finding my past...

Usually its been difficult to impossible to track down most of my former teachers once they've left the school.  i've still promised myself that if i ever see my 9th grade english teacher, Bob Mullen, he gets my free mdrf passes as he's the one who introduced me both to the faire concept and to shakespeare.  he was very active in the national campaign to get textbook publishers to stop abridging the works they put into compilations like "Adventures in Reading" (an example, from Romeo and Juliet, from their 9th grade edition was famous enough to have been pointed out in a sunday doonesbury).

The music department, though its changed hands often, has had many skilled, talented, and dedicated people pass through its batons, though until tonite I hadn't realized just how much.  Moe Turrentine was my first conductor in '84, who left the school to become county-wide music education director and now has that role at the state level. 

His replacement, Gary Markham, teaches high school down in Cobb County (north of atlanta) Georgia and remains an active director of DCI, working to get a corps into the Atlanta area.

My next teacher, Chris Azzara, seemed just a nice guy with a lot of musical interests.  he had perfect pitch which drove me nuts, and played in a rock covers band with guitar teacher Glen McCarthy (q.v.).  I didn't think all that much about his talents as his general nice-guy-ness kinda just made you go, yeah, he's cool.

He's now an associate professor at Eastman School of Music, Rochester.  Waaaaaaay cool...

My final teacher, Kristi Thomas, I've run into off and on here in the region, at the Birchmere and at local restaurants.  She switched to elementary school and was a Fairfax County teacher of the year for 1995!

Glen McCarthy, whom I knew but never studied under (though my brother did years later), had started the first guitar class for high schools (anywhere) there at Robinson, and still teaches there, travelling the state and the country giving guidance on how his classes worked.  In addition, he's a sought-after session musician in the DC area and recently joined two fellow dc-area musicians i know in the celtic group, Keltish!  small world...

He's one of only two teachers left from when I was there, the other being Chip Rome who just hit his 25th year as drama coach.

so the possibilities are...

1. lieberman is right and the voters want a moderate who's willing to put partisan politics aside
2. lieberman's wrong and the liberal voters in the state want more direct representation than they had in him, someone willing to take on the president
3. lieberman's wrong and partisan politics will explode - he'll split the democrat vote between the "always vote democrat" and his own supporters and the republican will take the seat.

The cynic in me is betting on #3, particularly if the (ultra-)conservatives get a rallying open vote on the table the way gay marriage worked in several other states.

it seems, people love to be discriminatory if they can do so anonymously, which is exactly how these amendment votes manage to work...

question: if he wins as an independent, is he still an independent when it comes to senate majority/minority rules, committee memberships, etc?

the difference between design in science and "intelligent design" laid bare...

Angry Astronomer: DI's Apples & Oranges:

In this post, Denyse O'Leary (on Dembski's Uncommon Descent blog) writes about a recent scandal in which the news media was caught posting a poorly photoshopped image of smoke over Berut that was apparently intended to make the scene more ominous. The deception, like many others, was quickly outed by attentative bloggers who noticed the similar natures of the smoke columns and were able to show precisely how the feat was accomplished.

O'Leary makes the claim that this process is synonomyous with the process Intelligent Design supporters use to detect design in nature.

Unfortunately, aside from the initial step of say "well, it looks designed, so perhaps it is", the two cases have very little in common. The Photoshopped image scenario has several components that intelligent design lacks.

The major one is that there is an obvious intent that gives purpose, and motivation, to the Photoshopped image's creation. With intelligent Design, There's no intent. Apparently, the designer just thought it'd be a good idea to put a bunch of organisms together.

The second thing that differentiates the two, is that the Photoshopped picture case did something ID has stubbornly refused to do: demonstrate how it's possible. The blogger that outed the media took the image and demonstrated which parts were copied from where. In science, this would be considered a very good test of a hypothesis. As far as ID, well, they still haven't bothered to explain how the designer did anything. They just claim he/she/it did.

emph mine

quote of the day

"Without the use of a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to make a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing." -- Poe's Law (by Nathan Poe, commentor on physorg.com and others)

Non Sequitur says...

...be careful what you wish for...