Payday!

I feel rich today. It’s payday! Here at my school we get paid on a “nine month contract.” Since we begin our fall semester in August, and end the spring one in May, it’s actually a ten month nine month contract. But wait! We get paid in twelve equal checks, one at the end of each month except July. The July paycheck we get at the end of June. Additionally, we’re allowed to teach one or two extra classes in the spring and fall and get paid about $2000 for each we teach. The checks for the extra classes appear separately at the end of each month, with the exception of August and January, when no extra checks are cut. In the summer we’re allowed to teach up to three classes, and we get paid 7% of our base ten month nine month salary for each of those. Logically, if logic was involved, a class that’s worth $2000 in the spring or fall would be worth $2000 in the summer, or a fall or spring class should be worth 7% of one’s base ten month nine month base; but no, for those of us earning $30,000 or more on our ten month nine month salary, each class in the summer is worth more.

So today, I got my June check from my ten month nine month salary, my July check from my ten month nine month salary, and half of the 21% of my ten month nine month salary for summer. I have to be careful though, because I won’t have a ten month nine month paycheck at the end of July, and even though I’ll probably teach two additional classes in the fall, beginning in August, the first check for those won’t appear in my pay until the end of September.

“Can’t we get nine payments instead of twelve?”

“No, that would require a new line of code in the program, but we’ll give you June and July at the same time. How’s that?”

Were these arrangements devised by a psychotic orangutan on acid? A Bush economics adviser?

And administrators wonder why we laugh at Dilbert.

Fast Train to Venice

My squeeze and I had just finished a delightful week in Rome, and we were next scheduled for a week in Venice. To get there, we had booked passage on a bullet train that would take us through Tuscany in what was scheduled to be about a four hour trip. This meant that we had to check out of our Rome hotel, taxi to the train station, and once there figure out which train was ours and get ourselves and our luggage on it.

We had some good luck at the station because we were approached by a stout porter who spoke English. He took our bags and led us to the track our train would be on. He told us that we’d board in about 45 minutes.

When the time came to load ourselves aboard, the porter reappeared and helped us with our stuff. On the train itself was another man who asked us our seat numbers, and first found our seats for us, and helped us get situated. In the meantime the porter had lugged our bags aboard and put them in their proper place. My girlfriend said thank you, and handed him a 10 Euro tip (a Euro at that time was worth about $1.15). He handed the note back to her and said that he figured he was worth 20 Euros, which my girlfriend then handed him. “I never had anyone tell me how much to tip him before,” she said.

Meanwhile the man who had helped us to our seats asked if we wanted sandwiches and drinks for our trip. We told him no, we had heard excellent things about the lunches served in the dinning car of the train, and we were looking forward to that. He explained that the rail-line was no longer serving food on the train and asked again if we wanted sandwiches and drinks. We said OK. We each got two salami sandwiches, a bottle of water, and a can of Pepsi. I handed the man a 20 Euro note, expecting change. He shook his head no, so I opened my wallet and he took another 20. Then he started helping the Americans who had boarded right after us. A similar scene played out with them, and after the Italian man left I heard one of the Americans exclaim “I wonder if I have a sign that says ‘Victim’ on my forehead.” As it turned out, the train did indeed serve food, and had several sittings on our trip. It was the only time in Italy that I actually felt conned.

The trip itself was very interesting. First, the seating was set up so that I and my companion faced each other. There were four seats on each side of the train, and my squeeze and I had the windows on our side. Two young American women from Virginia Tech were in the seats beside us on the aisle.

The Italian train is very, very fast. In US trains, if you look out the window at the parallel highway, you’ll always notice that the cars and trucks are moving at a much faster speed than the train is. Not on this Italian bad boy - we were barreling past even the quickest of the cars on the highway, and I suspect that Italian speed limits are way above American ones. We were moving!

The scenery was wonderful. Out in the Italian countryside we saw the vast expanses of land, mostly uninhabited. We saw fields of grapes. We saw ancient estates and castles. It was beautiful.

In the meantime, my girlfriend had engaged the two Virginia Tech coeds in conversation (she’s quiet the social animal, she is). She shared with them that she had “dated” a guy from Virginia Tech years before. Now in my girlfriend’s girl-speak “dated” means slept with. If she talks about someone she “went out with” that means didn’t sleep with (usually). Girlfriend is an interesting character in that she seems both embarrassed and simultaneously proud of the number of sexual experiences she has had, alternately bragging about her past boyfriends and fiances, and later saying things like “I’d never tell ANYONE how many men I’ve slept with.”

She has “dated” and/or has been engaged to the doctor, the lawyer, the Jew, the Brit, the pro golfer, the pilot, the Mafioso, the Italian, the artist, the stockbroker, the piano-tuner, the mortician, the scribe, the...

Interestingly, she gets upset if I talk about any of my old flames because “It’s boring.”

After the co-eds had detrained, I said to Girlfriend “The next time you start that ‘dated’ crap, I’m going to tell whoever you’re talking to ‘She’s trying to sleep with at least one guy from every state in the union. So far, she’s only got four left’.”

Girlfriend was silent for a moment and then asked “Which four?”

“What!?”

“Which four states do you think I haven’t slept with anyone from?”

I thought about it, and decided to pick places that were sparsely populated.

“Nevada, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Delaware.”

“Well,” she said, “you’d be wrong.”

Goody.

Fate

One of the founding fathers of American psychology in the late nineteenth century was the great William James at Harvard. One of his lesser known contributions was his sponsoring of the awarding of a doctorate in psychology to a Russian immigrant named Boris Sidis. As a way of saying thank you to James, Sidis decided to make his newborn son “William James Sidis” a genius by using the psychological techniques he had learned at Harvard. He was incredibly successful, and Bill Sidis was doing things like teaching himself Greek at age five (he later would enroll at Harvard at age 12). But although little Bill had the brain of an adult, he had the emotions of a child. When the family took a vacation in upstate New York, Bill sat down for breakfast one morning and, after examining the menu, ordered. The waiter told him that, unfortunately, they were out of what Bill had requested. The enraged little boy had to be carried away by his father as the child screamed over and over “But it is written! It is written!” like some Old Testament prophet.

It is written.

Fate.

Sometimes I wonder.

I have a birdhouse out back. It’s meant for purple martins, but after two seasons of availability it has not attracted any. I did see a male martin checking it out in the early spring, but he decided to go elsewhere. Instead I have a couple of apartments worth of house sparrows. I hate house sparrows and call them “cockroach sparrows.” They’re not pretty, they don’t sing, and they’re dirty. Their nests are extremely disheveled, unlike the tidy purple martins and their nests of mud and leaves.

I was sitting on my back porch recently and noticed that there was a piece of straw or string hanging from one of the sparrow apartments. Then I saw it wiggle. I realized it was a baby sparrow who had fallen out of the nest, and was hanging by it’s head on the birdhouse railing. Even though I don’t like the birds, I felt some responsibility for the poor creature. So I got a broom and gently pushed the little fledge back into his house.

Twenty minutes later the same chick popped out of the house, over the ledge, and fell all the way to the ground. The dog ate it.

It is written.

Paying the Piper

I was filling my car yesterday (I paid $2.20 a gallon for the privilege), and the fellow at the pump next to me topped off his tank and exclaimed “Fifty dollars to fill-up! Can you believe that?”

I told him, “Expect it to get worse.”

I noticed that he was driving a huge SUV. I didn’t see a “W” sticker on his back window but since a large majority of Oklahomans voted for George W in the last election, I figured he did too.

If everyone in America owns and drives gas-guzzling SUVs, pickup trucks, and vans (according to Auto Week, only 40% of new vehicle sales are for automobiles) there’s going to be a strain on the oil supply. If Americans vote a Texas oil-man with powerful sponsors in the oil bidness into the White House, prices on oil and gas are going to go up.

Expect to pay even more for oil and gas in the coming weeks, months, and years, but sleep well, knowing that married homosexuals won’t be breaking into your home at night to harm you or your family.

Brer Possum

There’s a large undeveloped field behind our house. The backyard fence between us and the field is only marginally effective in keeping the wild critters on their side of the boundary, sorta like something out of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Good fences make for good neighbors?

The other night the dogs were going apoplectic barking at something in the backyard. Unwisely, my girlfriend let them out. It was a possum, walking the top of the back fence.

Immediately the larger dog pulled the possum down off the fence and killed it.

This upset my girlfriend.

She quickly regained her composure and managed to bustle the dogs back inside. She then rooted around in the garage for a few minutes for a shovel so that she could scoop up Brer Possum’s carcass and toss him into someone else’s back yard (sorta the way Oklahoma did to Texas with meth labs). By the time she got out to the backyard again, the Brer Possum was gone.

He’d been playing possum.

Another Data Point On Oklahoma Education

This is a letter to the editor in today’s Tulsa World:

>>The June 10 cartoon “Non Sequitur” displayed some of the most ludicrous irony I have ever seen in print. It tried vainly to characterize whoever feels it reasonable to doubt the theory of evolution as being as illogical as those who would deny the law of gravity.

>>To those, whom I realize includes the majority of the scientific community, who don’t understand the difference between gravity and the theory of evolution, take a second to find the switch that turns your head from the “intellectual sounding hat rack” setting to the thinking machine it was designed to be.

>>Now, the law of gravity has been observed in action by humans, and we can demonstrate it at any time. No people ever observed evolution occurring and we cannot reproduce it in the present. This leaves only the fossil record as “evidence” one way or the other and all honest evolutionists, including Darwin, have admitted that the fossil record is the biggest obstacle to believing in evolution.

>>When the world’s scientists believed the world was flat, at least it was because of lack of information. In evolution the world has superimposed the greatest hoax in history onto the fabric of current scientific thought and posterity will eventually bear out this persistent logic.

I have chosen to omit the writer’s name out of respect for his family and the embarrassment this letter must cause them.

I don’t know whether it’s more amazing that someone wrote that letter, or that the Tulsa World published it. Wouldn’t the editors of the World have immediately thrown the letter in the trash if the author had suggested that both common sense and the Bible dictate that the world is flat, and that any notion that science has that it’s a sphere “has superimposed the greatest hoax in history onto the fabric of current scientific thought and posterity will eventually bear out this persistent logic.” Of course they would have. But the topic of evolution is one still deemed open for debate it seems.

In the 1960s I was attending the University of North Carolina. My professor was discussing evolution and asked our class of about 30 if any of us didn’t believe in evolution. One (older) woman raised her hand. The class laughed at her. In the 1990s a biology(!) professor at the Tulsa Community College asked her class if any of them actually BELIEVED in evolution. One student raised her hand. The class laughed at her.

“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers, these are people of the land, the common clay of the new west. You know . . . morons!” —The Ringo Kid, in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles

Eyes Wide Open

I rented Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut the other night. I’m a fan of Kubrick and think that 2001: A Space Odyssey is still one of the best films ever made. In fact, I like just about everything the man has created, the exception being Barry Lyndon. I noticed that Time in an issue a couple of weeks ago named the 100 best films of all time; Barry Lyndon was one of them - did the Time editors and I watch the same film?

When Eyes Wide Shut was first released, several women I knew told me they’d like to go see it, and I told them I’d be more than happy to take them. But each of them, individually, saw it by herself, or went with someone else. It was frustrating. So, I didn’t see it until I got a DVD of it a few nights ago. I was excited, because I’m a fan of Nicole Kidman, in the same way that I’m a fan of Kubrick. I think Kidman is the most beautiful woman of the age.

If you haven’t seen Eyes Wide Shut, I need to tell you that the film begins with Kidman dancing nekkid, back to the camera, to Shostakovich’s Waltz Number 2 from his Jazz Suite. Wow! I’d never seen Kidman nekkid before. I have to say, she’s got kinda a big butt, and pretty small breasts. But... I still think she’s the most beautiful woman of the age. That face! That red hair! That face!

I love you Nicole! I’m not as handsome as Tom, but I’m not as crazy either; I promise that if I’m ever on Oprah I won’t act like a chimp. Marry me! Have my babies!

Doris Roberts Belongs to Me

I own Doris Roberts. You might say she’s my bitch. Most people don’t know that I own her, including Miss Roberts herself.

Let me explain.

Two summers ago my squeeze decided to rent a beach house in May on Pawleys Island, South Carolina, for a week. Pawleys Island isn’t really a very large place, perhaps five miles long and two or three miles wide. Half of the island faces the Atlantic and the other side faces a salt flat. The beach houses there are nothing particularly luxurious, but because of the location and the panache, when they sell, it’s for a million dollars and up. Pawleys visitors are mostly renters, and the clientele are often among the society’s most chichi. It is Pawleys, too, that is famous for its rope hammocks which admittedly are very comfortable.

Surprisingly, there really isn’t much in the way of tourist spots or souvenir shops in the small communities on the mainland across from Pawleys. There are a few average bars, and a couple of unremarkable restaurants nearby. Nonetheless, my significant other had decided to check out the small hammock store near Pawleys while I circled the block in the rental car (parking was a problem). On about the fifth pass, I had turned onto the main drag that passed near the hammock shop and saw my girlfriend, her mother, and an old woman standing at the curb. Incredibly, the old woman, without looking, stepped in front of my car and I had to stomp the brake pedal for dear life so as not to hit her. Her guardian angel must have been with her because the old woman just missed becoming a hood ornament on my rental.

As my squeeze and her mom climbed into the car she asked “Do you know who that was?”

“Yeah! Some crazy old woman,” I replied, “who nearly got dead.”

“That was Doris Roberts!”

“Who the hell is Doris Roberts?”

I’ve subsequently found that she is a fairly well known star of sit-coms. I’ve seen her on the TV on several occasions since. And every time I do, I say to myself “Doris Roberts, you belong to me!”

Just Another Brick in the Wall

I’ve now had a full week of classes under by belt (I’d rather have a 25-year old under my belt, but whaddyagonnado?). The students seem bland enough. I love the blank stares, the drool dribbling down the sides of their mouths, the quiet gnawing of the textbooks. For some reason my class last Thursday was obsessed about hand preference. I told them SOME left-handed people are right-brain dominant, and thus left-handed people are overly represented among highly gifted mathematicians. So the pregnant woman on the front row says “I know a lot of left handed people, and none of them have good math skills.” I replied, “because math geniuses are disproportionately left handed doesn’t mean that left-handed people are all math geniuses.” She looked at me like I had just uttered Swahili. It’s gonna be a long semester.

My student is clearly a concrete thinker. It’s surprising to me just how many adult concrete thinkers I have to deal with as students in college. Perhaps even more surprising is how many concrete thinkers I have to deal with as teaching colleagues. In a conversation with a colleague a little while ago, he commented that all the soldiers who fought for the Confederate cause in the Civil War were traitors. This is an idea that he borrowed from Al Franken in Franken’s book, Lies, and the Lying Liars that Tell Them. My colleague is not prone to new ideas of his own, so he has a tendency to “borrow” ideas from books he reads.

I asked him if the Confederates were traitors in the same way that Jefferson, Washington, and Adams were traitors.

“Oh, no! Those men weren’t traitors.”

“What’s the difference between the founding fathers and the Confederates?” I asked.

“The founding fathers were on the winning side,” he replied.

“So,” I said, “if the Nazis had won the Second World War, the Holocaust would be morally acceptable?”

“Oh, yes! The Germans would have written all the history books.”

That, of course, doesn’t mean that we who read them would have to agree. The white man won the Indian wars, but there are some of us, textbooks or no, who still think the treatment of the Native Americans in the nineteenth century was immoral. American historians, being on the winning side, have written justifications for dropping A-bombs on Japan, but there are many Americans who still question the morality of that decision.

My colleague, however, only knows what he reads, and apparently is incapable of independent thought. What amazes is that he’s a college teacher with an advanced degree. Sad.