…which of course any rational person seriously hopes it does not…
…well, then may it pass just like this.
Shamelessly appropriated from Wirecutter.
‘Sincerely, worried students’
I know I rarely talk shop here, but today a support ticket came in direct from a student, and it just made me giggle:
Recently Grammarly was blocked and I can no longer use it. I was inquiring if it would be unblocked so I can once again utilize it and reach my full potential.
Sincerely, worried students
You see my point.
Suitably amused, I went and took care of the mechanics of the problem, and when I came back to respond and close the ticket, I realized that one bit of whimsy deserved another. So I responded…in my own way.
Dear worried students:
Thank you for your recent, and persuasive, missive in re the functional availability of Grammarly as an educational resource. In the spirit of our shared objective (for it is indeed shared) of helping you to reach your full academic potential, your inquiry was indeed useful, as it highlighted for us that Grammarly had not yet been greenlit under Google’s new requirements for “third-party app access”, thus explaining the aggravating administrative blockage you described. Thank you for that awareness.
In response, our team of highly trained tech porcupines has now reviewed the Grammarly privacy policy (viewable at https://www.grammarly.com/privacy-policy, for the pedantically inclined), and, finding it within the acceptance parameters for K-12 education, has now duly attested to Google in favor of its suitability for our District’s student base. Concomitantly, we have configured student access to Grammarly, in the Google Admin system, to provide specific relief from access blockages of the type you recently encountered. We would thus expect no recidivist episodes from this cranky little gremlin, but in the event you do experience such, by all means do bring it to our attention.
Additionally, and again in the spirit of the pursuit of academic potential, herewith an anecdote from the member of our team perhaps most given to the verbal vomitus, the literary nerdy-bits, the (let’s face it, he’s just “that way”) TL;DR. Please make as much or as little of it as you may wish, but it certainly made an impression on him, and so it is offered here:
Among the most consequential teachers I ever had was my senior-year lit teacher, an ancient-looking, frail little waif of a woman…who had more true command presence than any academic teacher I ever had, bar none. You could tell when she entered the room behind you, because the sub-simian portion of your brain just instantly knew…you’d feel your back straighten involuntarily, you’d gracefully terminate your pre-class conversation(s), and you were wholly hers for the hour. She was exacting, strict, impossibly intimidating…and we loved her precisely for it, because it was so obviously purely in pursuit of excellence.
The year after I had her, she was reassigned to run the school where the system “sent all the problem kids”, and many of us instinctively felt that this seemed a waste of her talents. Well, apparently she still had consequential things to teach me well after my time with her, as three years later, that school started turning out National Merit Scholars for the first time in its history.
I believe it. She was that kind of truly luminous person whose selfless gifts are available to anyone, however likely or unlikely, and I suspect she is a large part of the reason I try to aspire to the same behavior, so many (ahem) years later.
But that’s not actually the anecdote; that’s just the introduction. (You were warned about me, right?) Among the many memories I have of her is her first-day, without-warning, assertion that the only book in history truly worth burning, is your thesaurus.
Wait, wut? (Most of us in that class were pretty nerdy, and I’m fairly certain that not a one of us had failed to bring a thesaurus that first day of class, in anticipation.)
“When you use a thesaurus, the word you select instead of the one you would have used, almost invariably does not sound like you. Instead,” she said, mustering an impressive flourish completely at odds with her diminutive physical stature, “the word just leaps off the page and announces to the world, ‘I am a WORD!'”
She smiled kindly all throughout the pregnant pause that followed. Finally, we started giggling.
Still unfazed, she then apologized that a thesaurus was even on the year’s official supplies list–she had no control over that–but she did suggest that if we insisted on using it, she would know it by our papers. Instead, she encouraged us to write like ourselves, instead of someone else, and in the unrelated event that really needed improving (this being lit class, not writing class), we could maybe use our investment as a starting point, to find word(s) that sounded most like us, and then work on truly integrating them into our natural vocabulary first…
I’ve no doubt I am not the only one of us who can recall this event with such vivid precision.
So, in the spirit of academic excellence…how did I do, here? For the record, even thirty-five years after this event (eep), I still try to review my own work against this standard, before sending, to see if I’m guilty of using fancy-sounding language that either doesn’t sound naturally like me, or which is intentionally flowery for specific effect. (If you’ve not read the book The Princess Bride by William Goldman, consider gifting yourself the experience; it’s an absolute hoot, and plays very deliberately on the absurdity of flowery language. The better-known 1987 film adaptation is of course justly legendary, but the book delivers its humor very differently (as asides to the reader) and is a delight for those of us bibliophiles whose first experience was the film.)
And if you’re still with me after all the above–congratulations, stalwart–thank you for precipitating the above response, which indeed was juuust a bit more involved than the usual ticket chatter. Amazing, isn’t it, how such a simple turn of phrase as “…and reach my full potential”, or “Sincerely, worried students”, can instantly humanize an otherwise mechanical request?
In my case, I immediately giggled, and then, after making the requested changes, realized that it deserved a whimsical response instead of a merely informative one. Kinda made my day; again, thank you for that.
Best wishes on reaching your full potential. (Not that anyone asked me about this, but I think that is one of the pursuits that best elevates life, into living. Or, as Carl Jung put it, “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”)
Respectfully, shameless growth promoters.
The story, of course, is a true one; I am surely at least partially limited by the 35-year gulf (daang) of my own memory, but I assure you she made an impression, and the memory is still pretty vivid after all this time.
And that’s another good reason, in addition to the whimsy, to have the story itself documented here. I have already written about my “not just a swim coach” Lanny Landtroop, and have made reference to my third- and fifth-grade teacher Mickey Shannon, about things of truly lifelong impact on me, and it occurred to me in the middle of writing the above anecdote for “worried students”, above, that Ms. Kevan would probably be the third member of my top triumvirate of memorable–consequential–teachers.
RFK Jr. interviewed by James O’Keefe.
I am not sure it is really possible to overstate how important and powerful this content is. James O’Keefe interviews Robert Kennedy Jr. about things that matter.
No preamble, no wrapup, all content. (Please pardon the embed here…this is Rumble, not YouTube, and I haven’t figured out how to embed effectively without all the empty space. Consider just viewing natively on Rumble.)
And for those of us who try to pay close attention to how all the State’s shenanigans originate, manifest, and metastasize into the misanthropic horrors they become, there is so much in here that tracks perfectly with all those moments in which we may inductively sense an obvious and logical conclusion to draw, from readily-available information, but don’t necessarily have the specifics immediately at hand from our own personal experience. RFK Jr., here, reliably “brings the receipts”, in the form of names, stats, history, context–hell, it sounds like he has actually been there for a great number of these watershed events. Which in its way is pretty depressing, since any natural gratification that comes from having our own logic and thinking confirmed, is easily overwhelmed by the reality of just how bad so much of this is.
There are a few clarion-level signs that, history has shown us before, truly indicate that things have moved out of the normal cycle of everyday shenanigans and partisan wrangling, and into a more dangerous space where larger and more disruptive changes are afoot for the whole of society. One of those signs is seeing the “politics makes strange bedfellows” phenomenon running rife among the arguably incorruptible. (The “strange bedfellows” thing of course happens all the time, among people who really aren’t strange bedfellows at all, except to the overly credulous.) And so here we have two characters that have a pretty demonstrable public record of resisting corruption, each driven at a personal level with a distinct moral conviction, who most of us wouldn’t naturally have expected to come together–except that we are living in increasingly “interesting times”. And just listen to what comes out here!
I’ve gotta hand it to RFK Jr., too, with whom I disagree at the most fundamental level about the ideal relationship between the individual and government: this is a respectable dude. If one accepts the inevitability of the state (I don’t, but that’s for another time), then I would say that his is the only sort of personality, of morality, that we should ever accept in any position of power. (A tiny government full of RFK Jr. and Ron Paul personalities, and we–as a society–just might make it.) On the evidence of what I’ve seen and heard from him, he does not get distracted from what is important, he speaks directly and candidly (there are a couple of moments in the above clip where he initially appears to divert and evade, but to his credit–and O’Keefe’s–he does quickly come back and answer the question directly), he understands implicitly that the root problem is usually systemic, and he also understands that it will never change until it is stopped. This is someone who understands what “strike the root” actually means.
And I have to admire his brass ones, too. Given his personal family history, for him to be in this position now, speaking truth to power as plainly as he is, going directly and publicly against a machine which increasingly resembles the second chapter of The GULAG Archipelago, … well, frankly I wish him well. The thought of having to deal with him on matters of mere policy disagreement, would be an almost incomprehensible improvement over the zombie horror-reel we have now (and are promised far more of in the coming years)…
As for O’Keefe, at least arguably the greatest muckraker operating today, he actually does pretty well in the interviewer’s chair, not exactly his usual wheelhouse. His great value here, really, is simply bringing RFK Jr. to an audience that may not know him in the depth this session reveals. This can only be to the good; I had to smile when I saw these two sitting down together to talk things that matter, and I hope that the millions of people who really need to see this, do.
A home-built foam trailer? Add one to the idea mill.
Ran across this randomly tonight, and thought it needed a bookmark. Dude builds a roadworthy trailer at home, out of foam.
Set cogitation mode on.
Augustine Island: trash pickup meets bucket list.
(Note that this post annotates and then points to the larger contents of the site page for the trip overview. The entry point for the set of site pages covering the whole trip is located here.)
This is Augustine Island, aka Augustine Volcano.
It is located in and dominates Kamishak Bay, which sits across the mouth of Cook Inlet from Kachemak Bay, and which roughly defines the beginning of the Alaska Peninsula to its south and west.
The island is uninhabited, and the volcano is still considered active (last eruption 2006); really, very few people ever get over there. (It’s not cheap to get there at all, and with no big game populations or fishable rivers–the biggest thing that lives there is red fox–it doesn’t even get the attention of the still-more-remote mainland that surrounds it.)
Which is why it’s at least a bit surprising that you can find so much trash there. So much, in fact, that the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies (CACS) was awarded its third grant to take a boat and volunteer crew over there to see how much they could pick up and get off the island in a three-day effort.
This–picking up trash on this island–was a bucket-list item for me.
(full article at the trip overview; umbrella entry point here)
I’m not sure if it’s possible…
…for a dad to be more proud of his kids.
Just got back late tonight, from the third CACS-run, grant-funded Augustine Island trash pickup project. There are pictures to collate, stories to gather, and things to share among project participants, and there will be more here before too long, but..it can’t all happen now. Suffice it to say that the three youngest project members on this trip–by a margin–were my kids (at 14, 11, and 8), and I am not sure I could be more proud of their contribution to the project and comportment of themselves.
Among the extant Proud Parent moments, this one is a doozy. 🙂
More later. Now, sleep.
Number One Son turns eight today.
Happy Birthday to my how-can-he-be-eight-already boy Murray. I am not in the general habit of doing birthday posts here, but in this case the birthday wishes also include the announcement of his birth story, which has languished in notes-only form for far too long. No longer! His story now joins those of his sisters and we have a complete accounting of our Contrarian Trifecta.
But y’know, since I’m already here, I’ll gush on the kid just a little. (And it is, indeed, just a little. To get a true sense of how awesome this little fella is, you just need to spend a few hours with him in his element–and then, I assure you, you will know.) Consider this recent picture:
This is Murray, at the Anchor Point beach, on an official bird-monitoring session led by local bird scientists. (In the spirit of photo trivia, the little rise he is about to crest, here, will then reveal the expanse of the beach itself, with the 20 miles of Cook Inlet beyond; the white peak in center frame is Iliamna Volcano, about 45 total miles distant and a full ten thousand feet higher than we are here.) He is by far the youngest of the group on this day, but that doesn’t faze him in the least. He is in-his-element in multiple ways: he loves being outdoors in general, trail walking in particular (he’ll lead, thank you very much), beach time, and of course the birds. The session leader already knows him pretty well (my family helps out with the seasonal monitoring walks whenever we can get ourselves there), and it’s pretty fulfilling as a parent to watch the respectful interactions going both ways between Murray and Jim.
He does a pretty masterful job at balancing being a fully-invested, normal boy (there’s usually a stuffed dragon in that pack, and abject silliness is never far away), with these sorts of “little man” moments around adults and events for adults, or for much older kids. He’s got two older sisters who themselves are very good at “presenting up” when they need to, or choose to, and like them he almost always seems to know how to do that when it’s really needed. This is beyond merely gratifying for a parent!
For my money, though, it is his combination of perceptiveness and creativity that I find most impressive about him. Really, you have to see it in person to really get it, but this boy seems to reliably surprise both his parents with the creative ideas that come forth from that little brain of his. The well he draws on is surprisingly broad, to me at least; you never know whether the ideas for, say, the new jalopy he’s creating (usually for the dragons and other stuffed critters) will come from his general interest in duct tape and cardboard (or his new tools bag), or from something he saw a bird do in the yard, or from something he remembers doing in the garden last year, or seeing the gizmos in a friend’s truck, or from a kit-crate he or one of his sisters did within the last few years, or something out of one of his science lesson/experiments, etc. Or, it’s combining some or all of that with something he’s put together from a random conversation he had with one of us three months ago on a car trip to or from a sister’s practice. And it may get mashed-up with another idea he got from playing Mario Kart or a board game, or a fantastical book he’s read, or his out-of-the-blue questions about how some creature or machine works. And so on.
And it’s hard to fault the boy for completeness of vision, too. You should see all the seat belt and roll cage designs he’s demonstrated in these jalopies–taking into consideration the differing anatomical needs of dragons, jagulars, Yoshis, bears, etc.–along with the more obvious kid-build variations like the placement of rocket motors, axles, wings, onboard defensive weaponry, etc.
You’re impressing the old man, kid. A lot. I’m thinking that a suitable nickname for you might well be “Custom”.
Please keep on bringing it, and I’ll continue to do my best to keep encouraging it. Much love, and happy birthday!
‘The Birders: A Melodic Journey Through Northern Colombia’. This may be the finest documentary I have ever seen.
As a part of this year’s Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival, I got the chance to see a documentary film, “The Birders: A Melodic Journey Through Northern Colombia“. Simply put and no joke, this may be the finest documentary film I have ever seen*.
Now, I cannot claim to be a connoisseur of documentaries, and in fact I have come to be pretty leery of the genre in general simply because so many of them cannot resist infesting otherwise interesting content with the (usually robotically trendy) politics of the makers. Nor can I claim to be a great birder; I am certainly fascinated (and increasingly so, over time) with the wee beasties, but I can’t hold a candle to the rest of my family, and I am reminded whenever I am around the truly knowledgeable, how little I know. This doesn’t bother me–hell, it may actually increase my amazement and fascination–but it’s not like I could judge a bird documentary on the accuracy or presentation of its content.
But I do appreciate good design, good presentation, attention both to craft and to the art of craft; and increasingly I specifically appreciate those things that either provide, or reveal, a sense of connectedness between humans, animals, and the natural world–the things that can truly ground us, help us relate to one another, and bring us closer to the divinity of both human art, and the natural art in the world around us. And of course, as anyone who knows me understands, I have a great and abiding affection for the obvious pursuit of excellence for the simple reason that it matters.
And this film is just a fantastic effort in all of this. The cinematography is truly spectacular (ace videographer Keith Ladzinski was astutely aware of his great fortune in being a part of this project), and I was struck specifically by the creative use of what I (in my ignorance) might call “targeted bursts of slow motion”–with an artistic signature very different from the now-long-overused slow-mo technique used in so many action films. It seemed to me that the slow bursts may have been intended specifically for the delight of us neophyte birders, to better understand, and be even more amazed by, not only how much nuance there is in motion that passes by in the blink of an eye or less, but the artful grace with which it is done. For me at least, it actually becomes possible to see how the bird might actually enjoy its own movement, and somehow that is an incredibly inspiring thought.
It’s hard for me to overstate, too, how glorious the integration of music is throughout the whole work. The notion that the local natives draw on the extant music they see in the birds, for their own artistic work, is obviously much deeper than just appreciating a songbird’s vocalizations and mimicking that. Here you can hear, both in the birds themselves and in the inspiration (direct and indirect) that infuses the human music, several different artistic elements that could be considered musical. For my part at least, I hear melodies, rhythms, moods, and timbres, both vocalized and ambient (e.g., wingbeats, the incredibly cool clicking sounds, etc.), and sometimes seeming to be shared collaboratively by multiple birds. I even hear, in the human music, manifestations of some of the visual music the birds display, especially the complex and sometimes coordinated courtship behaviors. The original wing-man, indeed!
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I found that to be down-where-I-live level outstanding. The filmmakers seemed to understand exactly what they were doing, and presented it in a way that made it seem beautifully clear. Truly the title “A Melodic Journey Through Northern Colombia” is appropriate here, and worth noting.
Finally, I must say that I don’t think there was a hint of politics throughout the production–just the obvious love of discovery and the birds themselves. (I can certainly say that if there was, I obviously missed it because the good parts just overwhelmed it right out of my memory. Even the human-interest twist about the naturalist was done with great human respect and presented no judgment.) In this tiresome age that is notable, and warmly welcome!
For his part, I also thought that Diego Calderon-Franco, the primary naturalist and central character throughout the film, was thoroughly engaging and inspiring; this appears to be a man who knows exactly what he is about, and he leads always with his boyish love of what he is doing. At the Festival’s screening of the film, it was Diego himself who introduced it and took questions afterward. I thought he handled the politically loaded questions very well (virtue signaling is sometimes a sport around here) and I found his responses to be very much in respectful service of this same theme of discovery–very “let’s get back to the good stuff”. Gratifying.
At some point it occurred to me that nobody had asked him what I thought would be an obvious question…so I did, and I think his response here told me all I needed to know about him. I asked, “I don’t know how long you’ve been in town, but what is the coolest bird you’ve seen since you’ve been here–or what is it you most want to see?” Everyone was understandably fixated on Colombia (and no judgment there, I was captivated too), but here we have a noted bird naturalist from the tropics, in a completely different environment from his own–what is it he finds fascinating about being here?
He got visibly, boyishly excited, shaking his hands in an “oo-oo” kind of way, and his eyes just lit up. “Tufted puffins, definitely tufted puffins!” He even said he was considering shaving his hair down the middle for a while, so he could wear tufts properly.
Oh yes, this is a man I can understand. Actually, his overall persona, watching him work in this environment, reminded me pretty strongly of our own local naturalist Conrad Field, and (at another time) I could go on at some length about how much of a compliment that really is. I would bet Diego has some of his own humdinger stories to tell.
Anyway…very much worth a watch. The world needs far, far more of this.
_______________________________
* I must mention that this is no easy praise. The documentary Throw Down Your Heart, covering Béla Fleck‘s quest to find the origins of the banjo in western Africa, is so incredibly soul-stirring in its content alone that it has long been my gold standard for the genre. It is probably still my favorite documentary. But here, we have content that arguably could only be overshadowed by something like Throw Down Your Heart, and we also have an inspired and artfully crafted production worthy of its own superlative accolades. And so, I do think this may be the finest documentary I have yet seen.
I’ve full confidence that the irony goes completely undetected here. Alaska has a ‘Department of Administration’.
I thought I’d see what it would take to get a new Alaska driver’s license printed with my updated address, just to make some administrative annoyances easier. (It got updated in the backend system back when we changed PO boxes from Homer to Anchor Point, but the physical license itself still has the Homer address.) So, not knowing quite where to start, I did a web search, and clicked through on a link with a domain of doa.alaska.gov.
“doa“. Huh? Yeah, that’s really what it says. What could that actually mean?
And the problem with that, is that such questions often do have answers. The link loaded, and I learned that apparently the State of Alaska has a Department Of Administration.
I actually checked to see if I’d happened to land at the Babylon Bee, but no, it seems for real:
And so the facepalm giggles commenced, and actually took a while to subside.
Department of Administration. When you’re so tone-deaf to your own acceptance of nonsensical bureaucracy that a name like this gets past every review and committee, and on through legal, out into the wild to confound anyone who might expect names to convey some sort of, you know, meaning. I guess once they get bigger enough there could be a Bureau of Departments (Plural) of Administration, and who knows where it might go from there?
And how’s this for a funny bolt-on…when I first went back to doa.alaska.gov to grab the screencap for this post, I found the site…well, DOA.
(Okay, so it seemed that the entire alaska.gov domain was down at the time–not just doa.alaska.gov–but still, as a lover of irony I found it amusing.)
And once I got to thinking about flashy words conveying no meaning, I of course thought of Weird Al. 🙂
Today’s mantra.
Be present.
Be available.
Begin again.
Kevin Wilmeth 