Quote of the day (yesterday) goes to Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) at Betsy DeVos’s appearance before Congress on the 2018 Education Department budget:
Education is not mayonnaise, and, frankly, the day we start treating the education of our children like we do the marketing of a condiment is the day we have given up on our kids.
This was in response to a Republican Senator’s (R-La.) comment that choosing a school should be like going to the store to choose from six kinds of mayonnaise. Louisiana was ranked #46 out of 50 states in USNews’ 2017 report and last in an independent 2016 study.
Interesting...
- May 4
From VICE, yet another chilling story: a data broker is collecting and selling location information of people who visited Planned Parenthood, where they came from, and where they went afterwards. I think we all need to be trained up on proper information security to circumvent the oncoming Big Brother state that's bearing down on us. Step one: leave the phone at home.
April 29
Hmmm. A scan of my Google News feed picked this up today: Café Hon in Hampden is closing this evening. The space has been bought by the Foreman/Wolf group, who run some of our favorite restaurants in the city. The last time we ate there was probably before Finn was born, and we were not impressed; the owner trademarked the word "Hon" and got a lot of bad local press for enforcing it. They were featured later on "Kitchen Nightmares" and nobody came out looking well. Hopefully the new venue will be worth visiting.
April 12
I've been looking for the collected Venture Brothers seasons on DVD for years with no luck, and suddenly they appeared on Netflix's DVD service (yes, we still pay to have DVDs sent by mail). I just filled up the queue with comedy goodness and bumped everything else to the bottom. By the way, there's a movie coming! I sure hope it's better than the Deadwood movie.
April 1
This is a hilarious note from the owner of a Porsche 914 to the next thief who attempts to steal it:
Now you will become adrift in the zone known to early Porsche owners as “Neverland” and your quest will be to find second gear. Prepare yourself for a ten-second-or-so adventure. Do not go straight forward with the shift knob, as you will only find Reverse waiting there to mock you with a shriek of high-speed gear teeth machining themselves into round cylinders. Should you hear this noise, retreat immediately to the only easy spot to find in this transmission: neutral.
So much of this resonates with me, and this transmission section in particular, given the large amount of Volkswagen engineering present in the 914: the entire section on the transmission could very well have been written for any variant of air-cooled VW buses.
March 29
I loaded up my profile on this old Mac and came across a pile of bookmarks from years ago; one of which is my profile on Last.fm, with the first playlist dating to 2006 and the last from October of 2017. I'd forgotten all about Last.fm and wasn't even aware it was still around. It tracks, though; this is when I moved over to Spotify exclusively.
