I’m not a big fan of singer Chris Brown. I don’t like how he treated his girlfriend, Rihanna, but I do appreciate the pressure he’s feeling from his neighbors over an invented Urban Semiotic problem that he’s deeply invested in on a career angle. No, I’m not talking about his Graffiti album, I’m talking about his driveway.
I have never been a fan of standardized testing in schools. There’s too big a variable at play — missing the wild mind — and these tests praise and condone only the middle. If you don’t do well on these tests, you are not moved forward or thought of as a significant thinker. The system doesn’t mind if your wild view of the world matters. The only thing the test givers care about is finding, and approving, the mainstream, middling, mind to guarantee, and impress, conformity.
I am cheating a little and using the Four Corners concept to quickly introduce to you people and ideas so that future articles on Portugal make a lot more sense.
Introducing Mr P — who does not really wish to be on the internet at all. Ironically, I met Mr P online playing a rather silly game called Tribal Wars. Mr P was born in Morocco of French parents and has been living in Portugal for most of his life. He has a degree in Biology from Pau University. He speaks French, Portuguese and English extremely well and has knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German as well. He has a strong sense of history and of culture. The mix of our cultures and our language brings a lot of humour to our lives. We love to travel — not just in the broadest sense — but in the everyday sense of exploration; not only of ourselves and our lives but in the beauty found all around us. We have adventures everywhere! This picture was taken at our handfasting where we took our vows in front of friends and family.
When I was young my mother told me that as children, our minds were like sponges and that we could absorb much knowledge that our teachers gave over to us. An important thing that I would like to add to that, however, is that the transfer of information from teacher to student cannot be the only thing that happens from the time the student arrives in school until they go home for the day. Recess, it turns out, is an extremely important part of the children’s day.
I’m not sure if there’s much more left to to say in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut that hasn’t already been shot to death before — except that it was excellent how, together, teachers and students faced down death that day — while our politicians will never be similarly brave because they are more terrified of the long and ugly shadow of the NRA than they are of dead children.
As Fall arrived, I noticed a lot more children taking the train in the morning, on their way to school. I could not help but notice that this year, as in years past, the number of heavier set children seems to be on the rise — and sadly it is not just my observation but a recorded trend of an increase in the number of children and teenagers that are considered obese. When I was a child it was considerably more unusual than it is today and I fear that trends are moving toward more overweight and obese children, not fewer.
When I was a child, there was no need for cybersecurity because it was the early 1980s and there was no such thing as the Internet as we know it today. In the last twenty years the situation has turned around completely around — it is oftentimes difficult to determine who or what is real online and every day people come up with new scams to try to rip off people and steal everything from their identity to the contents of their bank accounts.
Up All Night is an NBC comedy that is one of the many shows that I regularly follow on Thursday night. My wife Elizabeth and I started watching it from the beginning last year because we wanted to see to what extent the show captured reality well or was just another television show whose relevance to the real world was minimal at best.
When I was a child, my brother and I regularly heard about kids our age who would get into all kinds of dangerous wacky hijinks, endangering their lives in the process. We would see news reports about a child getting hurt or dying but we would never see the dangerous circumstances in which the child got hurt.
It really makes me a happier person to see that in a world full of mothers like the Octomom and mothers trying to commit suicide publicly, and even the most obnoxious mother I have ever seen, there are mothers who not only take care of their own children but also reach out and take care of other children — children who have been abandoned and left for dead. They do it because it is the right thing to do, not because the panopticonic camera will be following them wherever they go, snapping photographs of them as they wander through airports and go grocery shopping and pick up their dry cleaning.
Her current porn career notwithstanding, we have known since at least February 9, 2009 that Nadya Suleman is — The Worst Mother in the World — and now we have additional information that makes one wonder if she is now also The Worst Loan Shark Shill Ever!
I confess there is something oddly alluring about Ms. Suleman — not in a sexual manner, but rather in one of witnessing a car crashing in slow motion over and over and over with every wrong move she makes. Imagine my shock when she recently popped on my late-night television screen in what, at first, appeared to be a private YouTube video gone public, and vilely viral, catching her unaware at home — when, oops!, all she was really doing — surprise! — was serving as an on-purpose paid loan shark pitchperson… err… pitchshark… uh… loanshill… ah… OctoLoanSharkMom to charge vig on money people don’t have.
I have said in the past that I don’t care for reality television but there are certainly some areas of reality television that are far more creepy than others. Specifically, I am referring to shows like Toddlers and Tiaras — a show that blatantly degrades extremely young girls and sexualizes them in every way possible.
Years ago, after my stage debut in — The King and I at UNL — I was asked by Roger L. Stephens to pay the cameo role of Harry in the silly Benjamin Britten opera, Albert Herring. Here’s a brief plot synopsis of the show:
Lady Billows is organizing the annual May Day festival and desperate to find girls for the coveted position of Queen of the May. However, it turns out none of the girls in the village are virgins – disqualifying them. Thus, Lady Billows and Superintendent Budd decide to select a May King instead of a May Queen. Albert Herring, a virgin, is the perfect candidate. Comedy ensues when after winning, Albert disappears. Everyone assumes he is dead when in fact Albert simply took the prize money and went to look for trouble!
For some reason, whenever I think of Nadya Suleman (often referred to as Octomom in the media because she chose to have eight embryos implanted in her at once and gave birth to eight perfectly healthy babies) I think of the life of the typical Jewish woman who lived in slavery in Egypt many years ago and, according to some, would miraculously always give birth to six and more babies at a go — this greatly increased the population of the Jewish people in Egypt at the time in a short span of time. They were not, however, getting pregnant and giving birth to numerous babies as some sort of publicity stunt — rather it was because it was necessary to save the Jewish people at the time from extinction.
