Professionalism

I had a 40º temperature yesterday (104º Fahrenheit), and I had the shakes, so I called into work sick. I was in real pain. Do you think they told me to stay home and get well soon? No, instead they told me they won’t “tolerate” sick leave, reminded me that I'm still on my trial period, and said it wouldn’t look "professional" to cancel classes—apparently they think it looks more professional to have contagious teachers moaning and shaking throughout class between squirts of Orofar® into their throats. Can you believe that?

p.s. one really great thing about the American heath care system is that they give you pills for everything. Here they give you huge doses of disgusting tea (well, at least there's booze in it)

p.p.s. my special lady was my lady-in-waiting (but for a nobleman). she spent half the day keeping me tucked in, souped up, and forcing me to drink disguisting tea...which did make me better. Unless it was my huge sperm count.

UPDATE: Because I succumbed to the pressure and went to work on Tuesday, I now have complications and am sequestered from the world, including my two special children, for the next five days.

Groupthink

Man, kids are stupid. I suppose we learned in IR about the same thing happening among adults, but I've yet to witness it.

It all started when I began volunteering at my kid's kindergarten. I teach English there twice a week. After a month the kids "know" how to say:

Hello, my name is _______
Bye bye
Red
Blue
Green
Yellow
White
I like _________
One
Two
Three
Four
Five

By "know" I mean some of them remember the words sometimes, there’re a few bright ones, but mostly they repeat after me. I demonstrate the colors to them by showing them bowling pins; each pin is a different color. I've counted by counting off balls in the past. Today I decided to make things simpler by just counting off the pins instead of balls. Think that worked?

"How many pins am I holding up?"
One kid shouts "Blue!"
Then the rest chime in "BLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"No no, how many pins am I holding?"
One kid shouts "Holding!"
Then the rest chime in "HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Enough of that, time for a new game. I put three of the pins on top of book cases in three corners of the room. I said, "let's go to the blue pin!" and jogged over to the blue pin. They got the hang of that pretty quickly. Problem was, sometimes they went to the wrong pin. As soon as one kid started running, they all followed him, irregardless of who the kid was (not the same leader every time). And you might say the rest figure he knows which color is which so they follow. You'd be sorely mistaken if you thought that, because get this: my daughter followed the group to the wrong pin as well! She knows very bloody well which color is which! Can you believe that?

Applause is in order for the Hero of this Article of the Day

This man accused his ex-wife and sister-in-law of pimping out his 4 year old daughter and niece to a judge and parliament aide who raped them on several occasions. After a year of his accusations falling on deaf ears at the Lithuanian Child Welfare Office, despite three independent expert psychological reports confirming the girls' honesty, he allegedly shot one of the rapists and one of the pimps himself. How tragic that he couldn't get to the others.

This article in English doesn't have all the details, but it has the general picture.

Article of the Day

Obama and the Bureaucratization of Health Care, by Sarah Palin.

Article of the Day

Listening to a Liar, by Thomas Sowell. I like Sowell more and more each time I read him.

Heart Attack

I had a mild heart attack yesterday, I think. It felt pretty severe, but I didn't collapse or anything. I was teaching class, and we were talking about what makes people attractive. The students were supposed to think of the most attractive person in the world. They were having trouble, so I told them that other quality besides physical appearance make people, honesty or bravery or intelligence. There are three students in the class that know me already and there is one girl who is new. It was her first day, and at this moment she shouted "Barack Obama!" I shuddered violently and grabbed the left side of my chest--ouch, real pain! I told her she wouldn't think so if she'd been to my classes for the past three weeks. I managed to teach all my other students the truth.

Article of the Day

The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare: Eight things we can do to improve health care without adding to the deficit, by JOHN MACKEY.

Clear and wise.

Godfried Daniel, Picasa is a Fuckface!

For reasons I'll go into on my other blog, I've chosen to start saying Godfried Daniel around my children instead of God Fucking Damn It! I can't put into words how frustrating it is to download Picasa over and over again from different sites claiming to offer it in English and never get it in English. What's the fuckin deal, can somebody please enlighten me? Does google think that nobody in Lithuania speaks English, and that everybody does speak Lithuanian? Both assertions would be dead wrong. But no, that's not even the problem: I tried turning on a privacy program that hides my IP address, and I still can't get the English version! So please, what is the fucking deal already? I had it at work in English, I had it on my laptop in English, is Picasa simply no longer offered in English?

Unfortunately, I haven't decided on a clean version of "fuckface" yet, so I hope my kids were around this afternoon. I'll take suggestions on that too.

Article of the Day

Obama's healthcare horror: Heads should roll -- beginning with Nancy Pelosi's!, by Camille Paglia, is a good piece on the doom of Obama's reform plans, if you can call them "plans." She also points out a couple of the stupider things he and the media have done lately (useful for me because I'm behind on my news reading).

Thanks Liepa!

I wish I were stupid, instead of *so* stupid

When I bought my new computer the guy offered to put a universal card reader into the front. But it doesn't transfer data any faster than my camera cord, and I do have a camera cord, so I didn't take it...even though I didn't know where my camera cord is at the moment...and even though it was only 20 lits!

Now I can't find my camera cord, so I have to bring my computer back to have it installed; I haven't been able to unload my full camera for a week and I have to take the time and pay for the gas to make another trip. Why can't I just be regular stupid?

High Score in Upwords: where's my medal?!

Ever since giving our kid away to my mother-in-law for the end of vacation, we spend most days playing hangman, buck euchre, or gin. We added rummy a few days ago, and we don't just play at home, we go to the beach or park too, but still, I've been kicking myself literally for leaving all our board games in Vilnius. Yesterday I felt unaccountably down (is there such a thing as antepartum depression for men? or cleaning-out-your-desk depression?), and bored, so we decided to go to Acropolis for a new game.

They have game store at the mall; we get most of our daughter's games there because they have thinking/learning games for various ages. They have the kinds of toys that you have to take apart, like a 3-D metal and/or wood contraptions that you sit with for hours or days until you figure out how to take it apart (which is simple and only takes a second once you figure it out). Unfortunately, they don't have any card games (such as Uno or other nonstandard deck games). Also unfortunately for boardgames they mostly have stupid things like Warcraft. What? That's a computer game! Next can I play the Duck Hunt board game? How about Street Fighter II Turbo?

We ended up buying the Lithuanian version of Upwords (Žodžių bokštas). We went to Chili Kaimas to get some beer and play. It took us a while to get going, because I'd never played before and my special lady had never even played Scrabble before. It was really fun, though, we're really glad we bought it. Throughout the game we'd both gotten a 12 point word (we were playing mostly in Lithuanian, incidentally). The thrilling conclusion was my rewriting a word that changed a couple other words too, giving me 23 points. I don't know if that's awesome or anything as far as standard play goes, but it was awesome for me!

Article of the Day

Malaise Forever!
-The immortal epitaph given to Jimmy Carter by the Simpsons

Make mine malaise, The attempt to rehabilitate Jimmy Carter, by Steven F. Hayward, is a decent account of how silly it is to try and glorify the wost president in American history. I've ready better, but I have to give a shout out to any article about the dud with the word malaise in the tile.

Is that a pickle in your pants, or...?

You bet your sweet ass it is! Sweet ass, that's a funny expression, isn't it?

I went downstairs today at work with a bowl of chili and a delicious pickle from the market. I had to slice up the pickle and heat up the chili. When I finished my lunch prep I went back upstairs to eat and watch Jim Gaffigan on the tube. I had to use both hands to carry the chili because it was so hot. I guess in addition to the hotness the chili was so good I totally forgot I'd had to put the pickle in my pocket (it was in a plastic bag). I didn't remember until I felt something cold and wet on my leg.

Article of the Day

The EPA suppressing its own report skeptical of global warming is no surprise: the Democrats' government ignores legitimate science because it stands in the way of one of their strongest talking points: science fiction, like man-made climate change.

The Hangover (Two or three Spoilers in the third paragraph, you can read till there safely)

My special lady and I have been on vacation, but up until a few days ago it's all--two whole weeks--have been spent moving and taking care of business at our new home, which has been somewhat neglected. We gave our kid away to my mother-in-law on Wednesday, and since then we're all, "Now what do we do?" The answer is mostly play cards, also some hangman. But one night we went to the movies.

The Hangover is a really good movie. We hadn't gone to the movies in a while, and it was fun to laugh out loud, especially for me, because I'm often the only one in the theater to get a joke. There were plenty of jokes in this one. It was also funny to see them translated: thrice somebody accents the wrong syllable in the word "retard," so in the subtitles the word "delibas" (which actually means dumbass, not retard) was misspelled "debylas," as if being pronounced as only a dumbass would.

Two things disappointing about the movie (here come the spoilers): predictability and too happy an ending, both of which are typical, though, and expected. Knew-it-1 as soon as Alan opened the book on how to count cards I knew they'd end up having to do it at some point. Knew-it-2 as soon as they blanked out that early in the night I sensed that Alan's Jager wasn't kosher. Knew-it-3 as soon as they showed Doug with the hood I knew it wasn't Doug. Knew-it-4 as soon as Melissa was such a bitch I knew no happy ending for her was coming. That brings us to the too happy ending: uptight Stu breaks up with his girlfriend whom he inteded to propose to, and instead makes a date with a hooker-mom? Only in Hollywood...

On the other hand, I did not guess where Doug would be, which I should have because I know that high up hotel windows don't open. I highly recommend the movie and give it an 8 on IMDb.

Restaurant Blunders

Because we're mostly moved out of our current dwelling (the freezer, spices and pantry items are gone already) we're eating out more and eating simple things at home. We've had Godawful luck with the restaurants. As I pointed out in another post, our wedding restaurant has been on a six month hiatus and the one we went to instead sucked for three big reasons. Since then we stopped at Pusynelis half way between Maisiagala and Vievis: half the menu was unavailable, the fried bread with cheese was microwaved, and the soup was so tepid I returned it. Yesterday we went out for dinner at the restaurant in Karkle: the Lowlander pancakes were obviously frozen the the potato pancakes devoid of salt. Today we went to the Chinese place near the Old Ferry on the New Town side of the river that is apparently under new management or has a new chef or both: the rice was extremely over-boiled, and when I asked for new rice they just said all the rice is make ahead of time and heated before serving; they can't possibly make me any new rice. What the fuck I says?!

Love Your Job

I do love teaching. Assigning, correcting, grading, and most of the administrative work I do could mostly go to hell, but teaching is good fun. I came across an article about Salinger today that I'm sure to include in the reading material for my next American literature course.

Is LOST real?

This is a bit of news you can find in a million places, I'm just linking to google's number one hit.

My special lady and I often watch an episode of Lost weeknights before bed. We're halfway through the third season. So far in the Desmond-Charlie arc, D has saved C's life three times.

For anyone unfamiliar with this, the deal is you can't avoid fate for long. If you're meant to die and you accidentally don't, the universe will course-correct and you'll die soon enough. Is that what happened to the women who missed the Air France flight?

And about the Air France flight in general, did they find the bodies, or just assume everyone was killed? Cause if they did make an assumption, hello, haven't they seen Lost?!

Article of the Day

Yeah, this is bullshit!

Climate of Hate, World of Double Standards, by Michelle Malkin

So Many Articles of the Day? I'd say it's because of universal goofiality.

In case anybody wondered why I've begun publishing more article of the day bits than usual, I will now let you know why, so you can stop wondering and return to day dreaming about being a pornography sound board operator. The top three blogs I follow for fun have halted production; no new posts for five weeks or more. I've been noticing this trend for a while, blogs getting abandoned or shut down. I used to blame laziness, now a mere devotion to new fads, too: the blog fad has come to an end, I guess. It has relegated its seat to Facefuck. So the amount of news I read during my free time has increased.

It wouldn't be so bad if Facefuck weren't also taking over the realm of email. Half the time I go to write some pal an email I realize when his email address doesn't pop us that I don't have it at all and I never did: he and/or she and I only send each other messages on Facefuck. It's our own fault (not mine, just everyone eles's) for being too lazy to switch from one webpage to another.

Hello people? If you want to make some comments publically about politics or life or anything random and begin a discussion about it, a blog is really the best forum for that. If you want to send me a personal messege, be a dear and send me a fuckin email, what? If you want to share some photo albums with me online, likely to include ones with people's faces, feel free to use facebook. Duh: that's why it's called facebook, not emailbook or blogbook.