Planet Ecaz

Adventures in teaching young kids:
Three-year-old (upon seeing a butternut squash in our collection of seasonal gourds): Open, Mr. Squash. Open, Mr. Squash. Open, Mr. Squash.

(After follow-up questions, the child was demanding the squash open the back door to the classroom. Why? No idea.)

Every Sunday morning, I take apart and clean my CPAP. Every Sunday night, I hunt around the house for all the pieces in an attempt to assemble the saddest Voltron ever.

Spikevax-ed and early voting today. Two things to feel good about.

I can’t tell if I’m just really burned out or if I don’t want to teach anymore. I also can’t tell — in the case of the former — if I can fix it in a time horizon that makes the two materially different.

Adventures in teaching young kids:
Me (to 4-year-old): What were you working on?
4-year-old: (pauses for a bit; lets out a big hiccup) I have hiccups so I forgot.

Somehow he failed to end Blade Runner — the Black Lotus anime series came out in 2021 and another live-action series drops next year. Maybe BR is immortal since every release is financially unsuccessful but more always comes — eventually.

This is also true.

It was mostly a joke. A throw-away line that I posted when I was bored this morning. It should not be taken as serious literary criticism.

I totally agree with you on this. They are absolutely opposites and Tolkien’s dislike of Dune was well known. But, technically, they are on the same time line in the same universe.

They aren’t thematically linked. But Tolkien saw his work as a prehistory of our world — we are in something like the 7th age. Herbert saw his work as the far future of our current world. Neither was working in an alternative earth timeline. The stories are, oddly, in a continuous universe.

When you really think about it, Dune is just a really, really future forward sequel to Lord of the Rings.

A perfect score on my CPAP machine.

I got a perfect score from my CPAP machine last night. In the words of Dean Craig Pelton, “Jesus wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer!”
Yup, I may have peaked as a human being last night.

Adventures in teaching young kids:
3-year-old: I’m going swimming tonight.
Me: Are you swimming with your mom or dad?
3-year-old: No. Old people can’t swim.

Adventures in teaching young kids:
3-year-old: I have a baby named XXXX at home.
Me: That’s wonderful. Is there anything else you want to tell me about XXXX?
3-year-old: She only eats boobie milk.

Loved this book. It also made me feel very sad, especially as a labor union Democrat.

Adventures in teaching young kids:
Student: I think you’re sensational.
Me: Thank you very much.
Student: What does sensational mean?

Adventures in teaching 3-year-old kids:
3-year-old: Do you have itchy teeth?
Me: No.
3-year-old: Yes, you do. And you have a baby in your tummy.

Still making my way through 2019’s Cats. There’s a part where a bunch of cats — some of whom are wearing sneakers — spend like 10 minutes dancing to impress the Judi Dench cat. Just wanted to make sure other people are seeing this too and that it isn’t just me…

Can I please just get some #Dune memes in my feed? To quote the great Bonnie Tyler, “And I need you now tonight/ And I need you more than ever.”

I ignored the murder of Melissa Hortman. Here’s why I’ll be talking about the murder of Charlie Kirk all day today.

by most liberal pundits

What’s my headspace tonight?
Well, I’m watching the 2019 version of Cats because… it and I both exist, why shouldn’t we become one tonight.

Adventures in teaching 4-year-old kids:
Me: Some examples of liquids are water or milk or coffee…
4-year-old: Or bourbon!

The 20th century was built largely out of absurd moments and events. In time we had to invent an adjective, European and literary, that might encapsulate the feeling of impending menace and distorted reality and the sense of a vast alienating force that presses the edges of individual choice. These things are Kafkaesque. In America it is the individual himself, floating on random streams of disaffection, who tends to set the terms of the absurd. A man walks into a diner and shoots 11 strangers. What city was that, and who remembers the shooter’s name? A couple of teenagers wander through their school building shooting teachers and students. How many times did this happen, and where exactly, and who were the kids with the guns? Oswald changed history not only through his involvement in the death of the president, but also in prefiguring such moments of the American absurd. He was not media-poisoned, as many of the others have been, and his crime was not steeped in the supermarket cult of modern folklore and dread. But think of the outrages and atrocities that flowed from the psychic disorientation of the 1960s — the assassinations, the cult murders, the mass suicides. It was surely the assassination of President Kennedy that began to give us a sense of something coming undone. This was vintage American violence, lonely and rootless, but it shaded into something older and previously distant, a condition of estrangement and helplessness, an undependable reality. We felt the shock of unmeaning.

We continue to, as DeLillo described once about Oswald, feel "the shock of unmeaning"

The MSNBC commentator saying that most political violence has historically come from the left just once again showed how we suffer from failing to learn history. Lynching, pogroms, race riots, the political violence that ended Reconstruction, and against the Civil Rights Movement. Come on.

It is wild how confident these people have been for decades that they could incite chaotic violence but it would never be directed at them. Just absolute confidence that they held the fire hose and could point it exclusively at others.

Violence builds more violence and the pendulum swings until the violent ones are shattered.
— Frank Herbert

Any average Texas resident in the past decade or two would be much more likely to associate McClelland with the company, not Butt. Scott was in almost every TV commercial for the brand for years. The public face of the company was against autonomy for public schools.

Nope. It was Scott McClelland— the president and ubiquitous TV commercial presence. Two different leaders in the same company. Sadly, Butt did his work quietly. The other guy was out in public pushing bad ideas doing much more harm.

It is unfortunate that the former HEB president and public face of the company for many years was a cheerleader for the state to displace an elected board and take over Houston ISD. Sure, I still shop at Central Market, but I try to send fewer of my dollars to HEB.