Yesterday, someone named "Girl" posed this question in the comments section:

What is summer time like for teachers? Do you really think you deserve 3 months off?

Yes, I really think I deserve three months off for several reasons:

1. Students deserve three months off. Summer is an important time for decompression, expansive daydreaming, mental regeneration, and creative playtime. Students desperately need wide swaths of free time, so they can explore the depths of their interests and have unfettered free time. I've always bristled at the thought of year-round school, because summer has always been very important to me as a student, and I believe it's similarly important for other young people.
   
   
2. I can't speak for other teachers, but I work my ass off during the school year. Need I remind readers of the excruciating stacks of essays I had to grade this past year? And in the fall I'll be getting another class, which means 20% more papers to grade. Given the kind of intense energy, time and dedication I devote to my classroom, I can say without hesitation that yes, I deserve three months of vacation.
   
   
3. All Americans deserve more vacation time! We work incredibly hard, and we're watching vacation become a mythological remnant from an ancient time. We've got this idea that we're not supposed to enjoy leisure (even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists it as a fundamental right of all people -- see Article 24). I say it's time for us to get busy and not work so hard just so other people can get richer.
   
   
4. Vacation my tuckus! What kind of vacation includes constant meetings, conference calls, protest actions, HTML programming, Go instruction, research, and activism? Oh yeah -- and trying to get a novel written when I have time. My point is that these are really important things that I simply don't have time for during the school year. Without three months of summer vacation, I really doubt I'd have much energy or time to devote to the urgent political causes which are so important to me.

Yeah, what. As for what summer time is like for teachers -- well, I think I've just told you what it's like for this teacher. As for others, you'll need to ask them.

Let me close by asking everyone to sign a real name to their comments (or at least a recognizable pseudonym). I don't mind challenging questions (hey, it gives me a chance to vent, right?), but I don't particularly care to be jabbed at from random people in the dark. Lemme know who you are, please. That's all I ask.


HalliBush Wars, Inc.

Well, it turns out that a bunch of people at the State Department knew that there were "dozens of factual problems" in the speech Colin Powell was scheduled to give at the UN in February 2003. Despite repeated objections by State Department experts, these bogus points were kept in. It's almost as though the Bush administration wanted to go to war, and they were cooking the intelligence in order to scare everyone else into going along with them. Nah, that's ridiculous.

Meanwhile, in Britain, a new report has "many wondering why, if the spies got it wrong, no-one was to blame."

The [report] has exposed "one of the greatest failures in British intelligence ever", said former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's government because of the decision to go to war.

"It is rather extraordinary that (the report) comes to the conclusion that everybody behaved entirely properly and nobody made any mistakes and nobody should take the blame," he told BBC radio on Thursday.

Boy, those Brits must hate Freedom. They must be part of the Blame America First crowd.

Seriously -- I don't understand the connection between mistakes being made and people being held responsible for those mistakes. Where is it written that just because our nations carried out a wretchedly bloody and illegal war based (supposedly) on false information, the people who provided that false information don't deserve to be punished? I know -- maybe this has nothing to do with false information! Maybe the murderers in Washington knew it was false information when they were pushing for the war in the first place. Maybe all this noise about who in the CIA messed up is beside the freaking point! Maybe Bush should have resigned and Tenet should have stayed!

I could go on, but why bother, when you can just watch Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War instead.

Website Demons

Does anyone else remember, once upon a time, when you typed in a faulty website address (say, for instance, using "com" instead of "org" for iraqbodycount), you'd just get an error window announcing that the server could not be found? Or, at the worst, you'd see a stupid cartoon stating "This website is under construction"? Well, no more!

Now you've got to sit -- sometimes for ten minutes -- waiting for the "web development" companies' stupid popup windows and javascripts and aggravating bells and whistles to go off. Then, maybe your stinking browser will lock up and you'll barely be able to salvage the hours of blogging you've been working on! ARRGGGHHH!!

Well, I was going to blame capitalism, but then I realized capitalism isn't all bad -- after all, it gives us Capitalist Chicks and The Puppy Channel. Yes, these are both real.


Random

Speaking of excellent movies that expose the truth behind insipid right-wing attacks on American democracy -- check out the clips for OutFoxed, a new documentary that analyzes FoxNews and how it works to undermine journalism and intellectual integrity in America.

Today I finally jacked into AirAmerica Radio. A show co-hosted by Chuck D? Outtasite!

I also spent over an hour this morning slogging through the Black Athena debate. Quick capsule summary: Martin Bernal writes a book called Black Athena wherein he argues that Greece owes much of its philosophical and intellectual prominence to Egypt. Bernal -- along with many others -- spawns a movement of Afrocentric scholarship, which seeks to break out of the ancient Eurocentric paradigm of historical and "classical" research. Mary Lefkowitz retorts with Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History, which tries to debunk Bernal's work, and asserts that the Afrocentric wave of scholars are using myth and hype instead of fact and data. Dozens of books, articles, essays, and debates follow.

Particularly interesting to me were The Politics of Criticism [PDF] by Maghan Keita and an episode of NPR's Talk of the Nation from 1996, featuring Lefkowitz and Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of the Department of Black Studies at California State University.

And how about a Bathroom Monkey? Jon Broad should like that one.

TimeWaster™

Check out the excellent (if old -- I'd never seen it before) video of Bush invigorating America's youth. Also make sure you read about White House attempts to accuse Letterman of doctoring the video.

Today I'm listening to: Onomatopoiea Radio, which is currently playing a superb Arabian version of Massive Attack's "Karmacoma". And before they played that groovy, trippy song -- anyone know the name or artist? -- that got overused in the Mitsubishi commercial.