inkbluesky

Magic trick costs teacher job

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

“I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers.  He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue, you can’t take any more assignments you need to come in right away,’” he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell and went much farther than he’d hoped.

“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’  ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.

The school plans a barbeque and witch burning next week.

stacked slices

Some of the far Right blogs, news columnists and of course Fox and a few talking heads at CNN have tried to paint Rev Wright as a little extreme. Interpreting one sermon that has had snippets run over and over again as Wright blaming America for 9-11. That interpretation seems debatable, but what is not debatable is that far Right Republican ministers did explicitly blame America for 9-11 and these same right-wingers that are condemning Weight never said a word to condemn the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, The Violent Language of Republican Pundits Poisons Our Democracy

Speaking in the days after the events of 9/11 on the 700 Club, the flagship daily broadcast of his Christian Broadcast Network, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed the death and destruction on liberal groups in America:

FALWELL: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.

ROBERTSON: Well, yes.

FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”

ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

All covered in the legal realm by free speech protection, but where was the cultural outrage. Where was the endless loops of this video on mainstream media networks. Why are the same people that support the Robertson’s ( who was once a Republican presidential canidate) applying a different standard to Wright.

You may already be familiar with many of these tips, but then again there might be one or two you haven’t heard before, 50 Ways to Help the Planet. If most of us stopped running the faucet while brushing your teeth that could save the U.S. the total amount of water that New York City uses in a year. Plant a tree - I planted a few trees with relatives when I was a kid. There is something incredibly gratifying about seeing the tree you planted grow as you grow up. One of them was a weeping willow that is huge now.

aspen blues

China farms the world to feed a ravenous economy

Laos’ communist regime touts rubber as a miracle crop that will help lift the country from the ranks of the world’s poorest nations. China is expected to consume a third of the world’s rubber by 2020, become its largest car market and put 200 million vehicles on the road.

In Inner Mongolia, Pushing Architecture’s Outer Limits

Not long ago, residents of this region 350 miles west of Beijing lived in elaborate tents called yurts. Now, with a population of 1.5 million, many live in homes that would make New Yorkers jealous. According to Bao Chongming, the regional vice-mayor, they have the second highest per-capita income in China (trailing only Shanghai, the country’s financial capital) and an annual economic growth rate of 40 percent.

Ordos officials decided that the old urban center, Dongsheng, was too crowded, and set out a few years ago to build a new one, Kangbashi, 20 miles away; its population is projected to reach 100,000 by the end of 2008 and five times that number by 2010. And it is sprouting satellite developments, including Mr. Cai’s cultural district.

I was tempted to steal one of the photos (desert by Doug Kanter) from the slideshow to this story. Generally people think of deserts as being lifeless,but they’re a unique biome. Though it is true that deserts are distinguished by their lack of rainfall, so that leaves routing water to these new insta-cities from somewhere else.

A couple years ago there was a lot of buzz including one of Sin City’s directors Robert Rodriguez about how everyone could now be a film maker because of the software available for composting and other effects and digital hardware. So far that doesn’t seem to have panned out ( stupid pet tricks on YouTube don’t count), but in case you’re still trying to make a career in film and pay your rent, Getting Paid: Sites that Help Filmmakers and Video Producers Make Money

On the other hand go to one of the Ivy league schools. Go to work as an executive at one of the oil companies. You gave to be able to answer the phone and read a spread sheet, but you’ll never break a sweat - Exxon posts $10.9 billion profit

The oil giant earned $10.9 billion in profits, up 17 percent from the previous year. The amount was short of the all-time record Exxon set the previous quarter but high enough to put it on the defensive amid consumer ire and congressional indignation.

framed surf

I’m not sure exactly where I would place it on my favorite books list, but Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita would definitely be on it. Not to be confused with the 1962 film by Stanley Kubrick or the recent remake with Jeremy Irons ( If you only have time for one film version, go with the 1962). That his son has decided that Nabokov’s last and unfinished novel “The Original of Laura” be published is good news. Though Dmitri says he never seriously intended to burn the index cards on which it was written and from the interview at the NYT it sounds as though that was probably not Vladimir’s intent anyway.

pier zen

38 years ago today some students dared, in a democracy with a Bill of Rights that guarantees freedom of speech and expression to protest Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. Four of those students were killed and nine others injured.

Clinton/McCain Gas Tax ‘Holiday’ a Joke

Finally, I got a quote from Robert Shapiro, formerly the undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and the author of “Futurecast.” An independent voice with ties to the former first lady, however, did not give the expected results.

“Stated as clearly as I can,” he wrote, “it’s utterly misguided both environmentally and economically. Environmentally, it does actual harm, since it reduces the price of producing greenhouse gases. And economically it’s trivial or worse — by reducing the price of driving it encourages more of it, thereby increasing demand for gasoline, which inevitably pushes the price back up - the consumer gains nothing, and the oil companies and OPEC collect the extra bucks instead of the government.”

Nothing but pandering. I’m a little surprised that the idea is getting any serious play among candidates and the media.

type grass. i posted one previously shot from another angle. its a little large at over 2mb.

A Nation of Hysterics

All this reflects a more general problem: the many cultural and political forces pushing us to behave like a nation of hysterics.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the typical American suburb is just about the safest place that has ever existed in the history of the world — yet it’s full of terrified people.

Statistics have little power in the face of a media environment in which extraordinarily rare events, such as strangers kidnapping children, are presented as commonplace by profit-hungry “news” outlets, for whom the bottom line is that fear sells.

Politicians realize this too. The ongoing overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is only the most vivid example of how our leaders cynically exploit our fears by making wildly exaggerated claims, such as that Islamic terrorism poses an “existential threat” to America.

There is one network in particular and most local news affiliates that sell the childnapping hysteria. AS the author points out there are 75 million children in America with about 115 abductions (in 2006). Everyday, and I do mean every day some far Right talking head, some of them ministers cry wolf about the so called Islamic plot to have a worldwide Caliphate.  You can pull out all the statistics you like proving that the chances of your kid being grabbed are very small and that the world’s one billion Muslims hardly seem like they’re on the march to war and it doesn’t seem to matter. Fear is profitable, it keeps people’s eyes glued to the screen, but it doesn’t seem to all about profit. Fear seems to be something that some people enjoy, much like some movie goers enjoy being scared at a horror movie. There is something about this phenomenon that is wired into some people and not others. Speaking up and saying hey let’s keep all the potential risks that we face in perspective is the new heresy.

tree on canvas

It has turned into a myth buster day, Inequalities

The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.