It's Five O'Clock Somewhere - Sometime

Archaeologist Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University in Canada would like us to acknowledge the role that beer has played in the Rise of Civilization. As an avid fan of Civilization, and a vocal advocate of beer for many years, I can back his assertion with a number of easily verifiable anecdotes.
2630 B.C.: Egyptian teenagers, having consumed more than a case of beer, make the creative leap of stacking their cans in an orderly, geometric fashion. This "beeramid" became the model for the architectural triumphs that were to become the Great Pyramids. Without the scale model offered up by these ancient adolescents, we might never have achieved one of the great wonders and tourist destinations history.
1509 A.D.: Michelangelo discovers that, while maintaining a pretty solid beer buzz for three straight years, he could paint the ceiling of a church while laying on his back. A shocked Pope Julius II wandered into the Sistine Chapel just about the time Mike had finished up his drunken vandalism, and decided to call it "a work of art." Why he didn't start on the walls or the floor, we may never know.
December, 1773: A bunch of drunks, dressed like Pocahontas, hop aboard a ship in Boston Harbor, hoping to find beer. Finding none, they do the only thing that right-thinking inebriated patriots could do: they started history's first environmental disaster by tossing a bunch of English Breakfast into the ocean, paving the way for future drunken idiots.
Today is Veterans Day, originally the celebration of the signing of the peace treaty ending World War I. Why not celebrate by recreating the event that lead to the beginning of that conflict, when a couple of Bosnian Serbs tossed back a few Hungarian brews and decided to pull a prank on the Archduke's motorcade.

Brother, Can You Spare A Rib?

It's back. That creepy, indistinguishable slab of protein that McDonald's likes to promote as the "McRib" has found its way back onto the menu. No one asked me, but the appearance of the "rib" portion has always put me in mind of the space slugs that Khan shoves in Chekhov's ear while exhibiting some of his now infamous wrath. I'm not sure what sort of dare might get me to put something like that in my mouth, but as my legend precedes me, I don't think that I would turn down the chance to make a little money off the exchange.
Really? In a word: yes. In a few more words: I have, on more than one occasion, consumed a Big Mac in one bite. The pride that I might take away from this accomplishment is minimized by my age and the relative health consequences that could still appear years after my last performance. I didn't start off by shoving two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun into my face. I began with a simple cheeseburger. Using atomic theory that suggests that most matter are mostly empty space, I surmised that most fast food is made of air. Compression is key. Once all the meat, bread and condiments are condensed into a more compact form, the rest of the process is pretty simple. Ugly, but simple.
Which brings us back to the McRib. It is not, as the name suggests, a bone-related product. It is a ground pork patty. There is nothing on which to gnaw. I suspect that your average denture wearer, using extra-strength Poligrip, could chew their way through this bad boy. Not that they might want to, but the marketing genius that is McDonald's would certainly love every AARP member to line up at the counter for this limited-time offer. And every pre-schooler. And every mother of three. And anyone who has a neck. Just don't expect to get a toy with your Mcground pork Mcpatty.

How Is MLB like NPR?

I'm a fan of Keith Olbermann much in the same way that I'm a fan of Woody Allen. The younger, funny one was the best. Then came all the trouble. Some might argue that taking up with the adopted daughter of your wife is less objectionable than making contributions to political candidates. Neither did Keith, but he did have a clause about conflict of interest. Woody's interest was conflicted, but not contractual.
I used to love Olbermann's sports bluster. It was the perfect oversized rush of opinion that makes otherwise meaningless sporting events take on amusingly mythic proportions. There was always a certain amount of wink-and-grin in what he did that let us all know that it was a game, after all, and he was getting paid for talking about a game. All that bombast was really just stuff and nonsense, but we were all in on the joke.
When Keith landed on MSNBC, it seemed like an interesting stretch, but he made it work. Take it from a guy who spent four years referring to the leader of the free world as "Pinhead," I appreciated the fact that there was another cynic out there jabbing his finger in the collective chest of an administration. He rode that horse hard into the election of a new president. He was unafraid to shine a light on "the worst person in the world." Across the cable system, another jester suggested that maybe pointed vitriol of either stripe might be simply feeding the fire that is burning under our feet. The hypocrisy ball was lobbed back and forth, and then suddenly there was this: Keith Olbermann was suspended indefinitely without pay for making contributions to the campaigns of several Democratic candidates. The same ones he was reporting about on election night a week ago. It wasn't exactly a Rick Sanchez or Juan Williams moment, but that's the world we're living in now. Sportscasters "tell it like it is," even when they come off sounding a little partial to the hometown team. That's a sweet sound. Maybe Keith Olbermann just needs to get sent down to the minors. I wonder if MSNBC has a farm team.

What's That Sound?

I used to love getting new stereo equipment. I was all about upgrading: speakers, receiver, tape deck, turntable. When I had two speakers, I upgraded to four. When I had one tape deck, I upgraded to two. Keep in mind that this was a sound system that was responsible for filling my bedroom, not an entire house. Eventually I even ran speaker wire into my bathroom to make sure that I didn't miss a tweet or a woof. My favorite part about all this expansion of sound was hooking up the new components. Cables and parts spread out in front of me, I had to match inputs with outputs, test connections and make sure that my ever-expanding stereo could support the stress I was putting on it.
Later, when I moved into my dorm room, I packed and unpacked all those pieces and put them back together again in a space designed to accommodate two college freshman. When my roommate arrived, from Trumbull, Connecticut, there was simply no room for any stereo equipment he might have wished to unload into our shared lebensraum. My sound system was preeminent. There was no need to mess with perfection.
Not until I moved into my friend's house over the summer. He too had a monster set of speakers and even higher quality components. We spent the first two days mapping out where all the parts would be stacked and hung. Eventually, we assembled a six speaker wall of sound that, when the doors were left open, filled not just the house but the mountain valleys below. When we blew one of the speakers in the midst of a party, we celebrated the fact that it had stood up to most of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" before the cone of the woofer ripped in two. It gave its life for our guests' exquisite torment.
Over the years I have slowed down the process of upgrading the way that music comes into my life. I had to buy a compact disc player, but kept my turntable for years after to allow the vinyl that I dragged around in crates to be heard. Bits and pieces have been replaced. Now I have surround sound in my living room, which comes in very handy when thrashing my medium mad Guitar Hero skills. I even have the cassette deck, the one that created so many mix tape masterpieces back in college, sitting on a shelf awaiting the next opportunity to play ninety minutes of music with auto-reverse. Every so often I see black or chrome boxes in the local electronics store that make me think that it must be time to renegotiate the aural landscape of my life. Then I remember how the sound that comes out of those little speakers attached to my computer is every bit as triumphant as the thunder I once made with big wooden boxes eight times the size. I know that this is my son's time. He's attaching ever-increasing speaker sizes to his iPod. He wants to make a bigger noise. And I know now that it has become my job to yell, "Turn it down!"

Bye, Bye Bye

This weekend, the professional football team that I follow regularly will be taking what might be considered a well-deserved week off. This is called a bye week, as in: bye to the stress, bye to the strain, bye to the rhythm that has brought us to this point. It is an opportunity to sit back and lick the wounds from previous weeks and prepare for the long haul that will be the rest of the season. My question is this: Why don't I get a bye week?
Professional football players and coaches play sixteen regular season games, preceded by four before that that are exhibition, and if they are extraordinarily successful they might get another three after that in the post-season. If you toss in an extra pre-season game for the primary purpose of getting the year off to an early start, a professional football team will play a maximum of twenty-five games over the course of a season. Twenty-five weeks adds up to roughly half a year. That means that about halfway through that half-year, they all sit down and take a break. In my life, this is known as Christmas Break. For two weeks all the teachers and kids go home and prepare for the second half of the year.
Just like the NFL, sometimes game plans change. The rosters are also up for revision as kids move away or arrive at our school ready to find their place on the team. This year we even have a couple of teachers going out on injured reserve. How will this impact our performance heading into the playoffs? We hope that the third grade equivalent of Randy Moss doesn't land on our doorstep. The waiver procedure in elementary school is a little more complex than that found in the NFL, but if he can bring our test scores up, we will find a way to work with him. I don't think we would let him interview himself, however.

Accidents Will Happen

I know there are not a lot of other ways to go about it. I know that when bad news comes, no one wants to be the person bringing it. I feel this most oppressively in the fall. This is the time of year when I came home and got the call from my mom on the answering machine telling me that I shouldn't call back, but I should just come over to the house. When I got there, I found out that my friend Darren had died in a car accident. Fast forward a dozen years, and I come home from work to find my wife sitting on the front steps of our apartment building. She had just been on the phone and was waiting there to tell me my father's plane had crashed. Though he lived long enough for me to get back to Colorado for one last tag, he was gone shortly after that.
This is why, when our school's secretary came out on the playground to find me before the bell rang last Thursday morning and told me that I needed to call my wife, my initial reaction was to run in the opposite direction. What possible good could come from this interaction? If I had won the lottery, she would have announced it to the world. If there was a problem with the washing machine, I would have expected an e-mail that I could pick up somewhere in the course of the day. No, this one had "emergency" written all over it. Did the house burn down? Is the dog all right? Are all our parents moving around, taking in air?
As it turns out, my son had merged his bike with a car while riding to school. Happily, the sandwich and pear in his backpack cushioned his spine and the helmet he was wearing did more damage to the car than the windshield did to his head. He got a police car, an ambulance, and countless middle-schoolers' attention, and abruptly after that I got the call at my school. When I called back, I was immediately relieved when my son answered and said, "I got hit by a car and I'm okay." Those nine words were all the roller coaster I needed. There was a day of reflection after that, where I mulled over all the things I still need to tell him about life and how to live it, but the fact that he is now telling all of his friends that they need to wear a helmet when they ride their bikes seems to be the most profound piece of wisdom that I could share. Sometimes life can be short and scary. Other times it stretches out for weeks and months when you walk across a playground to make a call home to find out what is happening. That's scary too. The good news is that sometimes the story has a happy ending.

Race To The Finnish

"Finland, Finland, Finland: The country where I quite want to be." - Monty Python
To be quite honest, as a teacher, I'm not sure it's exactly where I would want to end up, since the starting salary for primary teachers is only eighteen thousand dollars a year, but I guess that could buy one a lot of fried Pike Perch in Beetroot sauce. It would also make my son very happy and extremely well educated. This is a country that has a one hundred percent literacy rate. Their math and scientific literacy rates are in the top percentile as well. Maybe it's all that fish they eat.
My wife sent me a report about Finnish education reform. Here's the part that made me look twice: "Primary school, particularly, is, to a large extent, a 'testing-free zone' reserved for learning to know, to do, and to sustain natural curiosity." The only high-stakes standardized test comes at the end of high school. That would be quite a change from the early-and-often assessment program that we follow here. We run on data, and if that means testing Kindergartners in the first week of school to find out if they know their letters, so be it. Here in the United States, it's all about performance.
Or is it? Our literacy rate is ninety-nine percent, so should we bother with why Johnny can't read? Well, if you consider that that one percent difference represents some three million people, maybe we should be concerned. Maybe we should be looking into the "trust-based school culture" that Finland adopted back in the 1990s. But that would also mean addressing our problems with children living in poverty. That doesn't happen in Finland. We have six times as any kids per capita living below the poverty line. That might be why we approach school reform in the United States like a corporation. In Finland, they treat their schools like places where kids go to learn things. Go figure.