Lakeshore

charlesatan reviews Trial of Flowers [ Powell's | Amazon ]

Get Fuzzy on genre mixing

Martian canyons in high definition photography — Mmm, wow.

Max Mosley faces calls to quit as Formula One chief after ‘Nazi’ orgy — Five hookers? Life imitates an Al Yankovic song. Read all about it in the weekly Midnight Star.

SEC: Countrywide execs to get millions in stock — Mmm. I've never been paid to fail. But at my income level, that would be considered welfare, not market forces.

This Modern World summarizes my view of the Hillary campaign — Go mess with Slate's delegate calculator. It's over for her, on the numbers. She's staying in on hopes of gaming the rules hard enough, or a meteor hitting Obama. Whose interest is she serving now? Not the Democratic party's, and certainly not the interests of the liberal-progressive community.

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3/31/08
Time in saddle: 0 minutes (sick)
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: 276.2
Currently reading: n/a</small>

I said recently that I had strong (and unpopular) views on home schooling. Several people asked me to expand on that. By sheer coincidence, scalzi has covered the same topic this morning, and while he's nicer about it than I, our views largely align. He's just more charitable than I am about it.

Remember that I spent the first 18 years of my adult life in Texas, where "home schooling" almost exclusively meant, "keep those Godless liberals away from my little Bubba." In other words, an uncoded appeal to raising children in deliberate ignorance in an attempt to preserve a narrow-minded spiritual framework. (We also have some experience with this version of home schooling within my extended family.)

My default assumption about home schooling is the above. Combine that with the simple fact that most people aren't qualified to teach, not even (or especially) their own kids, as well as the socialization issues, and I have a hard time seeing why it's appropriate, except possibly for edge cases. The business about the home school movement wanting their kids to play team sports and go to the prom (there were a series of lawsuits about this back when I was in Texas) strikes me as rank opportunism and cherry picking.

Like I said, unpopular views. And yes, I'm very familiar with the arguments for home schooling, and likewise familiar with the fact that the alternative community is a strong proponent of home schooling. Still, at the bottom I don't see how educating kids away from other kids is the best route.

I'll just don my flameproof suit now, shall I?

Dear Intarwebs —

I am very, very sick of the somethingsalmon chatbot spam. You can stop it any damned time you want now.

No love,

Me

A much-delayed announcement of the winner for the recent caption contest. pauljessup, ( Collapse )

pauljessup wins an ARC of Escapement [ Amazon ].

Judge's special prize goes to kehrli ( Collapse )

kehrli wins the last of my Audible gift cards.

Email me, y'all. And a big round of applause for the winners!

164,800 words, in to casacarona and arcaedia, by the end of March as agreed.

I am so done.

Paper Cities [ Senses Five Press | Amazon ] is out as of April 1st. Edited by squirrel_monkey, this anthology has stories from a whole bunch of folks, including my own "Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable." (It's about Biggest Sister, for those of you familiar with Trial of Flowers [ Powell's | Amazon ].) Check it out!

Today has been a swimming in mud day. The plane was late to Portland, so our departure was late getting out. It was snowing rather dramatically in Denver, and that plane was late as well, so by the time we boarded and de-iced, we were an hour late out of there. The cab line at McCarran airport was ( Collapse ) There was another 30+ minutes gone. Never did manage to coordinate dinner with skidspoppe. PW from work and I went out to a restaurant down the street, where the service could kindly be described as glacial.

On the plus side, walking back from dinner I got to see ( Collapse )

And I read a book! jimhines Goblin War [ Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy ], to be precise. Yay me! Yay Jim, too. Go read it. A lot of fun!

Off to the CTIA trade show tomorrow morning. Expect mo better blogging soon, as my topics list has backed up. In the mean time, feel free to treat this post as an open questions thread.