Day: April 28, 2010

Take it from Snee: The quittening

We suburban Americans are normally a cowardly lot. We don’t really grow a pair of balls until wrapped in steel Toyotas and a horn can do our talking.

But, there are certain times when we just can’t resist making someone feel like s@&t about their personal habits.

Prime example: smoking.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have sympathy for smokers, and I smoke. But it doesn’t matter where you light up. It could be in the clearly marked smoking area, a corn field in the middle of Nebraska, an asbestos shingles factory in Bangladesh or the Earth’s molten core. Somebody will walk up to you and say, “You know that’s killing you, right?” Continue reading Take it from Snee: The quittening

Run for the hills, Tian Tian!

Zookeepers at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. have officially called off this year’s Panda Watch. It appears that Mei Xiang faked the whole thing, again.

Apparently, Mei Xiang will do anything to keep the attention she craves from zoo personnel, the media and her own badgered panda husband, Tian Tian, all of whom have been through this ordeal five times.

It’s time to leave, Tian Tian. She’ll just keep pulling this act to guilt you into sticking around. It may be hard to leave the potential mother of your cub or whatever they call your babies, but would she really lie to you if she loved you?

(And that’s how you convince an endangered species to stop breeding donating their sperm to a zookeeper.)

Stop thinking about the children

It’s over. It’s all over.

All the illusions of “school life” that have been built up in the fragile psyche of those that love Japan have now been shattered, as the traditions and strictures of school no longer match those of Japan’s reality.

Accordingly, an increasing number of public and private middle schools have begun switching their school terms to a semestral system instead of the traditional trimestral system. For students, that means ten to fifteen more school hours in a term, and teachers are more free to deal with their classes rather than prepare report cards. That’s a lot of school.

It’s over.

Now, I was lucky enough to graduate from my podunk little high school (“What high school did you go to?” “Culpeper.” “Where’s that?” “Culpeper.”) before they began the switch to block scheduling. As such, all I know of is the period system, and as such, I know not of these new-fangled academic systems that schools these days use. But this system? It just sounds rough.

Smoke on the water

Let’s be clear on one thing: oil spills are not cool. We’re going out on a limb with that one, even though it often means killing dangerous animals. However, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just took a turn for the awesome.

As the oil slick gets closer to the Mississippi River Delta, the federal government is thinking about setting the whole thing on fire. Take that, Louisiana!

UPDATE: It’s happening.