It seems like I go through this sort of thing every couple of months. Some kind of email retrieval issue crops up, typically involving SSL. Luckily, I take the time to jot it down so I can refer back in case it’s a repeat. Today’s problem turned out to be something new, so it now gets its own place here on the blog.
Here’s about a millll-yun reasons:
I intended to get those raked up today, but Mother Nature decided that we needed more rain. Thanks for that.
Mike Florio, July 6th, 2012:
If the anonymous tipster isn’t willing to step out of the shadows, even when given assurances that the league will react swiftly and aggressively if the whistleblower-turned-witness experiences retaliation, that should be a red flag regarding the overall reliability of the information that has been provided while tucked safely behind the proverbial curtain of a third-world courtroom.
Mike Florio, October 10th, 2012:
As NFL owners prepare to gather in Chicago for their first full meeting since a string of embarrassments smacked against the shield like repeated pecan pies in the face, the gratuitous outing of a whistleblower who never became a witness can be added to the list of things for which the owners could be demanding a full and complete explanation.
It’s tempting to call Florio a hypocrite based on these articles. In one case, he’s arguing for the release of the whistleblower’s name because the accused should get a chance to call their accuser names, or something. In the second, he’s calling the league a bunch of dummy-heads for releasing the name of another whistleblower whom didn’t provide any evidence in the bounty case. But Florio’s lawyerly background shines through, as a careful reading reveals he distinguishes the two cases based on the relevance of the whistleblower to the NFL’s case.
But mainly, these show that Florio is consistent at finding ways to mock the NFL. You know, the very same NFL that was a huge success long before Florio came around, and guided by the very people Florio likes to mock. The NFL that put Mike Florio on the map, or the web?
I know, it’s churlish of me to point this out because, certainly, the NFL is not beyond criticism and just because Florio is another parasite glommed on to the NFL doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the occasional point. But having read him enough, his constant nitpicking makes me think nothing the NFL can do will ever be good enough.
The fact of the matter is this is football, not National Security, and it’s a bunch of rich guys with a hobby, albeit a very lucrative one. None the less, they’re going to make they’re fair share of screwups and even be assholes every now and again. The glee with which Florio trumpets all these mistakes is out of proportion with the offenses.
But that’s the way pissants like Florio operate.
I had a Cub Scout Den meeting tonight and had to pick up one of the Scout before the meeting. There wasn’t any school today so I had no access to the school to hold the meeting, so I had it here at my place. This particular Scout goes to a local private school, so he had a little homework and, amazingly, he wanted to get it done since there were only 4 problems and he figured he could get them done before the meeting started.
We got back to the house and he settled in to work on his problems. The boy and I got ready for the meeting and when I came back down, his friend asked me if I could help him with his homework. So here’s the first of 4 problems he’s working on:
Which of the following helps you solve 35 + 16?
- Think of 16 as 10 + 6
- Think of 16 as 8 + 8
- Think of 35 as 40 – 5 Explain your answer:
35 + 16 = ?
I had to look at this a bit to figure out what the heck was going on, it was understandable that the boy’s friend was having trouble with. After looking at it a bit, then squinting at it and looking at it from some other angles, I figured this is how they make math have “no wrong answers.”
To the Scout’s credit, he new the answer. To the math part that is. So, trying to help him answer the homework question, I asked him how he figured it out. He said “I just added to two number together…” The sheepishness in his voice was a nice touch.
The fact is, this type of thinking needlessly complicates math. It was clear that the Scout was having trouble with the concept of substitution. But there was no need to use substitution to solve this problem. For whatever reason, “new math” does a lot of this- complicating simple problems.
My old school mentality will come screaming through here, but the best way to learn addition, is to do addition. That means know all the single digit problems, then teaching carrying. Learn single digit subtraction, then teach borrowing. Give them practice word problems. Boom. Done.
The boy has been coming home with dots and “fast tens” and “fast doubles” and “doubles +1” all these terms that allegedly help the kids learn how to add. But what does it teach? The idea behind “doubles +1” is for a problem like “8+7”, the student is supposed to think, “Well, 7+7 is 14, plus 1 is 15.” Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?
Happily, I can say “No.”
We ran out of time for finishing his homework. After the meeting ended, when his father showed up, I explained what we were doing. The father, who teaches accounting, rolled his eyes and said something to the effect “Yeah, that’s the ‘New Math’…” At which point, one of the Mom’s nearby, who teaches science, overheard and said “Oh my God, it’s ridiculous. Their coming home with dots and games and spinning things… why can’t they just learn the math?” At which point, another father, who is a pilot, jumped into the conversation rolling his eyes about these new teaching methods.
After all, it’s not like any of us were able to figure out math…
When last we left our intrepid hockey player, he was sick of hockey. I remember quite clearly his final words as we left the rink at the end of last season: “I won’t ever play hockey again.”
I’ll admit that, at the time, I was of a mixed opinion on the matter. On the one hand- YES!!! Weekends free next year! No more tears over equipment and early mornings! On the other hand, well, I hated to see him dislike it so much. Hockey really is a good sport, I’d hoped he’d at least have a better opinion of it than that.
Then, about 2 months ago, the subject of hockey came up at the dinner table. The boy stated that he thought he’d like to play again. It was all I could do not to choke on my food. The Wife’s reaction wasn’t quite as strong as my own, but his statement caught her by surprise as well.
Ever since, we been waging a covert campaign to figure out what he really wants to do. The Wife and I both have strong senses of how thing will go if he chooses to play: after a couple weeks the complaining will start, halfway through he’ll be phoning in the practices with half-assed effort, buy the end he’ll be mad because his team can’t do anything and he’ll hate hockey. Again. That said, we are both reluctant to just out-and-out deny him the chance to play because we could be wrong.
We’ve both spoken with him, trying to couch the conversation in terms of his having thought about his martial arts classes and does he really want to give up his weekends? But he’s consistently come back with the conviction that he wants to play. So it looks like our weekends will be occupied this Winter.
As for the lass, she’s been in for quite awhile now. She’s a different beast altogether from her brother when it comes to sports. The boy wants to be an All Star without putting in any work. The lass just wants to have fun.
So the countdown has begun. 3 weeks to go.
Some more pictures from the weekend. The Wife went out early this morning to shoot in better lighting conditions. Here’s what she got.
From the deck:
This pumpkin is bigger than a basketball. Ironic because the Wife and the kids both thought the plant dead several times after the planted it.
The treeline in the back:
And my favorite of the lot:
Frosted Trees:
Birds Going South:
Leaves:
Willpower is simply the ability to choose to do something and stand by that choice. Scientists have, apparently, demonstrated it’s a finite resource. Apparently, the culprit is glucose, or lack thereof. Turns out it takes energy to exercise willpower:
Further studies have suggested that willpower is fueled by glucose- which helps explain why our determination crumbles when we try to lose weight. When we don’t eat, our glucose drops, and our willpower along with it. “We call it the dieter’s catch-22: In order to not eat, you need willpower. But in order to have willpower you need to eat,” says John Tierney…
Every parent since the beginning of time has run up against this phenomena:
Child: Can I have some candy?
Parent: No.Several seconds later…
Child: Can I have some candy?
Parent: No.Several seconds later…
Child: Can I have some candy?
Parent: No.Several seconds later…
Child: Can I have some candy?
Parent: No.Several seconds later…
Child: Can I have some candy?
Parent: FINE! HAVE THE WHOLE BAG! ROT YOUR TEETH!
Not to mention all the times where the initial request is just a feint. They ask for the candy, but they’re really after video games or something. It’s like Chinese Water Torture. Except, I’m not Chinese and there’s no water involved.
Of course, this evidence also suggests a solution. Go grab a candy bar before our willpower gives out. Just be sure sure to brush our teeth afterwords…
Last year, the lass was so excited about homework that she would come home and complete it as soon as she received it, despite the fact that as a kindergartner, the assignments were due whenever the kids chose to finish them. The Wife and I were very impressed.
Now that’s she’s in 1st grade, her only real homework each week is reading and studying for her spelling tests. After a couple of weeks, she’s decided that studying for her spelling tests is not so much fun. She typically has only 8 to 10 words to work on.
So she has her test coming up tomorrow and I sat going through the words with her. This weeks words are: trip, trap, grass, grab, crab, crib, grand and craft. The final two are bonus words. I guess the emphasis is on learning blended sounds like the “tr” and “cr”.
She didn’t like the way I went through the words because I didn’t do them in the order on the sheet. I told her that if she really knows them then the order won’t matter. She struggled a bit, but managed to get them all correct.
Since she struggled a bit, I decided to go through them again. She rolled her eyes at me after I said one of the words again and said in an exasperated tone “We’re not going to go through these like a million times, are we?”
“I promise we won’t,” I replied. “We’ll just do it as many as it takes for you to know them well.”
She did much better the second time around.
Being the Den Leader for the Bears, and having done the Wolves, I can say that the one thing that turns a mind into mush is figuring out the combination of Achievements, and the further combinations of requirements for each Achievement. Then, keeping it all straight for each Scout. Yuk.
A Google search revealed this site which has Achievement trackers for a variety of Scouting levels and activities. The trackers themselves are in both spreadsheet format and PDF. Even nicer, the author was aware of the existence of OpenOffice, so even though it was developed for Excel, it works with OO, or Libreoffice (the debian-ized version of OO).
Speaking for the Bear tracker, it’s quite a bit of work put into the sheet, but it’s well documented and pretty straight forward to use. I’ll be using this of my guys this year. If you’re a Den leader, these are definitely worth a look see.
I have to admit this is giving me a case of it:
Rodgers acknowledged on his weekly show on ESPN Radio in Milwaukee that he had a hard time swallowing the Saints fumble on Sunday that didn’t count because the regular officials wrongly ruled that Saints kickoff returner Darren Sproles was down before he lost the ball.
Ah yes, the “regular” officials who never make mistakes and are veritable oracles of the football Gods. Their word is law. Until it isn’t, apparently.
Having watched a good portion of the New Orleans-Green Bay game, there were a lot of questionable calls made and missed in that game. But then, as I’ve said previously, that happens all the time, regardless of who’s officiating the games.
Let’s just thank our lucky stars that the officials didn’t affect the outcome of the game. Who could we call in then?
The weather didn’t help me today.
My Cub Scout Den is full of active, high energy kids. I had planned on getting them outside to work on some of their Achievements, but it started raining about an hour prior to the Den meeting. Since taking them outside in the rain wasn’t really a viable option, I had to do my best to keep them moving indoors.
I also decided to stray from my normal “no snack” protocol because my meetings this year are immediately after school. I anticipate that most of them will have the munchies to varying degrees, so giving them some snacks would be necessary to keep their blood-sugar levels stable enough for me to actually be able to accomplish anything with them. For this meeting, I brought pretzel sticks, though a bunch of them also had their own snacks.
So after I distributed the snacks, the kids start laughing. I turn and look, and one of them has stuck a pretzel stick up his nose. Shortly after that, another one has one going from his nose down into his lower lip, so it looks like some gangly tooth sticking up his schnoz. After that, another one decides to set a Guinness record for most pretzel sticks in a nostril.
Let’s just say that it made the Den meeting a challenge.
As Bear Scouts, they actually have some latitude in what they do to earn their Rank Badge this year. There are 4 categories which they have to satisfy Achievements. Each category has a different number of Achievements to complete, totalling 12. But the handbook lists 24 overall Achievements, so they have quite a few different ones to pick from. That at least makes the curriculum possible to accomplish in a year with likely only a couple of Den meetings a month.
The hard part of the Den meeting is trying to keep the material fun and interesting for them. For instance, they all have to review their Bobcat Requirements, and the newer Scouts have to learn them. So rather than have them just sit and memorize the material, I ran a relay race with them where they had to answer a quiz question involving one of the requirements. So they got a chance to practice plus they got a little exercise along the way.
But some of this stuff doesn’t always fall so easily into a game. I discussed the concept of “respect” with them today and I had about 5 minutes or so before I lost the entire room. Some of the kids aren’t even listening when we start the discussion. How to turn a talk about respect into a game? I suppose there’s a way to do it, but I’m not the one to figure it out. At some point, these guys have to grow up a bit and learn to listen to things other than farting and belching. Of course, this could likely be as much about my own limitations as a presenter of the material. But hey, someone has to do it.
The next Den meeting looms now. My preference will be for something where I can get them outside. But it’s Fall in New England, and counting on the weather is never a good idea.
This morning, the Wife tried to get one up on the boy. His teacher had sent a note home asking parents to remind their kids to quiet down during the lunch line. The boy was on the defensive immediately, if not sooner.
“I’m not loud! It’s the other kids…” he started.
I’d anticipated his defensiveness as soon as the Wife had finished her question. I quickly jumped in to the fray, calmly stating “You aren’t in trouble, no one is yelling at you…” It can be exhausting working to circumvent his defensive tendencies. Lately, everything that falls short of glowing praise means we are yelling at him or he’s in trouble, according to him. It’s ridiculous, he of all kids should know when he’s really in trouble.
Anyway, he retorted “If I’m not in trouble then why are you saying something?”
See what I mean?
Then he continued “Besides, I know who the kids are that make us late too lunch. It’s these 2 girls who have to go to the bathroom everyday and take forever.”
I smiled at that and snarked “Yeah, well, get used to it.”
That made the Wife chuckle, she said “Yeah, 3rd grade is about right…”
Just 2 more years for the lass then.