What is your favorite day of the week?
I think it is -- CATURDAY!
My first flight was delayed into chicago. Guess i get to spend a few hours in o'hare. Somebody text me something funny -- i don't have twitter set up on my phone! :)
I guess every person on this flight is in seating group one. Just like on greyhound.
People never believe me that you can get hate mail about random old blog posts. Here's one I got today, for you all to enjoy!
Dear Anus,I recently read about Diamond Ranting. You are obviousy near-sighted and as dense as a tree stump. You pobably cant afford a diamond thats why you so pissed off at the world. Ask your mommy to go blow your nose and wipe away your little tears of frustration.Kind regardsCraig Lubbe
Geoscientific Mineral Resources
Centre for Advanced Satellite and Mineral Exploration
P. O. Box 59, Prince Albert, Western Cape, South Africa, 6930.
Tel: 27 23 5411031
Fax: 27 23 5411030
Mobile: 27 83 3728374
Email: geoscientific@telkomsa.net
Oh Craig, you poor thing! (All spelling errors and typos are Craig's own.)
Ever run for office? (School, club, organization, politics, etc.) Did you get elected?
I ran for a buncha different things when I was in school. I don't remember if I just ran or was actually elected to student council when I was in middle school, but that year our class elected a special ed kid to student council as a joke that (I felt, at least) was largely at his expense. I found that whole episode so disturbing and typical that I never ran for any of our class offices again.
But! I did participate pretty actively in the Model Legislature program run by the YMCA. It's different than the (better-known, I think) Model U.N. program that a lot of schools do, though I participated in that as well. In Model Legislature, we played the role of legislators for our state, so kids from all over Pennsylvania, where I grew up, all came to Harrisburg and we even got to sit in the actual seats of the state capitol. There were a lot of really good kids in the program, and it was one of my favorite experiences from high school, but I'll just share the anecdotes you would all appreciate.
- My sophomore year of high school, the Model Legislature program introduced lobbyists for the first time. I immediately signed up to be one, representing women's issues. (Seriously!) Yes, I was the first influence-peddling, silver-tongued perverter of the democratic process in the history of that state's august faux-legislative body. And I did it for the chicks.
- At the end of my junior year, I ran for Governor, a term I would have served as a senior if I had won. I think there were four or five serious candidates, including one guy whom I was friends with (I forget his name; it's been 15 years) who was actually the son of a real-life state legislator. He and I both lost (my performance in the final debate was unimpressive, since I'd almost completely lost my voice campaigning) but my friend Hans was the Editor-in-Chief of the Model Newspaper, which oversaw the elections, and I think he told me I placed third or fourth. NOT LAST! :)
- Since I wasn't Governor, I was eligible to run for a different office my senior year. That time, I killed. I ran for Speaker of the House against four or five other candidates. Instead of a debate, we each had a few minutes to present the case for our candidacies, and for the closing line of my speech, I stepped from behind the podium I was standing at and said, "and my final qualification is that I'm not just wearing purple pants, I'm purple on the inside." I won in a landslide.
- There were a lot of weird scheduling problems that year, so I ended up having to kill time in the actual chambers of the Pennsylvania Capitol in front of a few hundred high school kids all in formal dress, growing increasingly restless. I had a gavel, which was largely ineffective, but being way up high on the speaker's podium made it really easy to command everyone's attention. So, during the course of the long weekend, I carried out the duties of my office by singing my acapella rendition of the introduction to Whitney Houston's cover of Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman", having the congressional pages deliver notes to my girlfriend, and having everyone wave their hands in the air while chanting "Hip hop hooray, hoooo, heeeey, hoooo" because Naughty By Nature was very popular back then.
I'm pretty sure nobody's elected me to anything since then.
We're still not 100% done unpacking, and we only have a tiny little bit of counter space in our new kitchen, but already there are two storage canisters for dry goods sitting on the kitchen counter: one for tea, and one for rice.
Who was your best (or worst) elementary school teacher?
Submitted by Minnow.
In fifth grade, we rotated between 3 teachers during the day, with our homeroom teacher doing most of the teaching, and then a nice smart guy doing science class (And hey -- I still love science -- whadaya know?) and a mean old crotchety tyrant teaching math.
That guy was one of the worst teachers I've ever had. Capricious, and fond of blatantly playing favorites, he let you know fairly explicitly if you were in his favored circle or on his shitlist. And he was violent! I mean, I had plenty of experience with student-on-student violence since I went to public school for all 12 years, but he was one of only a handful of teachers whom I saw really get nuts on kids.
Once, a kid who cheated on a test and got caught was dragged by his arm out into the hallway where he was just out of sight of the class and paddled, which yielded a piercing howl. I hated the kid who was the cheater and still felt sorry for him. Another time, he grabbed a kid by his collar and yanked him up out of his seat "as a joke" while making fun of the kid. And that stuff would happen every week.
Then, one time, it was my turn. This teacher would often like to play "buddies" with the students he liked, and then they called him Mr. Smith or whatever, he'd call them "Mr. Kid's Last Name". So, one day we were having some sort of school event in the auditorium, which meant we all had to carry our chairs into the big gymnasium to sit on. After the event, we were filing out, and I decided to reverse his little "buddy name" game, and as I walked by him, I said "Bye, bye, Bill!" (His first name was William.)
And then this guy lost his mind. He grabbed the chair I was carrying back to our classroom, and threw it across the hallway. I don't remember all the stuff he shouted (mostly along the tunes of "how dare you!!" I think), but I do remember him distinctly saying, "When you get a college degree and you have done something as an adult then you can call me Bill..." etc.
I still don't have a college degree, but we went by my old elementary school back in December when we visited my hometown, and until this question, I'd completely forgotten about that guy. Is that sufficiently respectful, Bill? You no longer exist. :)
