Well, no news actually, but my last post was so angry. . . It was a cultural weekend in SoCal. Hubby, the Dudes and I met for Thai food, then it was on to an 3-D IMAX movie called Magnificent Desolation about the Apollo missions. It was AWESOME, and now I can't wait to get back to see Deep Sea 3-D. Can you believe I'd never been to an IMAX movie before?
Then, on to another new experience, the LA Natural History Museum. I had never seen Dinosaur Fossils up close and personal before. That was my favorite part.....although we were there to see the BOG PEOPLE! Freaky, dude. Freaky.
Now it's on to the Community Services Division's Hell Week- Prep for the 9th annual Fine Arts Festival. The event is fantastic, and I love doing it, but working 50 hours in 4 days generally isn't my bag.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Black Death and Puppy Death- No Good News Today
So, a woman in LA is being treated for the Plague. I mean the PLAGUE. Please!
In addition to the plague, according to a great, sad, and made-me-snotty article in Los Angeles Magazine, LA has a real problem with unwanted dogs and cats. Last year, 90,000 dogs and cats were put down in the Greater LA area. That could be good news, when you compare it to the 250,000 that were put down each year in the 70s, but still, 5 Million animals in 35 years is unacceptible.
I can't imagine what kind of person abandons an animal, but people are, and in droves. The article I read quoted an Animal Control Officer as saying that during routine calls, other people will ask him to take their pets away with the strays from the nighborhood. The charge to rid yourself of an unwanted pet is only $5.
It's easy to say that LA should adopt a no kill policy, but there is simply no room for the unwanted would-be and used-to-be pets. But why can't we find a way to hold these people
accountable?
accountable?I know I'm all smooshy about animals, maybe more than I should be, but this is still just sickening to me. This is just another reason I want to get a house. Houses with yards are big enough to house, me, Hubby, kids, and a menagerie of animals. Someday, I'd love to have a couple dogs, a couple cats, a fish or two, and who knows what else. For now, though, my one boy, a (neutered!!!!) rescue, is keeping the house plenty busy.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
What do you do with a BA in English?
The title of my new favorite song from Avenue Q is also a good intro to this article from the LA times... Again, it's long, but it's also funny.
Here are words that no parent wants to hear: I've decided to major in English.
I suppose it could be worse. Theater arts, music history. I actually announced to my parents that I was majoring in creative writing, which is the rough equivalent—in terms of employment opportunities—to majoring in liturgical dance.
The English major presents for his or her parents a lexical quandary: What to call the graduate? My son the geologist, my daughter the physicist—these ring familiarly. But there is, ironically enough, no word in English for the English major. Our son the . . . um . . . who speaks English.
The high-minded, lowly employed English major has become a stock comedic character, most lovingly lampooned by Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion": Is this a spatula which I see before me?/The handle toward my hand?/And on thy blade brute flesh and dudgeon and gouts of blood./(DING)/Behold a car approacheth to the window./Now I must do the work fate sends me./And better it were done quickly.
Occasionally English majors will rise to greatness—astronaut Sally Ride has a B.A. in English, as well as a not-unhelpful PhD in physics from Stanford—but in the main, English degrees are regarded as the heart's triumph over the head, or the degree you get before you learn something useful. It's rare that the boss asks you to put a PowerPoint presentation into ottava rima.
And so I was cheered (note the archaic usage, so typical of an English major) recently when I found Richard A. Lanham's "The Economics of Attention" amid a forlorn pile of books (personification—again, so typical) rejected by the book review editor. "The central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style," read the cover blurb. "In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced."
Really? No kidding? Sweet! I want to be director of well-turned phrases for the Federal Reserve.
Actually, Dr. Lanham—a professor emeritus of English at UCLA and a man of Rabelaisian intellectual appetite (oh, please, Rabelais?)—makes no such claim in his learned if eccentric book, which will stretch the ligaments of the best bibliophile (Quintilian, Castiglioni, Peter Drucker, Konrad Lorenz would make for a handsome game of contract bridge, don't you think?).
What he does say is that in a world freighted and fretted with information overload, the skills to make sense of it all, to lasso the fleeting attention of the public, are the old skills. The art and technique of rhetoric (from the Greek word for "orator") was part of the trivium, the three-legged stool of a classical liberal education, before "rhetoric"—and "liberal," for that matter—became a dirty word.
People trained in English and rhetoric are, as Lanham would have it, information stylists.
Along the way, Lanham—a Yale PhD and general heavy-hitter in humane letters—makes the argument that the expressive digital space offers possibilities beyond the ant-marching typography of the printed page. He proposes that text become more active and dynamic, morphing with meaning, and he points to shape poems (poems about light bulbs, for example, that look like light bulbs on the printed page) and Medieval illuminated manuscripts as early examples of the text as hyper-artifact.
What would this new text paradigm look like? "I'm not sure what comes next," Lanham concedes. Yes, me neither. Actually, I was in the weeds back in Chapter 2.
What I really want to know, as I sit at his dining room table with Lanham and his wife, Carol (a Latin scholar), is whether English majors really will inherit the Earth? Will knowing the difference between ottava rima and a Spenserian sonnet form prepare you for work in a technological society? "You can't make single connections like that," says Lanham. "You have to look at what that teaches you about the use of rhythm in your expression, indeed, in all parts of your life."
Hmm. I don't find this answer that satisfying. All my life I've been looking for a reason why I had to read "The Faerie Queene." I'm still looking.
English is certainly useful. If, for example, you find yourself in a strange country—like Georgia. But the fact is English majors must take their satisfactions as they find them. Lanham pulls out C.S. Lewis' essay on the compensations of a literary life. "This is the sentence that always gets me," Lanham says, almost choking up. "'Literary experience heals the wound without undermining the privilege of individuality.'"
"Looking back on it," he says, "I feel I've dwelt in this immensely rich world. I've dwelt in marvels and riches."
It's a pity street fights don't end with spelling bees or the consummation of a hot date doesn't depend on proper conjugation. Studies in literature are their own reward. However, fries are usually free.
Here are words that no parent wants to hear: I've decided to major in English.
I suppose it could be worse. Theater arts, music history. I actually announced to my parents that I was majoring in creative writing, which is the rough equivalent—in terms of employment opportunities—to majoring in liturgical dance.
The English major presents for his or her parents a lexical quandary: What to call the graduate? My son the geologist, my daughter the physicist—these ring familiarly. But there is, ironically enough, no word in English for the English major. Our son the . . . um . . . who speaks English.
The high-minded, lowly employed English major has become a stock comedic character, most lovingly lampooned by Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion": Is this a spatula which I see before me?/The handle toward my hand?/And on thy blade brute flesh and dudgeon and gouts of blood./(DING)/Behold a car approacheth to the window./Now I must do the work fate sends me./And better it were done quickly.
Occasionally English majors will rise to greatness—astronaut Sally Ride has a B.A. in English, as well as a not-unhelpful PhD in physics from Stanford—but in the main, English degrees are regarded as the heart's triumph over the head, or the degree you get before you learn something useful. It's rare that the boss asks you to put a PowerPoint presentation into ottava rima.
And so I was cheered (note the archaic usage, so typical of an English major) recently when I found Richard A. Lanham's "The Economics of Attention" amid a forlorn pile of books (personification—again, so typical) rejected by the book review editor. "The central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style," read the cover blurb. "In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced."
Really? No kidding? Sweet! I want to be director of well-turned phrases for the Federal Reserve.
Actually, Dr. Lanham—a professor emeritus of English at UCLA and a man of Rabelaisian intellectual appetite (oh, please, Rabelais?)—makes no such claim in his learned if eccentric book, which will stretch the ligaments of the best bibliophile (Quintilian, Castiglioni, Peter Drucker, Konrad Lorenz would make for a handsome game of contract bridge, don't you think?).
What he does say is that in a world freighted and fretted with information overload, the skills to make sense of it all, to lasso the fleeting attention of the public, are the old skills. The art and technique of rhetoric (from the Greek word for "orator") was part of the trivium, the three-legged stool of a classical liberal education, before "rhetoric"—and "liberal," for that matter—became a dirty word.
People trained in English and rhetoric are, as Lanham would have it, information stylists.
Along the way, Lanham—a Yale PhD and general heavy-hitter in humane letters—makes the argument that the expressive digital space offers possibilities beyond the ant-marching typography of the printed page. He proposes that text become more active and dynamic, morphing with meaning, and he points to shape poems (poems about light bulbs, for example, that look like light bulbs on the printed page) and Medieval illuminated manuscripts as early examples of the text as hyper-artifact.
What would this new text paradigm look like? "I'm not sure what comes next," Lanham concedes. Yes, me neither. Actually, I was in the weeds back in Chapter 2.
What I really want to know, as I sit at his dining room table with Lanham and his wife, Carol (a Latin scholar), is whether English majors really will inherit the Earth? Will knowing the difference between ottava rima and a Spenserian sonnet form prepare you for work in a technological society? "You can't make single connections like that," says Lanham. "You have to look at what that teaches you about the use of rhythm in your expression, indeed, in all parts of your life."
Hmm. I don't find this answer that satisfying. All my life I've been looking for a reason why I had to read "The Faerie Queene." I'm still looking.
English is certainly useful. If, for example, you find yourself in a strange country—like Georgia. But the fact is English majors must take their satisfactions as they find them. Lanham pulls out C.S. Lewis' essay on the compensations of a literary life. "This is the sentence that always gets me," Lanham says, almost choking up. "'Literary experience heals the wound without undermining the privilege of individuality.'"
"Looking back on it," he says, "I feel I've dwelt in this immensely rich world. I've dwelt in marvels and riches."
It's a pity street fights don't end with spelling bees or the consummation of a hot date doesn't depend on proper conjugation. Studies in literature are their own reward. However, fries are usually free.
Monday, April 17, 2006
I Weep for the Future
I found this article on Yahoo, and have edited it a bit for space. Sorry to the researchers for that. It's interesting considering I've been doing a lot of reading on similar subjects, because, although my parents taught me well, I still feel a little behind the 8-ball when it comes to finances. I'm working to improve my financial literacy, but it doesn't look like many out there are doing the same...
U.S. teenagers are making little headway when it comes to financial literacy, a survey out Wednesday shows. High school seniors on average answered 52.4% of a 30-question financial survey correctly. Down from 57% in 1997, the first year for the survey, according to the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.
"Financial literacy is still a very significant problem. It doesn't seem to be getting any better," says Lewis Mandell, a professor at SUNY Buffalo School of Management who oversaw the survey. It includes topics such as investing and managing personal finances.
He said the lack of knowledge was troubling given that today's high school seniors likely will be more responsible for their own financial well-being when they retire given trends away from company pension plans and an uncertain future for Social Security benefits.
But the study suggests students are unprepared for such a task, Mandell says.
In one question, only 14.2% of the students correctly answered that stocks would have the best growth potential for money over an 18-year period. That was the lowest percentage in the survey's history.
"In the 21st century, the only person you can really count on is yourself," he says.
The results of the survey taken by 5,775 high school seniors in 37 states were unveiled at a news conference in the boardroom at the Federal Reserve. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke called improving financial education "vital to the future of our economy."
Survey details:
• White students answered an average 55% of the questions correctly vs. 44.7% for blacks and 46.8% for Hispanics. The gap between whites and blacks was the widest in the survey's history.
• Students from families with incomes of $80,000 or greater answered 55.6% of the questions correctly on average vs. 48.5% for those with incomes less than $20,000. The gap between the two income groups was also the largest in the history of the survey.
• Nearly 17% of the seniors had taken a money management or personal finance class, down from 20% in 2004. Surprisingly, students who had taken a class actually fared worse than those who did not. Students, however, who had played a stock market game, in which they used play money to pick stocks, fared better than students who had not participated.
• There was little difference in financial literacy based on gender. Boys on average answered 52.6% of the questions correctly vs. 52.3% for girls.
Students aren't the only whose financial literacy is lacking. In a survey of 1,000 adults conducted last month for the Financial Services Forum, only 57% said they knew "quite a bit" or "a great deal" about managing their personal finances and retirement savings.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Weekend Update
Another fun weekend in the life of Sweets and Hubby. Saturday was A from work's baby shower. Lots of fun, and even noodle kugel. Is that how it's spelled? I can't spell it, but I can show you a picture. It's delish. A loved her gift- very us. A Pooh shirt and Hubby-like plaid shorts.
Unfortunately, I had to duck out of the party early to head over to the local Toyota dealer. ISN'T SHE PRETTY??? This is the new family car, which will one day hold the family. She doesn't have a name yet, but we're working on it.
Sunday, Hubby, the Dudes and I went down to the California Science Center for the Marvel Science of Comics Exhibit, as seen here: http://www.calendarlive.com
Yesterday was a tough day at work. We had to take the teen group to Disneyland. Overtime for riding Big Thunder- that's my kind of day! Disneyland with 5 adults = tons of fun. Hubby was missed. Food was great. As of now, the Main St. Corn Dog Cart and Tiki Room Pineapple Whip Hut are necessary stops. I'm personally of the opinion that Pinapple Whip should be sold by the gallon at the grocery store. HOWEVER, I took a few moments and found THIS: http://www.intercot.com
In other Disney news, I'm very upset that Pirates is closed so they can make it resemble the movie. You just can't DO that. I managed to have some fun with the Pirates regardless…… "Drink up me hearties YO HO!"
Finally, the big news: Suzipoodles is pregnant!!!!!!! It was the last thing I expected her to say when I picked up the phone this morning (and I was among the first called, by the way!), but this is the best, craziest, most fantastic surprise someone can get on a regular workday. She and the Vamp are going to be great parents. By the holidays this year, I'm going to be a pretend Auntie again. That thrills me to no end.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Dude....
How Geeky are You? Quiz. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11977271/site/newsweek/ I'm "Stuck in the Last Century," but very close to "Heading to Geekdom." I think the fact that this was a Newsweek Quiz, increases my score considerably. Speaking of Geeky, on my insistance, Hubby finally took the Jeopardy Contestant quiz. He's going to get on and win enough money furnish the new house we'll be buying some time next year.
I have another geeky pursuit of late. I'm doing everything I can to learn about finances, and retirement planning, etc. I highly recommend David Bach's books. Smart Couples Finish Rich was last month's discovery, and I'm about to begin The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner. Hey, I figure that I'm a little over a year away from "retiring" to become a full time mom. If I'm not going to be contributing financially, I'm certainly going to make sure that we can do it comfortably, and on our way to a great retirement.
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