The GI Joe and Transformers tee-shirts I bought ten years ago to wear ironically are now decidedly unironic.

At least I still have Thundercats... for now!
Speaking of irony...

Hi Kids, Let's Talk About Censorship

So the President aims to speak to school children about the controversial topics of staying in school and working hard to achieve your goals. To all the school districts who kowtowed to alarmist parents or acted on their own misplaced sense of persecution, thanks for making sure that the most intelligent and curious students will go out of their way to listen to the President speak. Nothing makes a piece of information as coveted as censoring it.

Sometimes, God Wants Us to Burn Some Trees

Here is a link to a story about one such time:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6721173.ece

An Open Letter to Mom and Dad, on the Jewish Question

Indoctrination only works on the ignorant and the incurious. Any attempt to limit an inquisitive, intelligent mind is certain to backfire. Perhaps Wonderturtle and I would be more likely to raise Zionist zealots if we waffle on such issues as keeping Kosher and the divinity of Christ.
We are certainly not likely to produce any progeny who will swallow a line like, "This book alone among all books is incontrovertibly and infallibly true, because it was written by the Hand of God Almighty. Even though the majority of the world believes the same to be true of other books, or different parts of the same book, they are wrong!
"And what's more, there is a certain parcel of land on the other side of the globe which was promised exclusively and in perpetuity to Us and Our Heirs (see aforementioned book...) and any amount of violence in protection of this birthright is not only justified, but sacrosanct."

Military Precision

The wind howls in our classroom, but we cannot feel it.
Some quirk of the air ducts makes it echo constantly. Sometimes it is a low, pigeon-coo hum, other times it is a tea-kettle whistle. There is never a palpable breeze, but the sound of it is constant.
The walls are cinder-block, painted off-white. The ceiling is gray, with fluorescent lights set in humorless rows like military cadets. The chairs are gray, and bolted to the floor in humorless rows like military cadets. The professor wonders why we don't laugh at her jokes, but instead sit stony-faced in humorless rows like military cadets.
The professor occasionally interjects observations she has gleaned in her garden. One of these was that owls are humorless. I laughed when she said that. When I stopped laughing, the room was silent but for the distant howl of the imaginary wind.
The class is mostly about math. Not the arithmetic I remember, nor the pure Euclidean fantasizing of rocket scientists, but an hermaphroditic hybrid of the two. It is most useful for insurance actuaries, political pollsters, and other meticulous efficiency freaks.
We learn the rules for stripping individuals of their identity and their uniqueness, hammering them into uniform, Orwellian boxes and stacking them in humorless rows like military cadets. These are called histograms.
I'm actually having a really good time!
Because the beauty of the math can peek out at me like a dancer from behind a veil and I am tantalized and awestruck.

Argument

Recently one of my young students postulated that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were lame.
I disagreed, and marshalled the following arguments:
1. They're the world's most fearsome fighting team.
2. They're heroes on the half-shell, and
3. They're green.
I further pointed out that when the evil Shredder attacks, these young Turtle-men are disinclined to grant him quarter.
I then reiterated in quadruplicate the subject we were discussing, and reminded him that these are heroes on the half-shell who exhibit, "Turtle Power."
As of this writing, he remains unconvinced.

Educate Me

Stephen Colbert: But doesn't your program have a liberal bias?
Jim Lehrer: No, we...
SC: Come on!
JL: No. We just present the information.
SC: But doesn't information itself have a liberal bias?

Alan Wolfe writing in The New Republic:
"The education gap is likely to exacerbate the tendency of Democrats to speak in policy terms while Republicans appeal to guts, instinct, and emotion. If this trend continues, the Republican Party, which contains both elitist and populist elements, will move more decisively toward the latter and away from the former. If the Palin choice indicates any sense of direction, the Republicans may soon nominate a candidate who never attended college at all."

Whew. I guess that means Southeast Missouri State University almumnus Rush Limbaugh is out.