Prepoceros

*Looks askance at North Korea*

Yesterday’s weather report said that there was about a 50% chance of thunderstorm activity today. This morning on my way to school I heard on the radio that there was *definitely* a storm headed our way, tornadoes and all, and that we should prepare for an ass-whooping at around 1:00 (i.e., fifteen minutes from now).

I have some free time between classes today, so I’m sitting in a exterior upstairs hallway. It’s actually been sunny most of the time I’ve been here, but the wind has been INSANE. Any studying involving paper or pens quickly got the kibosh, but even my laptop has nearly been blown off my lap more than once.

No rain yet, but the sky looks ominous, especially to the north. Usually I love thunderstorms, but when I have to be out in one it’s a different story. Is it too much to ask for the storm to rain itself out in the next ninety minutes while I’m in class, so that my fifteen-minute walk to the parking lot and subsequent errand-running are bearable?

Don’t feed the dog gravy.

I’ve harbored an abiding hatred for Stephen Baldwin ever since he ruined a brilliant television show by appearing on it and generally being an asshat.

I expected to loathe the man until my death (or his, preferably). Obviously I don’t know him personally, but his personality and demeanor get under my skin and, like, poke at my insides with little bitty knives of irksomeness*.

Then today I read this Salon article and discovered that the world is slightly more insane than I’d thought possible. Apparently “Stevie B.” is now a super-fundamentalist born-again Christian. What’s more, he’s taking his “gnarly” skateboarding-themed revivals on the road, targeting teenagers around the country, and *kids are listening to him*. His message is pretty disturbing:

Baldwin preaches that free will is a lie of Satan — we must shut off our brains, he says, and be led by what God tells our hearts. Furthermore, he writes, efforts to end global poverty and violence are just the sort of “stupid arrogance” that incur God’s wrath, which we’ll be feeling any day now in the coming apocalypse.

Stephen mfing Baldwin encouraging kids to stop thinking so hard and drink the Kool-Aid already…this frightens me. “Jesus Psycho” is NOT a title to aspire to, okay? Please, children of the world, don’t listen to the crazy man. Go home and read some books. Watch TV, even, as long as this nutjob isn’t on it.

I hereby propose we add to the D.A.R.E. program a segment entitled “Just Say No to Religious Extremism.” It would recognize that young people are often tempted to experiment with religion and would encourage them to do so only when they’re older and able to make an informed decision, and only in the presence of people they know and trust. Lesson one: If a strange man comes up to you on the street and offers you a “decision card,” you should knee him in the junk, run away, and tell a grown-up. That first step is VERY IMPORTANT.

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* Hat-tip to Dooce. “Hot forks of displeasure,” anyone?

Every week or two since the beginning of September we’ve had some sort of mini cold snap and I’ve thought that fall was finally here. Every time so far it’s been a false start, and the temperatures have bounced back into the nineties within a day. This morning, though, when I stumbled outside in a sweatshirt and shorts to walk Sam, it wasn’t just chilly, it was COLD. I think this one’s gonna stick.

You ought to understand, by the way, that when I say COLD I mean it was probably about sixty—I’m a warm-weather girl. I turned on the heat in my apartment two weeks ago, back when the daily highs still topped ninety.

So now instead of having pleasant temperatures at night and oppressive ones during the day, we have pleasant temperatures during the day and nippy ones at night. Still okay. It’s when the daytime highs drop below seventy that I’ll start to get cranky, but that’s probably a good month away.

At least I have the prospect of winter clothes to look forward to. If two shirts are good*, four shirts must be better. Sweaters and layers and tights, oh my!

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* And they are. Even during the summer I usually wear at least two shirts—I think it looks cleaner, and I feel more “put-together.” (Whether put-togetherness is something to strive for is open to debate, I suppose.) And hey, nowadays it’s even fashionable to do so.

Today, for the first time, I saw a flock of birds migrating south for the winter. I don’t mean that this was the first time I’d ever seen birds fly south—I’m sure they haven’t been avoiding me all these years. I mean that this was the first time I’d ever seen birds fly south and *realized* that they were migrating. Isn’t that odd?

If you’d asked me yesterday if I’d ever seen birds flying south for the winter, I’d have said, “Sure, of course I have! Who hasn’t?” But really the notion that birds fly south for the winter has been cemented in my mental list of “facts about the world” from a young age*. Not only was I confident that birds really do migrate, I had the vague sense that this was rather obvious and that I’d confirmed what books and television had told me by observing the phenomenon myself. Not so, apparently.

I think I’m supposed to extrapolate from here to some brilliant insight about the nature of learning and the difference between knowledge gained through direct observation and that gained through hearsay. Um, it’s different. It’s strange to think of all the things that I assume to be true because I’ve been told so repeatedly, but that I’ve never checked up on.

Now that I’ve drawn a vague, tangential conclusion, I’ll close with a question. Have you ever seen birds migrating and been aware that they were, in fact, migrating? Am I the least observant person ever?

Well, that’s a wishy-washy way to go at it. If this were an SAT essay, it *might* score a two out of six on a good day.

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* The first joke I remember learning: Q - Why do birds fly south for the winter? A - Because it’s too far to walk! Guffaw.

My internet connection has been sketchy these last few days. It was out several hours on Monday, some amount of time this morning, and an hour earlier this evening. This is not okay. Do I need to explain why this is not okay? Not. Okay. Time Warner? Roadrunner? Whoever pipes the wonderfulness of the interwebs into my apartment? You’re listening? Because this is not okay.

I don’t like not having internet access at home. Even when it’s on, I don’t like not being fairly certain that it’ll stay on for the next few hours. Ugh.

In the grand scheme of things, having my own internet on my own computer in my own home (kind of), and having that internet work just fine over 99% of the time is a rare blessing, one which I usually take for granted. Nevertheless I’ve come to depend on it, and when that rare blessing is suddenly snatched from out the back of my laptop*? Ouch.

I’m not addicted. I can quit anytime, I swear. Just, you know, not today. Heh.

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* Can you really say “from out the back of,” or did I just make that up? It was the first phrasing that came to mind, but when I typed it out I was all wtf? One noun, one article, and THREE prepositions?

Earlier tonight I set out to bake myself a batch of walnut-chocolate chip cookies as a reward* for being a fairly good girl today. But as I started to break the pre-cut chunks off of the dough-brick (hush), I noticed that the cookie cubelets were significantly smaller than they usually are. (Yes, I’m quite familiar with this exact variety of instant cookie.)

What’s more, there were *six* rows of four cookies instead of the usual five. Thinking I’d picked up the wrong package, I checked the wrapper, only to find emblazoned on it the cheery message “Now makes 24 cookies!” As if shrinking the cookie size so that the walnuts won’t stay on and the chunks don’t distribute themselves as neatly across the cookie pan just so you can claim a twenty percent increase in cookie number were something to be proud of. For shame, Nestlé.

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* A sensible-sounding untruth. I have little self-discipline and cannot reward or punish myself. I baked the cookies because I wanted cookies, goshdarnit.

Remember that Blogger SAT Challenge thing I mentioned a while back? Well, the scores are in, and the results have been published on a blog created just for the Challenge, which you can visit here.

Even if you didn’t write an essay for the challenge (and I haven’t heard from anyone who did), you should go check it out. All 109 essays composed for the challenge are posted, and the general blog-reading public is invited to rate them (to compare their scores with those given by us “expert graders”).

The broad-brush, general first impression of the results? Bloggers are no better than high school students at writing timed SAT-style essays. Much discussion is sure to follow on the site, on Chad’s and Dave’s blogs, and elsewhere on the statistical breakdown of the scores, common characteristics of blog-writing and how those mesh with the goals of the SAT, the validity of the test for measuring writing skill and college-readiness, and of course what this means for our students, the fabric of our society, and the universe as a whole.

I have to zip off to school now, but I’ll certainly be commenting on all of this later, probably both here and at ScienceBlogs. The standardized-test dork in me is totally psyched.

[Inspired by a conversation not too long ago.]

When a gas pump asks (as they all do), “Would You Like to Buy a Carwash Today?” your options are usually ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ I’ve never pressed the ‘Yes’ button, but the question pops up every time regardless. Hope springs eternal if you’re a gas station computer, I guess.

Just once I’d like to see a menu with three possible responses to the carwash offer: “Sure,” “No, thanks,” and “Step off, bi-atch.”

The third button wouldn’t do anything special, but it’d save me the trouble of saying it out loud. Not that I do that.