Monthly Archives: August 2004

Pitt Pride

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Banana split turns 100

University of Pittsburgh alumni have won the Nobel Prize, played in the National Football League and unlocked the secrets of DNA. On Wednesday, the university celebrated a less prestigious but equally sweet accomplishment — the banana split.

Pitt declared Wednesday “Banana Split Day” and celebrated the dessert’s 100th birthday by serving about 4,000 ice cream cones to university freshmen, family members, students and others returning to campus for the new school year.

Banana spilts I can be proud of. These poor excuses for journalism, I cannot.

High school’s at home; welcome to the collegiate hook-up (Part 1)

High school’s at home; welcome to the collegiate hook-up (Part 2)

What college doesn’t need a drunken debauchery and hedonism sex column? *rolls eyes*

Sock Monkey in ’04

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Prior to primary and caucus season, the battle cry of all but the staunchest supporters
of Bush was “Anybody But Bush in ’04”. Then people saw what the Democratic
party had to offer and suddenly it was “Does it have to be one of them?”
Many ex-Democrat non-Republicans began to brace themselves for a clothespin vote
or contemplate third party candidates.

The owner of JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButI’mVotingForHimAnyway.com
is trying to lure the disenfranchised and disaffected and even conservatives to
the Kerry camp. Not all of the site’s articles are up yet, but they ought to be
interesting. NOTA BENE: The language on the site is rather coarse.

In a related note, here’s another reason why pro-lifers
won’t touch Kerry with a ten meter cattle prod.

For the hat trick, here’s an article
about the man whose “lack of vibrancy…[and] utter dearth of sex appeal
made Al Gore look like Charo”. Then again, some say a d-bag is better than
Bush.

Seeing Red

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Would red marks on a paper or test frighten your child? Would
he/she be scarred for life? Well, thanks to some pseudoscience that’s growing in
popularity, your kids (and mine) probably won’t be subjected to such “frightening”
corrections. It seems purple is the new grading color of choice.

“If you see a whole paper of red, it looks pretty frightening. Purple stands out, but it doesn’t look as scary as red. ” – Sharon Carlson, a health and physical education teacher

I have nothing against purple. In fact, it’s my favorite color. Then again, I don’t have anything against red, either, at least as the color of grading pens. On the whole, I think this pen color issue is nonsense. Heaven forbid we scare a kid into doing better next time! A little bit of negative reinforcement can be a good thing.

On the other hand, there is some substance to studies of psychological responses to color. For instance, green is a dominant color in hospitals because it is a soothing color. Red can be an a aggressive color. Bright, hot colors inspire aggressive thoughts. Cool colors are soothing.

I still think the pen switch is a waste of time, thought, and energy, though. Instead of worrying about Americans falling behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, particularly in sciences, we’re trying to soften the blow of failure. Instead of wondering why the kids make so many mistakes – and fail to learn from them – we’re color coordinating marks of their inadequacy with fuzzy feel-good quackery.

Suddenly, I have the urge to reread The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.

Mother, Should I Trust the Government?

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Hooray! I’m not alone as a moderate Catholic who feels disenfranchised by the two-headed monster in Washington. This bit sums things up quite nicely:

"…by the time I was an adult, the Democratic Party had begun to shift its primary focus away from meat-and-potatoes issues of social justice, to Big Government support of an increasingly un-mainstream ideological platform that had more to do with social engineering than with social justice. This shift was epitomized, of course, by the Democratic Party’s fierce embrace of pro-choice feminism, with all its attendant pieties, from gay marriage to abortion-on-demand, from surrogate parenting to stem-cell harvesting to Orwellian bans on "hate speech."

But I knew I could never be at home in the Republican Party, either. Although ostensibly pro-life, the GOP has remained, as ever, the party in the pocket of Corporate America. (And the bigger the corporation the bigger the pocket, not to mention, pocketbook.) Sure, the Republicans toss us pro-lifers a tasty morsel now and then. I rejoiced mightily when Bush signed the ban on partial-birth abortions; but as an increasingly convinced supporter of small-is-beautiful Catholic social teaching, I remain haunted by Eisenhower’s prophecy about the Military-Industrial Complex, for which Dick Cheney could serve as poster boy. There was nothing for this ex-Democrat, non-Republican to do, in our lesser-of-two-evils bi-partisan mess of a political system, but turn (gag) Independent."