undecided.

This piece more or less echoed the spirit of one of my earlier posts. I don't understand people who are undecided and I figure they must be stupid. One of the guys she interviewed actually said something like "I just don't know. With Kerry, I'm just not sure, but with Bush I feel like the world is going to end tomorrow." And he was undecided. Fucking retard.

Anyway, the Daily Show is awesome.

I realized today one of the reasons I enjoy teaching. We hear all the time how we need to stop and smell the roses and I suppose what that equates to is noticing all the little details in life and appreciating them.

In all of the other jobs I've had I would go there, do the work, leave, and forget about it. There were many days where I would literally do nothing and it made absolutely no difference.

Teaching is the exact opposite of that. In order to teach a lesson, you have to plan basically down to the minute. The beauty of writing and executing the lesson plan (or the absolute bane of it, if that's your perspective) is the necessary attention to detail. In that sense, I have to stop every day and notice the details, not only in planning but while class is happening as well. It doesn't always go perfectly, obviously, but in the end I get to have those moments over again and make sure that they go better next time.

I suppose I'm the type of person who delights in the details of life. Teaching is a good opportunity to jump into those details.

There are other reasons I enjoy teaching, but I think the reason it seems to suit me is the planning. If everything goes right, there are really no surprises in the lesson. As soon as I learned the term I knew I was 'risk averse' and surprises and so forth don't really excite me. The students, of course, are a surprise a minute, but even they fit within the framework of the plans.

I guess it wasn't really a revelation, but the thought just sort of crystallized today while I was planning.

I was wondering if the title of my blog conveys the meaning I had intended it to convey. I'll bet it doesn't.

When I was thinking of the title I thought about how a lot of greatest hits albums, and other similar products where the greatest songs, essays, stories, and so forth are collected together in one edition, they often call them "The Quintessential [name here]". The word quintessential, incidentally, is a great word. I remember being in sixth grade and having that as a vocabulary/spelling word and thinking even back then that it was a great word. Anyhow, the idea behind it is that what the great minds behind the product have done is weed out the extra stuff and put together only the greatest hits, as it were, of that author, singer, band, or whoever.

I liked the idea of this being a place where my quintessential thoughts would be put down, but realized very quickly that these would not be the greatest thoughts to ever have emerged from my skull, and, in fact, most likely quite the opposite would be true. So since I would be putting down arbitrary thoughts, rather than just the great ones, the title seemed apparent. So there you go.

It occurred to me just recently that the words 'arbitrary' and 'ChuckJerry' sortof rhyme and that the inspiration for the title could be construed as simply a phonetically pleasing option. While it is somewhat phonetically pleasing, it is a coincidence and the intended meaning is, on an abstract level, somehow more pleasing.

I've been thinking about the MVP and the Cy Young awards for this years baseball season and wanted to get my thoughts down.

In the National League, it's hard to vote against Barry Bonds for MVP. If the Giants sucked, like they did in the beginning of the year, then I'd say vote against him because despite the walks and HRs and ridiculous .370-something batting average, he didn't help his team win. Except they've turned everything around in SF and it's mainly because of Bonds, who's clearly the best player in the league, even though he's kindof a jerk. I really wanted to say that Adrian Beltre of the Dodgers or Scott Rolen of the Cardinals should win, but it's got to go to Bonds.

The NL Cy Young should be Roger Clemens, also a bit of a runaway. There's no other pitcher in the NL who really deserves it, so he sortof wins by default. He dominated in the beginning of the year and had 9 wins in his first 10 starts. He has 18 wins now, and should have gotten his 19th the other day, but the game was scoreless until the 10th inning. The only other candidate I can think of is Randy Johnson, who's team sucks and loses games for him all the time. Clemens is leading the charge to the playoffs for Houston, so he should win.

The AL is a whole other story. There aren't any clear winners for either award, but lots of deserving candidates. The MVP should come down to Gary Sheffield and Manny Ramirez, but David Ortiz and Vladimir Guerrero are in the running as well. Even though the Yankees are stacked, Sheffield has carried them all year when just about everyone else has struggled for periods. He's hitting .295 or so right now, but he's hitting something like .340 with runners in scoring position.

Manny Ramirez is an incredible hitter. He's an awful fielder, though, and is basically a liability in left field. I really don't know why he doesn't DH more. He's always a threat at the plate, however, and has put up amazing numbers this year. He may get hurt by splitting votes with David Ortiz, his Red Sox team mate, who's numbers are just about as amazing as Manny's. How did they both put up numbers like that hitting back to back in the lineup? Between the two of them, they must have never left any runners on base.

Vladimir Guerrero's team is slipping out of contention and that may hurt his chances. The Angels are still technically alive, but they probably won't overcome the 3 game deficit behind Oakland and they definitely won't overcome the 5.5 games against Boston in the wild card. His numbers are comparable to these other guys, but he's not really a contender, like his team.

The AL Cy Young is between Curt Schilling and Johan Santana. Both of them have the same record, 20-6, I believe. Santana has been better since the All-Star break and has more strikeouts and is really the one guy making his team, the Twins, legitimate. Boston would be pretty good with Schilling or with a less good 15 game winning pitcher. That's not true in the playoffs, of course, but that doesn't count for the voting. Both of them are pretty much equal, so I'm guessing that Schilling will win since he's been great for years and hasn't won yet. I would vote for Schilling if I were voting.

The following conversation ensued between myself and a student:

"You know, mista, you need more skills."
"Huh? You mean like numchuck skills?"
"No, I mean teaching skills."
"But it's just the first day, we haven't learned anything yet."
"Yeah, but you need to improve your skills."
"How do you know? What if I told you you needed to improve your studenting skills?"
"But you don't know that yet, mista, we didn't do any work yet."
"Well, how do you know I need to improve my teaching skills if I didn't teach you anything yet?"
"Well, I guess so. But it's pretty boring so far."

I'm set up for automatic updates with my Windows XP OS. Four or five days ago I was updated with the new Windows XP Service Pack, which is apparently supposed to increase security and things of that nature.

It's good because finally Internet Explorer has a pop-up blocker that actually works and is integrated completely inside the IE system. I've only downloaded free pop-up blockers before, but they all sucked and were very intrusive into the browser space. One of them even made a gun shooting sound whenever it would block a pop-up, which was only about 10% of the time.

This service pack pop-up blocker blocks any and all pop-ups, even ones you request by clicking on a link. You have to turn off the blocker for certain sites if they shoot up new windows for browsing. It's easy to turn off, though if you're so inclined.

The other thing it does is to block any program that connects to the internet. For example, it blocks Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger unless you tell it not to. Again, it's not hard to turn it off, but the default is to completely disconnect any such program.

The main purpose of this service pack is to apparently increase security. The new security features are very apparent, while I really can't tell if it's doing anything else new that's not related to security. I don't think it is. I guess I'm glad to be safe. It's better to err on the side of caution, especially with such a widely used OS, for folks who might be in the dark about protecting their stuff.

On Joe's advice, I'll make an effort to post some interesting stories about teaching and what it's like. In general, teaching is the most fun thing I've ever done, but it's sad sometimes to see how the system is failing so many kids, and to know that I'm part of that system. Most days, though, I feel like I do my part to make it better.

I'll start off with a couple of short ones from last year, my first year.

I have a conversation with one of my students that went something like this:
"Where's [student x]?"
"He's not here. He's gonna have a baby, though, mista."
"He's having a baby?"
"Yeah."
"Who in the world would sleep with him?"
"Ha, that's funny mista. That's the new thing though."
"What is?"
"Having babies."
"Having babies is the new thing? Like it's the new black?"
"Yeah, it's in style."

Another one that made me laugh pretty hard:
We were in class and a car backfired outside. The kids commented on how it sounded like a gun and they should duck. One of them said, "Imagine if it hit Mr. Gardner. He would go like this..." Then he was all melodramatic and held his chest and let out a wail. As he fell he said "I love math. Aaahhh."

The one that made me laugh hardest last year:
Two girls sitting next to each other were finally putting an effort into the class. One of them remembered a formula and solved a problem correctly and said "Aww yeah," and reached to high five her friend. The two of them legitimately meant to high five and completely missed each others hands. It was like that old movie The Dream Team. I literally had to stop my lesson for about two or three minutes to compose myself.

I went back to work last week and I ended up doing lots of stuff after work to get prepared for the week. I took a bit of a break on the blog. Sorry about that, I know you've been pining for more.

I'm going to have to come up with a time to regularly post either before or after work. Probably after work. Most people can post while they're at work and that's what makes it interesting because it's a diversion. I have to do it at some other time, so I'll have to make time for it.

Rest assured, though that I will post regularly, except probably Tuesday because I take my masters classes on Tuesdays.

There are really only two blogs that I take note of on a regular basis, mine and Joe's. Between the two, though, there seems to be two different theories on how the posts should look. My posts are usually several paragraphs long and it's most likely a chore to read them. Joe's posts, on the other hand, probably average about for or five lines each with a link or something of that nature.

His posts are probably much more easy to sift through and probably a lot more informative since there's usually a link involved. His posts also usually only hint at his opinions whereas mine are filled with opinion. He's certainly a more experienced blogger/reader of blogs, so I'm guessing his blog is more the norm, though I don't know that I read enough on the web to adopt that style.

Anyhow, this post isn't really about anything, I was just noticing the difference in philosophy.

Unlike you regular schlubs out there, I have been off from work for the summer since I am a teacher. I've spent my summer doing not too much of anything except packing my house and moving. All in all, it was a very good summer.

(When I was seventeen, I drank some really good beer. I drank some really good beer I purchased with a fake ID. My name was Brian McGee. I stayed up listening to Queen. When I was seventeen.)

Tomorrow I'm back to work for a week of workshops and curriculum changes and so forth that basically boils down to trying not to drink so much coffee throughout the day that I start to shake.

I think the four days they give us of workshops will be enough to get back in the swing of having to actually be at work during the day and then next week starts the craziness with the students. I hope I get freshman again. Last year was my first year and I feel I didn't scare them sufficiently at the beginning of the term. This year I'll do it very differently.

It boggles my mind that there are any voters out there who are undecided about who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election. What is wrong with people from Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and so forth? What is it that you can't decide. The two sides are very clear, the policies aren't changing, the only thing that might be different is the undecided voter's faith in his or her beliefs.

I hate watching debates and then viewing the polls of undecideds right afterwards because they sound like retards saying that so and so 'looks presidential' or 'seems more electable'. Anyone who's got their party's nomination is electable and is presidential and is capable of running the country.

I don't understand Republicans, but if you've decided that you are a Republican and you're going to vote for Bush, then at least that makes sense and I can respect your decision. If you're undecided today, then you shouldn't be allowed to vote. In fact, you should be deported.

Larry David, of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame, and also a fairly active political figure, says that undecided voters aren't really undecided, they just like being pandered to. I can see that, but why then is there a huge bounce for Bush coming out of the convention, and a smaller, but significant bounce for Kerry coming out of his convention?

Maybe Americans are just that stupid. At least people from Ohio.

Former president Bill Clinton was admitted to the hospital today to have heart surgery. According to some reports he's going to have a quadruple bypass.

That is one hell of an operation. My dad was once scheduled to have a quadruple bypass and then when they started surgery they decided they needed to do 5 bypasses instead of 4. That's gotta be some kind of record. Anyhow, he recovered pretty well and said that the thing that bothered him most was his leg where they took the veins to put in his heart.

Good luck to my homeboy, Bill, on the impending surgery. I wonder if this is going to have an effect on the Kerry campaign. Was Bill scheduled to campaign at all? Anyhow, Kerry needs to try and win on his own merit, so this clearly can't be used as an excuse.

I finally moved last Friday. The place is in pretty good shape except for the one bedroom where all the boxes are. Most of them are unpacked, though.

The cable guy just left so I'm back online with all three of my loyal readers. Looking forward to posting about more random crap in the near future.

It's been along time. I shouldn't have left you. Without a fat blog to step to.