Mr. Narcissus Goes to Washington

Listening to them I thought of some of the great and hallowed phrases of our Republic. "The rooster who thought he brought the dawn." "The only man who can strut sitting down."
("blowhard," "puffed up popinjay")


Why do they do this? Is their egomania not part of a trend?

All this self-lauding has become strange. Public figures use the press to laud themselves with no embarrassment, no sense of what is important, and no sense of modesty. If Jack Webb were here he would deck these guys. Broderick Crawford would bark "10-4" and hit them on the head with his Highway Patrol walkie-talkie. Once again I think of the wisdom of Tony Soprano: Let Gary Cooper talk and he'll never shut up.

Why did they put on that performance the other day? Yes, it was sheer exuberant egotism; it was the excitement of the TV lights; it was their sly conviction that if they laud themselves they will be appearing to laud the institution; and it was, no doubt, the counsel of their advisers that in the magic medium of television, if you declare you are a "hero" often enough people will come to associate the word "hero" with you.

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I especially like this.

Reminds me of that fakir Flight Suit Barbie.
hero.
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LP, I enjoyed the story, but frankly, I could tell stories about my grandfather (the fisherman) working the boats on Hudsons Bay until his health failed and my grandmother (who will turn 87 shortly) going to work in a factory and of their sacrifices to send my mom and uncle to school.

One would think things should get easier, not harder.

Sounds to me like the subject of the story was a hard worker, too. I worked at a fast food restaurant and then at a print shop through school. Maybe it wasn't farming, but it wasn't easy. Now the costs of higher education are downright prohibitive.

That's not right.
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LIttle Bee,
As I keep saying, all the schools have to do is stop paying those liberal professors to teach those KRAP courses and just do the basics, higher ed would cost about half of the present cost! One account I read several years ago, estimated that only half of the courses in the curriculum were necessarya to educate the students.
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Love those photos of the 1930s Bart Katz, Those of the guys and gals that saved Europe and started the Freedom train that has almost reached all around the world. The train has been delayed on its trip a few times, but it is still on track!
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I do see ONE person in those photos with a steady gaze and fixed jaw, cautious and steadfast.  Bottom row, third from the right, looking skeptical of the whole idea of yearbook photos.

Notice that he's Asian.
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I do see ONE person in those photos with a steady gaze and fixed jaw, cautious and steadfast.  Bottom row, third from the right, looking skeptical of the whole idea of yearbook photos.

Notice that he's Asian.
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Higher education is not about 'the basics'. You're an authoritarian elitist (god knows why) prick, and that's all there's to it.
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You're right, higher education is not about the basics. For the ultra-left professors.........it all about.....BRAINWASHING!!!!!!
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Fine, fine. I've had some of those as an undergrad. Every stereotype has some truth to it. Still . . . it will be a cold day in hell when I will stoop to propaganda and brainwashing instead of teaching. That's pathetic and doesn't speak too highly of one's own ideas.
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Somehow comparing the "Greatest Generation's" mostly defensive and gallant struggle forced on our citizenry by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan's aggressive behavior and the Bush Inc war train and freight doesn’t ring true.

As for Bush Inc’s freedom train, it's puled by a corporate locomotive lubed and fired by government subsidizes, single bidder war contracts and ignored offshore tax evasions.

It pulls a cargo of a new four freedoms...

1 The Freedom to exploit third world labor and remove opportunity from American workers..

2  The freedom to abuse democracy domestically and in foreign lands with puppet governments billed as democracies.

3. The freedom enrich corporations by working hand in hand with the most dangerous Communist country in the world enriching it with technology and money that it uses builds a military aimed at Americans.

4. The freedom to get stinking rich by striping America of it's heavy industry placing the same outside our need and protection in case a serious war and gutting our consumer market of its better paying jobs.

Some freedom train...Its a carpetbaggers imperialistic troop train with hoppers for loot attached.
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Somehow comparing the "Greatest Generation's" mostly defensive and gallant struggle forced on our citizenry by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan's aggressive behavior and the Bush Inc war train and freight doesn’t ring true.

As for Bush Inc’s freedom train, it's puled by a corporate locomotive lubed and fired by government subsidizes, single bidder war contracts and ignored offshore tax evasions.

It pulls a cargo of a new four freedoms...

1 The Freedom to exploit third world labor and remove opportunity from American workers..

2  The freedom to abuse democracy domestically and in foreign lands with puppet governments billed as democracies.

3. The freedom enrich corporations by working hand in hand with the most dangerous Communist country in the world enriching it with technology and money that it uses builds a military aimed at Americans.

4. The freedom to get stinking rich by striping America of it's heavy industry placing the same outside our need and protection in case a serious war and gutting our consumer market of its better paying jobs.

Some freedom train...Its a carpetbaggers imperialistic troop train with hoppers for loot attached.
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Thanks for the photo, Bart, demonstrating my point.  Note the "body language" in these photos.  Do you see any firmly set jaws, or eyes fixed on the future?

Compare to your photos from the 30's and 50's, and how the even younger kids from those classes (in some cases, children) look determined but scared to death of adulthood, vs. the photo above of bland faces of kids who're expecting to be kids for another few years, until they're 22 or so.
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I think they're just happy kids, Judy Ann.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Those old ones look sad because the got up a dawn to milk the cows and know they are going home to work till dark on the old hill farm.  Nothing really deep there.

It appears to me the Asian kid's gaze is on account of he's crosseyed or has amblyopia or something.
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WE are at that time of year when millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence. How is this possible? The answer is simple and even obvious: Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make.

You can imagine the reaction of students who think that "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay, guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner" and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks later - and this happens every time - each group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and precision.

How is this near miracle accomplished? The short answer is that over the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: A sentence is a structure of logical relationships. In its bare form, this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I immediately supplement it with a simple exercise. "Here," I say, "are five words randomly chosen; turn them into a sentence." (The first time I did this the words were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.) In no time at all I am presented with 20 sentences, all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Then comes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that you did? What did it take to turn a random list of words into a sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling and false starts follow, but finally someone says, "I put the words into a relationship with one another."

Once the notion of relationship is on the table, the next question almost asks itself: what exactly are the relationships? And working with the sentences they have created the students quickly realize two things: first, that the possible relationships form a limited set; and second, that it all comes down to an interaction of some kind between actors, the actions they perform and the objects of those actions.

Rest of "Devoid of content"

Fascinating--for all you pedagogues...
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Yeah...and the point is..............?


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You need to be able to arrange thoughts as well as just toss out free form collections of random words if you want to communicate. Form words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs so the reader can understand the idea you're trying to get across.
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You need to be able to arrange thoughts as well as just toss out free form collections of random words if you want to communicate. Form words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs so the reader can understand the idea you're trying to get across.
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when happen this did?
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Want you not your Diet Pepsi.
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A friend of mine sent an email the other day. The title was "Bite". Then I opened it and it said "my shiny metal asss".

 

that was it.
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Thanks to you and AV both for turning me on to Futurama.

What a hoot!
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Bender gets all the best lines. The same actor that does both Ren and Stimpy.
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Yeah...and the point is..............?


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Wasn't it clear?

dang!
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It was crystal clear what the article was about...

Just another lame attempt at humour on my part.

Ferget it.
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I thought it was a pop quiz.
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Coke or Pepsi?

I thought it was interesting, it's the "function follows form" argument.
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Did you stand on one foot whilst posting?


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I'm kinda big about form in some things, writing included. Personally I'm kind of a laid back slob, but things like work and writing bring out my organized anal-retentive  side since other people rely on proper function.
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Coke or Pepsi?

I thought it was interesting, it's the "function follows form" argument.
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I'm kinda big about form in some things, writing included. Personally I'm kind of a laid back slob, but things like work and writing bring out my organized anal-retentive  side since other people rely on proper function.
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My better work has brought grieving relatives to tears but my handwriting looks like a third grader. 

 
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