All Access Tour of the Fortress of Solitude
A virtual tour of my apartment! Enjoy!
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Friday, August 04, 2006
EVERYONE'S CRAZY! (a play in three scenes)
Hello friends. Can't write much. I'm finishing the last gasp summer session teaching thing before the onslaught of vacation. The class I've been teaching for the past few days is drama, and that's been a proverbial "hoot" (check Proverbs for the "owl sound=fun" metaphor...I'm sure it's in there). Anyway, today my students collaborated on a play entitled Everyone's Crazy! and they'll be practicing and performing it for the next few days. If any readers are interested, please join us at the Kobe Kaisei College Auditorium at 1:00 PM this Sunday (Aug. 6th) for a performance of the play as well as refreshments.
Because I'm so proud of my students, I've decided to publish their script here. Please don't plagiarize (I've already sent a manuscript in to the Japanese Copyright Office, so it's too late to claim you wrote it), but if you know any cultured Hollywood or Broadway script agents, feel free to pass it along.
As for what it's about, I'll leave it to the readers and audience members to interpret and derive meaning. Let's just say it has elements of Oedipus Rex with even more romance yet none of the icky eye-gouging. Thanks for reading, and enjoy!
Because I'm so proud of my students, I've decided to publish their script here. Please don't plagiarize (I've already sent a manuscript in to the Japanese Copyright Office, so it's too late to claim you wrote it), but if you know any cultured Hollywood or Broadway script agents, feel free to pass it along.
As for what it's about, I'll leave it to the readers and audience members to interpret and derive meaning. Let's just say it has elements of Oedipus Rex with even more romance yet none of the icky eye-gouging. Thanks for reading, and enjoy!
EVERYONE’S CRAZY
Written, produced, and performed by the Kobe Kaisei Summer Drama Class
CASSIE, beautiful girl and heroine of the play (Yuki)
JIM, Cassie’s 2nd boyfriend and Jack’s brother (Yoko)
JACK, Cassie’s 1st boyfriend and Jim’s brother (Marika)
PRIEST, the person performing the wedding (Ikue)
MOTHER #1, Cassie’s true mother, robbed of her baby (Shiho)
MOTHER #2, the woman who receives baby Cassie (Ikue)
the DOCTOR, an evil man who does crazy things (Keiko)
NARRATOR and SOUND EFFECTS (Shiho)
NARRATOR: Our story begins in a hospital, where we are happy for new life. Baby Cassie has been born, and she sleeps peacefully in her mother's arms.
MOTHER #1: Oh! Cassie has been born!
[holds baby]
DOCTOR : Congratulations!
[claps hands]
MOTHER #1: Thank you!
DOCTOR: Now I need to take baby Cassie to be inspected. I will bring her right back.
[To Audience]: I’ll steal Cassie!
[smile]
MOTHER #1: OK. Here you go!
[gives baby to Doctor, who leaves room and meets Mother #2]
DOCTOR: This baby is present for you.
[Doctor gives baby to Mother #2]
MOTHER #2: Wow! I’m happy! Thank you very much!
[Doctor leaves and goes back to Mother #1’s room]
MOTHER #1: Oh, no! Where is my baby?
DOCTOR: Mother, I gave Cassie to someone else. Ha ha ha!
MOTHER #1: [very angry] Why did you do that?
DOCTOR: Because I am crazy and Cassie is very cute.
MOTHER #1: [very sad] Oh my God! Cassie is gone, but at least I have two children: Jim and Jack.
NARRATOR: 20 years have passed. Cassie is now an adult, and she is taking a romantic car trip with her boyfriend, Jack.
CASSIE: What’s wrong, Jack? You’re talk little.
JACK: Really? It’s normal!
[Both listen to music]
…because…
CASSIE: Look! That’s very beautiful, Jack. But I feel a little cold.
JACK: Wow! It’s very beautiful! But …
… you’re more beautiful.
CASSIE: [surprised] Wow!
JACK: Hey …
[speaks softly] Cassie, I will love you until death. Will you marry me?
CASSIE: [non-verbal cue] Wow! I’m very happy now! I want to live happily from now with you.
JACK: Cassie, you’re very cute! I can’t keep my eyes off you!
[car crashes loudly. Jack is unconscious and Cassie has hurt her head.]
CASSIE: Who am I? [asks audience] Do you know me?
[Jim shows up!]
JIM: Oh! I know you! You’re my girlfriend!
CASSIE: Holy Cow! You’re very handsome!
JIM: Thanks. Will you marry me?
CASSIE: Yes, yes, yes!
[Jim and Cassie leave accident and go to nearby church. End of Scene 2]
NARRATOR: Right after the accident, Jim and Cassie go to a church to get married. Will Jack wake up? Will Cassie be married? Will everyone find true love? Watch, to learn the answers.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Let's take a little walk down memory lane!
Hello All.
Things are going fine and dandy here in Japan. It's a rather funny place, but I like it. Job's good. School's good. Apartment's good. Neighborhood's good. Neighbors . . . could be worse. I'm pretty much finished grading, and now the only thing left on the calendar is this silly little 3-day "summer session." After that, two months of probable nothingness, with a nice 10-day Indonesian vacation in the middle. Although I'm bracing for dull tedium, I'm sure some interesting and blogworthy events will occur, and I'll keep you posted on those. Also, if there are any questions about life in Japan or anything else, feel free to use the comment feature to air them. (As I typed that last sentence, I felt a dire premonition settle upon me . . . no telling what kind of retarded questions I might be forced to field from Errol, but I'll do my best to answer even his.)
That said, in anticipation of the tremendous downtime, I feel a need to add something to this blog. In addition to the orgasm-inspiring artwork, I'm going to start republishing my old Collegian "Cageliner" columns here. I do this mostly out of vanity, somewhat out of nostalgia (you win, Zach, you magnificent, sentimental bastard!), but also slightly because I feel the need to archive my rantings electronically--preservation through the nebulous vagaries of the internet as opposed to the shaky confines of my aging and rattling hard drive. I'll put them in a different font--the elegant "Lucida Grande"--to differentiate them from the rest of the post. That way you can tell when current info ends and old news begins.
We'll begin with my first column, dated August 28th, 2000. Wow--Almost six years ago. In this inaugural piece, I savage teachers. This topic choice was a nod to my first "Soapbox" editorial, which was printed by The Coloradoan some six years before (1994!) and also savaged teachers. That little escapade nearly got me kicked out of school and it still represents what will likely be my life's greatest achievement--the pinnacle of my existence. Sigh. . . it's been entirely downhill since the 9th grade. When the Collegian decided to hire me, I chose to target teachers in my first column in the hope that it would get my newspaper career started on the right note.
This piece also features research--how naive I was to think I needed solid facts to write opinion columns! How ignorant I was to assume that the editors of the Collegian might expect that from a columnist! My boss at the CSU bookstore receiving department thought I'd made a possibly racist comment in comparing Washington D.C. schoolchildren to primates at a zoo; he pointed out that most D.C. schoolchildren are of African descent, and in certain racist circles, simian comparisons are a pejorative mainstay. I say millions of schoolchildren of all races and creeds are as stupid as monkeys, most of them grow up without even slightly augmenting their intelligence, and many are often hired for tenured careers in academia (e.g. CU's dearly departed plagiarizer, fabricator, and non-Indian Ward Churchill). Also, notice in paragraph two my contempt for extremists from both right and left sides of the American political landscape. I disliked extremists back in those days (still kinda do) and tried to blast both sides in a lot of my columns.
Anyhoo, I babble. I forget the headline this was printed under, but that's OK because I didn't write the headlines. Enjoy!
Things are going fine and dandy here in Japan. It's a rather funny place, but I like it. Job's good. School's good. Apartment's good. Neighborhood's good. Neighbors . . . could be worse. I'm pretty much finished grading, and now the only thing left on the calendar is this silly little 3-day "summer session." After that, two months of probable nothingness, with a nice 10-day Indonesian vacation in the middle. Although I'm bracing for dull tedium, I'm sure some interesting and blogworthy events will occur, and I'll keep you posted on those. Also, if there are any questions about life in Japan or anything else, feel free to use the comment feature to air them. (As I typed that last sentence, I felt a dire premonition settle upon me . . . no telling what kind of retarded questions I might be forced to field from Errol, but I'll do my best to answer even his.)
That said, in anticipation of the tremendous downtime, I feel a need to add something to this blog. In addition to the orgasm-inspiring artwork, I'm going to start republishing my old Collegian "Cageliner" columns here. I do this mostly out of vanity, somewhat out of nostalgia (you win, Zach, you magnificent, sentimental bastard!), but also slightly because I feel the need to archive my rantings electronically--preservation through the nebulous vagaries of the internet as opposed to the shaky confines of my aging and rattling hard drive. I'll put them in a different font--the elegant "Lucida Grande"--to differentiate them from the rest of the post. That way you can tell when current info ends and old news begins.
We'll begin with my first column, dated August 28th, 2000. Wow--Almost six years ago. In this inaugural piece, I savage teachers. This topic choice was a nod to my first "Soapbox" editorial, which was printed by The Coloradoan some six years before (1994!) and also savaged teachers. That little escapade nearly got me kicked out of school and it still represents what will likely be my life's greatest achievement--the pinnacle of my existence. Sigh. . . it's been entirely downhill since the 9th grade. When the Collegian decided to hire me, I chose to target teachers in my first column in the hope that it would get my newspaper career started on the right note.
This piece also features research--how naive I was to think I needed solid facts to write opinion columns! How ignorant I was to assume that the editors of the Collegian might expect that from a columnist! My boss at the CSU bookstore receiving department thought I'd made a possibly racist comment in comparing Washington D.C. schoolchildren to primates at a zoo; he pointed out that most D.C. schoolchildren are of African descent, and in certain racist circles, simian comparisons are a pejorative mainstay. I say millions of schoolchildren of all races and creeds are as stupid as monkeys, most of them grow up without even slightly augmenting their intelligence, and many are often hired for tenured careers in academia (e.g. CU's dearly departed plagiarizer, fabricator, and non-Indian Ward Churchill). Also, notice in paragraph two my contempt for extremists from both right and left sides of the American political landscape. I disliked extremists back in those days (still kinda do) and tried to blast both sides in a lot of my columns.
Anyhoo, I babble. I forget the headline this was printed under, but that's OK because I didn't write the headlines. Enjoy!
Every time a new report is released illustrating the bumbling idiocy of our nation’s public school students in comparison to kids from other countries, the inane debate over why our education system is failing reignites, demonstrating that our nation’s educational pundits seem to place well below the average intellectual caliber of the graduates of our schools.
Inflammatory reports, like “95% of American fifth graders believe Uranus is the capital of Algebra” or “when asked who the father of our country was, 62% of 10th grade students responded ‘true’,” are usually harbingers of an impending inundation of moronic explanations from “experts”. Absurd rationalizations range from “God is transforming us into wretched imbeciles because prayer has been removed from public schools” to “our standards of testing are race biased, gender biased, or biased against homosexual elementary students.”
Despite the fact that virtually no group affiliated with public education ever seems to take any responsibility for the mess, a loud-mouthed contingent of our noble and selfless “educators” often tend to be a major source of some particularly empty-headed solutions. While their conclusions have been deemed valid in the court of public opinion, the sad fact of the matter is statistics indicate their proposals are actually woefully ignorant of the way education in America works.
For example, one “solution” constantly parroted by the education establishment goes something like, “if we educators were paid more, then the quality of our teaching would undoubtedly increase.” Essentially, the higher their salary, the better the education.
However, according to a February report entitled “Report Card on American Education” published by the American Legislative Exchange Council, there is no noticeable correlation between teacher salary and student achievement. Minnesota and Iowa, for instance, ranked respectively first and second in the nation in student performance based upon ACT, SAT, and NAEP standardized test scores. Keeping in mind the education establishment’s “higher salary = better education” equation, Minnesota and Iowa teachers earn substantially more than the national average for these results, right?
Wrong. The average instructional staff salary in Minnesota is $40,320 a year, 21st in the nation, and Iowa’s average teacher salary is a paltry $35,277, ranking them 35th. Teachers in New Jersey have the 3rd highest average salary, but their students rank only 29th in terms of achievement. Over the past twenty years, New Hampshire has raised its average teacher salary 44%, more than any other state, but their average total SAT score has only risen by .2%. On the other hand, Illinois’ average SAT score has shot up 8.3% over the same time period, but they’ve only increased their teachers’ salary by 7.31%.
Another myth propagated by the education establishment is the notion that if schools had more money to spend on students (for essentials like jump ropes and glue sticks) then the kids would perform better. However, New Jersey, ranked 29th in student achievement, spends more money on each pupil ($10,900) than any other state, and Washington DC comes in second at $10,300 in expenditures per student. How are students in our nation’s capital faring scholastically? Well, let’s just say they’re doing slightly better than the state of Mississippi and the primate exhibit at the San Diego Zoo.
When taken into account all of the information indicating little to no connection exists between public school funding increases and student achievement, one is forced to question the motives and thought process of the mainstream education establishment and their extremely vocal tools. I don’t mind the National Education Administration and their eternal quest for more funding, but I would be far likely to support public education funding increases if the educators themselves could manage to swallow their pride and admit a shred of responsibility for the sorry state of education in America.
The efforts of the good teachers in the public school system -- the quality few who do an outstanding job despite the lack of money or recognition -- are often overshadowed by the constant, asinine call for more money to be indiscriminately thrown about.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Naturally: as soon as I leave, Fort Collins gets ranked #1.
Well ... dammit. It was bound to happen sometime. According to the Yahoo!News headlines that appear on the official Yahoo! homepage, Fort Collins has finally been ranked the #1 Best Place in America to live (2006), beating Sugar Land, Texas and Columbia, Maryland. The ranking was conducted by CNNMoney.com (the online version of Money magazine, if I'm not mistaken) and it would appear their methodology was sound, thereby justifying the hoopla.
Apparently, households in the Fort make about $48k a year. Students score around 20% better than the state average in reading and math, but only 6% go to private schools (I had no idea we were that much of a minority). For 90% of the year, Fort Collins' air quality is ranked "good", and while crime rates are slightly higher than Money's "Best Places Average", Fort Collins' commute time--15 minutes--is lower (the psychotic road rage instinct in me is demanding a recount). While Fort Collins only offers 652 restaurants (sharply below average), it also offers 375 bars, a whopping 50% better than average. The average age of Fort People is 28.8, which indicates that were I still living there, I would be younger than average.
If you think I sound less than thrilled, you're right. Two reasons: (1) I don't live there anymore, and having my love and pride in my hometown vindicated on a national level makes me miss it all the more; (2) while this contradicts the first reason, I kind of don't like my hometime being splashed all over the news as "Best" in America. That means it's now target #1 for hordes of dopey yuppies who want to transplant their unwelcome families, thereby further clogging up the roads and screwing up local politics and culture. To borrow a phrase the immortal Swearengen, Welcome to Fucking Fort Collins!
Oh well.
In other news, the semester is coming to a close as tomorrow brings about the first day of exams. I got a shitload of grading to do, so posts might be slow and irregular (as always, heh heh). Also newsworthy is that I bought tickets for Bali in late August. That should be quite relaxitating.
Anyway, here's a picture of a city I think is way cooler than Fort Collins.
Apparently, households in the Fort make about $48k a year. Students score around 20% better than the state average in reading and math, but only 6% go to private schools (I had no idea we were that much of a minority). For 90% of the year, Fort Collins' air quality is ranked "good", and while crime rates are slightly higher than Money's "Best Places Average", Fort Collins' commute time--15 minutes--is lower (the psychotic road rage instinct in me is demanding a recount). While Fort Collins only offers 652 restaurants (sharply below average), it also offers 375 bars, a whopping 50% better than average. The average age of Fort People is 28.8, which indicates that were I still living there, I would be younger than average.
If you think I sound less than thrilled, you're right. Two reasons: (1) I don't live there anymore, and having my love and pride in my hometown vindicated on a national level makes me miss it all the more; (2) while this contradicts the first reason, I kind of don't like my hometime being splashed all over the news as "Best" in America. That means it's now target #1 for hordes of dopey yuppies who want to transplant their unwelcome families, thereby further clogging up the roads and screwing up local politics and culture. To borrow a phrase the immortal Swearengen, Welcome to Fucking Fort Collins!
Oh well.
In other news, the semester is coming to a close as tomorrow brings about the first day of exams. I got a shitload of grading to do, so posts might be slow and irregular (as always, heh heh). Also newsworthy is that I bought tickets for Bali in late August. That should be quite relaxitating.
Anyway, here's a picture of a city I think is way cooler than Fort Collins.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Two things I missed when they were in their prime.
Thing #1: Dr. Katz, back when it was on Comedy Central. I didn't get it ... I thought it was just crappy animation and comedians' standup routines performed in front of a therapist who simply says, "uh huh" and "hhmmm... OK." Turns out that's EXACTLY what Dr. Katz was, only now I find it hilarious for some reason.
Thing #2: The comedy stylings of Mitch Hedberg. This guy was hilarious, and I never even heard of him until after he was dead. That's sad, but thanks to the internet, he has achieved immortality.
Enjoy!
Thing #1: Dr. Katz, back when it was on Comedy Central. I didn't get it ... I thought it was just crappy animation and comedians' standup routines performed in front of a therapist who simply says, "uh huh" and "hhmmm... OK." Turns out that's EXACTLY what Dr. Katz was, only now I find it hilarious for some reason.
Thing #2: The comedy stylings of Mitch Hedberg. This guy was hilarious, and I never even heard of him until after he was dead. That's sad, but thanks to the internet, he has achieved immortality.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
a memorable activity to strengthen a parent-child bond
Hmmm... the last post didn't seem to generate too much discussion, so here's a new topic for us to mull over:
Those who know me best will attest to my stunningly profound wisdom, particularly in the area of raising children. Well, I thought of a new and loving activity that will bring parents and children closer together. After you have a son or daughter, wait a few years. Then, as soon as the little tyke's cranial plates have fully fused together into a solid skull, shave its head and take the little boy or girl to a tattoo parlor. It may cry a little, or a lot, but trust me--it will be worth it. When you're done at the parlor, tell the infant it's all over, sshhh, there there now, and don't bring the event up for 15 or 16 years. It's a huge secret. When your child has turned 18 and has completed high school, drug him or her into complete sedation and then shave the scalp again. After your child awakes, answer its burning questions with a simple hand-held mirror. Atop your progeny's head will be written in elegantly faded but permanent ink: HAPPY GRADUATION, SWEETIE! WE ARE SOOO PROUD OF YOU AND LOVE YOU SO MUCH! -- MOM AND DAD
Discuss.
Those who know me best will attest to my stunningly profound wisdom, particularly in the area of raising children. Well, I thought of a new and loving activity that will bring parents and children closer together. After you have a son or daughter, wait a few years. Then, as soon as the little tyke's cranial plates have fully fused together into a solid skull, shave its head and take the little boy or girl to a tattoo parlor. It may cry a little, or a lot, but trust me--it will be worth it. When you're done at the parlor, tell the infant it's all over, sshhh, there there now, and don't bring the event up for 15 or 16 years. It's a huge secret. When your child has turned 18 and has completed high school, drug him or her into complete sedation and then shave the scalp again. After your child awakes, answer its burning questions with a simple hand-held mirror. Atop your progeny's head will be written in elegantly faded but permanent ink: HAPPY GRADUATION, SWEETIE! WE ARE SOOO PROUD OF YOU AND LOVE YOU SO MUCH! -- MOM AND DAD
Discuss.
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