With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
October 03, 2008 - 4:29 p.m.
I was having such a nice time in my office alone. Then my officemate came in and started talking loudly on the phone. Then he started talking to me even though he could see that I was working. Now he has the radio on. I have my deep in ear buds on and the volume cranked way up.
I'm doing different tonight. I'm going to the Hudson River Museum for the free Friday night planetarium show. Tomorrow I'll be back to my normal routine seeing Amy Speace in Madison Square Park.
Last night I actually watched the VP debate. I'm going to go back to not watching them. I learned nothing except how well they could evade questions. Cupcake not only made no attempt to answer the question she acted as if not answering the question was a virtue. She said something along the lines of "We need outsiders in Washington and I'm such an outsider that I don't answer questions the way you want." She actually didn't answer the question at all. One question asked what her "Achilles heel" was. I am not sure she knew what the phrase means. She just gave a laundry list of her qualifications. Did you know that being Governor of a state was a weakness? If she understood the question that is what she meant.
That is a classic job interview question and Biden gave the classic answer, calling an excessive amount of some virtue a weakness. He said, "I have too much passion."
You could have made good money if you bet that Biden would make the verbal blunder of the debate. He called residents of Bosnia, "Bosniacs."
I had an awkward day teaching today. I made a lot of careless mistakes and couldn't do calculations I can normally perform with one cerebral lobe tied in back of my head. I handle these situations with humor. I am frequently the butt of my own jokes.
I did let one student have it today. I put a graph on the board and had different scales for the x and y axes. You often need to do this. I have done it before this semester and explained that you choose the scale to make the graph intelligible. When I was done with the problem a student asked, "You can use different scales on the axes like that?" I explained once again that you could. Then another student immediately asked, "Can we do that on the test?" I let loose with a barrage of sarcasm.
"No you can't. I'm telling you that how to do the problem because I hate you and want you to do poorly on the test. "
To which he replied by asking if they could do it on the test. I asked him if he thought I was lying when I said that they could. He said, "No I was just making sure." Making sure of what? If I was telling the truth? What else is there? I actually told them that that was an exception to the "there are no stupid questions rule.
You can see this is one of the things that gets me very upset. The student sees school as a competition between the teacher and the student instead of as a place to learn.
Now I have to post this entry, insert the question papers for the test on Monday into the test booklets then head off to the Hudson River Museum.
We are the Drunken Smartass Champions my friends - October 10, 2008
Make me happy and read this (at leas don't make me sad by not reading it) - October 08, 2008
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile October 03, 2008
