After a year of my working with my Basic Literacy student, the program did an official evaluation of her progress. The main gain was in reading, on which I had focused pretty relentlessly. She'd gone from third grade level to eighth grade level. Other gains were less obvious, and there were a few goals we'd never gotten to, but on two hours a week ( Read more... )

The repairman has yet to pronounce a post-mortem, but my wife's Husqvarna 120 sewing machine seems to have bitten the dust after 33 years. It was a real workhorse, and we're sorry to see it go. We are unimpressed by the potential replacements at the local shop, and was wondering if anyone had any ideas. Our criteria: (1) Must stand up to another 30 ( Read more... )

Every day, I get ten or twenty messages from various political causes, asking me to sign their petitions online. (Email filters take care of these, but I occasionally check the folder out of morbid curiosity.) My suspicion is that these "petitions" are nothing of the kind; they influence nobody and are easily forged (why not simply grab the voter ( Read more... )

Obama is a failed President, the Jimmy Carter of the 21st century. I will gladly support any credible primary challenger in 2012.

Today is Beth's birthday, and, for the first time in 20 years, I couldn't give her a decent present ( Read more... )

If anyone knows someone who is a full-time faculty member in one of the University of Phoenix's graduate programs -- hopefully, someone nice -- please let me know.

A satirical piece of mine has just been posted on Printculture at http://printculture.com/item-2623.html

I have had four USB hubs burn out on me in the past seven months. This is not satisfactory ( Read more... )

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The best Fourths of July are in my past. There were picnics, parades, and fireworks. Then these things began to disappear. Last to go were the fireworks. For a few years, you could stand on a hill in back of the graduate student dorms at UC Irvine and see the fireworks go off all over Irvine and Tustin, and, if you looked behind you and squinted, ( Read more... )