The sun moves into Taurus this week, so there’s where the theme comes from. Signs are up from Aries, but everyone knows that beef > mutton.
The week starts off hopefully with the Moon and Venus bringing the love. Monday might be a bit annoying and smelly. Tuesday and Wednesday are particularly important if you’re a ruler of some sort, with disruption in your official business leading to equivalent disruptions in your personal life. I guess Tuesday also matters if you live in a country with such a ruler.
Aries: The Sun reversed – Even reversed, this is still a good card meaning material happiness, contentment and growth.
Taurus: Knight of Cups – Arrival, approach, advances, proposition, demeanor, invitation, incitement.
Gemini: 10 of Wands reversed – Contrarieties, difficulties, intrigues, and their analogies.
Cancer: 4 of Coins – The surety of possessions, cleaving to that which one has, gift, legacy, inheritance.
Leo: Queen of Cups – Good, fair woman; honest, devoted woman, loving intelligence, gift of vision, success, happiness, pleasure, wisdom, virtue; a perfect spouse and a good mother.
Virgo: 6 of Coins reversed – Getting snookered or potentially bamboozled,
Libra: 8 of Cups reversed – Great joy, happiness, feasting.
Scorpio: The Moon – Hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception, occult forces, error.
Sagittarius: Page of Coins reversed – Prodigality, dissipation, liberality, luxury; unfavorable news.
Capricorn: Ace of Swords – Triumph, the excessive degree in everything, conquest, triumph of force.
Aquarius: 3 of Swords reversed – Mental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.
Pisces: Page of Swords reversed – monitoring parties working against you, unfavorable surveillance, the unforeseen, unprepared state.
Let’s play Bamboozled!
https://y.yarn.co/f27c4848-ec5f-4dea-9ee0-45189b3105fa_text.gif
Story of my life.
https://youtu.be/Lr_CLQuq0U0
Sagittarius: Page of Coins reversed – Prodigality, dissipation, liberality, luxury; unfavorable news.
I can’t be broke, I have plenty of checks left.
‘Cuz I ride the range in my Ford V8
Sorry, but those checks are for an account that’s been closed and sent to collections for prolonged overdraft.
From ded thred, the anchor babies numbers ignore births to citizens with illegal or tps fathers. The numbers are undoubtedly higher.
58 on Tuesday. Still feel like I’m 20 and stupid, still shocked at what I see in the mirror. Whattaya mean I look my age????
Happy birthday! 🎂 I bet you look great due to your clean living.
*side-eyes the bday cake*
No. No, I do not and no I do not live cleanly.
(🧁)
At least it’s a cake and not funeral potatoes!
(Happy birthday!)
Well, I’ll be a full score younger than you on Tues, but I’ll only be 19 younger than you exactly a week later! Much like Colin’s only five years older than me for six weeks until June 8 rolls ’round, when he’s back to six steps above me 🙂
Dammit, an evan is supposed to be a measure of youth.
Dammit, an evan is supposed to be a measure of youth.
We’ll always have the memories.
And Lou Reed.
Happy Birthday!
Last week was so nice. I wore shorts. I just l ookedoutside and it was snowing! Not much, and the sun is out, but still. I need a nice weekend day to clean out my work vehicle. It’s getting harder and harder to find tools. I need to completely empty it and start from zero.
Dad and I just laser-engraved all my match magazines with my initials, and printed a new AR-15 chamber flag on his Bambu H2S. It fits.
Do you have a link to the STL, I could use some chamber flags.
I pulled it off Makerspace, but I could probably find it.
My self-education project right now is teaching myself Fusion 360.
I could whip up something in OpsnSCAD that would do the trick, I asked in case you had it handy.
Here you go:
https://makerworld.com/en/models/520272-eject-able-chamber-flag?from=search#profileId-436662
You’ll need a sacrificial piece of 5.56mm brass to complete it.
Thank you.
Another one bites the dust
“Liberal arts I think used to be a real draw, but I think that is no longer the case,” says Dr. Breneman. “Education for its own sake at $80,000 a year is a hard sell.”
——-
Liberal arts schools, which focus on teaching softer skills like critical thinking, have faced pressure to provide more profession-specific training, says Mary Churchill, an associate dean at Boston University who has studied college mergers.
——-
Some observers say that a liberal arts education is valuable for creating a more well-rounded, civically minded population.
“The role that liberal arts institutions play in educating people for a better future for our country, I think, is crucial,” Dr. Churchill says.
Sure, Socrates.
Liberal arts degrees are not the problem. I see value in a generalized and useful course of study.
Gender studies, race studies, and other uber-niche and utterly useless areas of study are the problem. No, really, Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose is the problem.
No, lady. That doesn’t make it better.
Technically, I have a liberal arts degrees. I have a BA, not a BS. It didn’t stop me from becoming an engineer. Although, it didn’t help either.
I grew up being told they were useless, but I didn’t really know what it WAS. I had a Twitter friend who told me the course of discipline, and changed my mind.
When we remembered there was a college of liberal arts at RIT, we would joke about “Who goes to a Technical Institute for Liberal Arts?” Then we’d forget about it.
We made more jokes about the Packaging Science majors. They got the last laugh.
*stuggles with impossible to open retail packaging*
Wash? Don’t be low-class? &c
#metoo
The problem these days is there are way too many schools and all of them are teaching activism more than anything else. And all taking tax dollars to enrich themselves.
@Rhy – That’s what drove me to embrace autodidactism. If the so-called educators won’t educate, I have no use for them.
I studied English at one of the best engineering schools in the country.
But, I was a townie and faculty brat, so it was my default, when I really should have left town.
Hey, underwater basket-weaving is a rec class!
https://www.uwbw.org (Can’t find a video)
Kinnath, I have a BS ED. ’cause I had a triple major. Not in an sciencey things but somehow History/Sociology/Edu got to be a BS.
Minor is Psych and coaching.
Luckily for any students I never taught. My own kids always say I had no class… and they are right.
When we remembered there was a college of liberal arts at RIT, we would joke about “Who goes to a Technical Institute for Liberal Arts?”
———–
I was friends with a 21W (Writing) major at M.I.T. And he wasn’t aspiring to write technical manuals or textbooks, nope. He wanted to win an Oscar. I always wondered where he ended up.
“I see value in a generalized and useful course of study.” Agreed, and with Rhy ’bout schools being Activism Training Camps.
At Indiana University, I got a BA in Psychology, with an earned Minor in Animal Behavior, and a Minor in German. (I can’t speak it worth a damn, but I did a semester in German at Freiburg. I’ve really never used any of these, though I interned at the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, working with lions, tigers and lots of mountain lions. (A few bobcats, too.)
A class short of being a sophomore when I first began, I just took classes I was interested in. I never had any drive, only ‘picking’ Psych my 3rd year when I was closest to fulfilling its requirements. *shrug*
I learned cuz I was personally interested in it, thankfully raised by parents who gave a shit. Graduating in ’09 was a big slap to my Unemployable Face. I very much blame Washington, universities, and all of society for ‘falling for’ the idea that ‘a degree = a job.’
I hope we’re now pushing past the interregnum, where uni *was* a place to find a DEI ‘studies,’ grant-$ landing spot.
(The playbill listed the cast’s pronouns w their bio, but not all of them. Presumably, some declined to enter the info. Baby steps.👍)
I worked with a guy who went to Carnegie Mellon… for Theater.
With my Radio-TV-Film degree I had the choice of getting a BA or a BS. To get the BS I’d have to take X number math classes and 1 Foreign Language class. To get the BA I had to take X number Foreign language classes and 1 math class. I was better with language than math so I opted for the BA.
I got out of my humanities requirement with a piece of paper to substitute “History of American Techology” which was mostly textile mills.
They let me take symbolic logic for the math requirement: very useful.
SB, aren’t you describing Michael McKean and David Lander?
Yeah, I learned it was a serious theater program, I had just always thought of CMU as a tech school – an occupational hazard, since I work with a goodly number of CMU nerds.
The math class I ended up taking was applied math. How geometry helps figure out how to fell a tree, mathematics for different voting styles; that was a lot easier for me to grok.
Yeah, we still have a loooong way to go to get back to sanity when that garbage is still everywhere. I suspect it will only die away with new generations deciding it’s fucking stupid and not playing along anymore.
My one CMU-grad work-friend’s degree is in applied mathematics, as it happens.
“You’ve got an applied mathematics degree – figure out the tip”; he might be a little tired of that joke.
True, but there’s an additional problem in that Liberal Arts still pretends to teach critical thinking.
I was always fond of Camilla Pagila’s opinion that the best major for a truly broad-based liberal arts education is Archaeology.
Forty year ago, I think there was still an expectation that liberal arts was intended to teach you how to think and to be curious about the whole world.
Modernly, it is clear that you are expected to accept the “truth” that you are given and to propagate it without blinking.
I had a History 100-something class when I was trying to get back into the swing of academia. Ancient societies. She said this curriculum was new and an experiment and we were going to use primary sources to infer/interpret what the history was.
Dumbest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. You’re 20 and you can barely spell your name at that point. You’ve forgotten everything you ever learned in high school about ancient history. You’re looking at fertility goddess statues and cave paintings and the Parthenon and supposed to figure out what was going on.
Critical thinking relies on the past, what you’ve experienced, what you’ve already been taught. I remember my dad trying to get me to conclusions I had no frame of educational or experiential reference for and failing and him getting mad at me for not being able to think. I’m 17 and he wants me to figure out case law from a vague definition of “tort.” Who does this?
I can’t say I was much better when I told my kid to clean the kitchen and she asked WTF and I said, make it look like no one was ever here. I thought that was a clear instruction. It was not.
My gas station job, my first day, my manager takes me into the cooler and very carefully explains how to stock it. I’m standing there thinking, “Why is he explaining this to me? It’s very clear what needs to happen here.” Fast forward a bunch of years and I marry a convenience store manager who comes home frustrated that he had to explain to a n00b how to stock the cooler. THREE TIMES. Excuse me, what? This is something you DO have to explain????
Blew my mind.
I can say that new grads coming out with technical degrees have limited ability to think creatively and to apply to the real world whatever the fuck was actually crammed into their brains at school.
I don’t see technical schools as putting out well-rounded people with the skills to work a 9 to 5 job with lots of other people.
The best thing to teach you how to work a job and not be a fuckup, is to actually work a job and learn not to fuck up.
In other words, start working part time in high school.
As far as liberal arts schools go, they are living on borrowed time and another mans memories, to borrow a phrase. They no longer teach real critical thinking, but, rather, critical theory, another branch of post-modern philosophy.
As long as the financing of useless degrees continues unabated, nothing is on borrowed time.
Forty year ago, I think there was still an expectation that liberal arts was intended to teach you how to think and to be curious about the whole world.
Modernly, it is clear that you are expected to accept the “truth” that you are given and to propagate it without blinking.
Things were transitioning when I was an undergrad thirty years ago.
In other words, start working part time in high school.
Or earlier.
If you set out to “teach critical thinking” I think you are going to get poor results at best. Critical thinking is a skill that people should pick up while studying actual bodies of knowledge. If history, philosophy, literature, etc. are taught correctly, then the students will be exposed to and need to reconcile/critique various points of view.
It’s like being smart – if you have to tell people how smart you are/that you teach critical thinking, then you’re probably not, really.
Is debate still taught (at all well, anyway)?
My alma mater, Northeastern, was 5 years, working a co-op job for 6 months and in school for the other 6 months.
The co-op jobs were invaluable experience; if nothing else I learned early what I didn’t want to do (Wall St commute from LI).
I’m surprised more schools don’t lean into co-op programs.
If you were talking pre-WWII liberal arts – yes, that would be worthwhile. If you are talking post-60s liberal arts – fuck off you midwit.
Liberal arts degrees are not the problem. I see value in a generalized and useful course of study.
That’s what I did. Broad liberal arts: history, political science, modern American literature, even a little bit of logic. Did I monetize it? Not really. I don’t regret it.
As for “critical thinking” fifty years ago when they said “how to think, not what to think” people weren’t so tempted to laugh out loud.
Yeah, the whole “critical thinking” thing was really nothing but marketing, an attempt to justify the study of bodies of knowledge that didn’t have an obvious connection to making money.
Talking point, dead ahead!
In the last couple of years, a growing number of women and people of color have begun training with Mr. Mills. His clients are conservatives, moderates, liberals, and those who defy simple labels altogether. His star student is Eva, a former infantry soldier who appears at the range in pink stockings and painted nails.
In some ways, Mr. Mills’ expansive view of gun ownership is still unusual in a firearm culture often associated with support for President Donald Trump and his villainization of Democrats and progressive politics. Yet those who see the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as a bulwark against oppressive government are beginning to include liberals who increasingly find themselves in political – and social – crosshairs.
How else will they manage to survive the Trump/MAGA Reign of Terror? The next battle of Lexington and Concord will be fought under the Rainbow Double Plus flag.
Other than gun grabbers and criminals, pretty sure “gun culture” is firmly that everyone has a right to own as many firearms as their budget allows.
And if you want to learn to shot and operate a firearm safely and hone your skills, pretty much everyone will say welcome. May roll some eyes if you want to defend your family from Gilead. Or endure some cracks about gun grabbers and Murica hating commies.
What utter horseshit. I’ve never been to a gun show, range, or training operation that was hostile to women, gay people, or dark-skinned people.
No love for a degree in Classics ?
Yale Department of Classics
Are you a Yalie?
They taught me French, somewhat.
https://www.learner.org/series/french-in-action/
“Taurus: Knight of Cups – Arrival, approach, advances, proposition, demeanor, invitation, incitement.”
==
This is rather timely. Contract starts tomorrow morning: “Missouri Grade Level Assessments – Grade 8 Writing.” Well. Last time it was 4th graders. So the new kids’ content ‘should’ be longer than before, but who knows how that’ll affect our team’s timing. (Longer, more weeks, is better.) Went to Meijer to get a day/week, but Sched Lady wasn’t there when I popped in. She will be later so I can get on that before the Cubs go for the sweep over the Mets.
My office nook is mostly set up. In a cute reality, my post-it reminders from two years ago are still stuck on the angled wall within the ex-closet. and hopefully they won’t need much change for the older kids this ‘term.’ Finding benefit from misapprehension, that Windows com I bought outta desperation a few months back has new purpose as my official Work Computer. (It’s now running as a second screen to run QI eps Richard was gracious enough to send me. Much, endless thanks, Richard.)
Even though I should be working 6 days/wk, this’ll be the closest to ‘normal’ scheduling I’ve had in two years. Even that was a blip after running the Peru Tribune, and before that, teaching five short afternoons plus four morning shifts per week during my last contract in Korea.
Got a sub coming out Tues about the gas station lottery, and a Big Idea about bday next week is coming together with my brother. I’ve gone through all my info and put all my travels in chronological order to make a big interactive map. Hopefully, it shows all my flights, when/where, and you’ll be able to click ‘bolded’ ones to reveal some Highlight Pics I’ve assembled for that location.
Pretty much, I want it to look like the maps Spielberg used in Indiana Jones that show the audience where Indy’s going across the world. I hit a dark tunnel last year when I thought I’d lost all my pics from my decade+ abroad, but I thankfully rediscovered ’em. I’d like my nephews to have a better idea of what I was up to for so long and why I was away. Kinda like Dad having his 76yo ‘Legacy’ thoughts, he’s determined to get The Boys to the airport (w Bro and SiL) so he can see them, passports in hand, get on their first flight out of America to England /Paris.
Well. (Not to be forgotten,) Dad’ll get a kick out of it/maybe kinda fully realize just where and how *I* explored the world. And even those who don’t love Radiohead’s first seven albums will still kinda have to see how perfect a moment and song is; Everything In Its Right Place .
(That may have worked. Regardless, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUnXxh5U25Y .)
That would have sucked.
Hope they bring you something good from abroad.
Radiohead did improve since the Creep era, IMO. /ducks Naw, good song, EIIRP.
“That would have sucked.” Yeah, thinking I’d lost ’em all threw me into a fairly nasty spell for a couple weeks. I found my semi-hidden backup hard drive with ’em all on board. So I still have vids of my bands playing in Korea, and all my pics. (Sadly… unorganized, for the most part. But semi-searchable, at least by date.)
Tremendous ‘restart’ to my brain, finding them again.
Radiohead: The Bends through In Rainbows is stellar. OK Computer, especially. I never listen to their first album, but I do gotta say: Jonny Greenwood hated “Creep,” the record label’s demand for a pop song, so he added the jarring lead guitar bits to the chorus and, funny enough, is a massive reason for its success.
In ’08 I saw ’em on the In Rainbows tour in London, while I was living in southwest Germany. That. That right there. Was fucking stunning. They closed with Idioteque, which is *just* what I wanted. They played there the next night, too, but I had to get back to Freiburg for a final. Fun, whirling semester, my junior year at IU and Freiburg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhM7Mh9T_XE
You’re a good sport, E.
Jugsy and I are, according to her, done. Finished, even.
For the sake of convenience and the fact that Im gone most of the week, cohabiting will continue for some time at the Palatial 2X-wide™. However, quite honestly, I’m a mess.
Your silly stars didnt see that coming.
Sorry Tres
Sorry. That’s a tough stretch of road.
I’m so sorry. I’m not quite caught up, but it seems like a lot of Glibs are having a hard time lately.
(MikeS, if you’re around: my apologies for being rude on Easter.)
Oof. Sorry dude.
“ Monday might be a bit annoying and smelly”
Whelp, I know what not to do on Monday.
Anal ?
Some times it’s tough, some times it may be welcomed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPjq73Wq_G0
Life ain’t easy, Tres, but with the disappointments there can come some sunny days
Good, fair woman; honest, devoted woman, loving intelligence, gift of vision, success, happiness, pleasure, wisdom, virtue; a perfect spouse and a good mother.
Not sufficiently shitty.
Leo’s horoscope a couple weeks ago led me to suggest to my wife she needed to up her game.
She hasn’t spoken to me since.
Surely if I show her this week’s version she will see the error in her ways and come around.
She hasn’t spoken to me since.
Congratulations on not having to listen to her!
(I kid, I kid!)
seems like a lot of Glibs are having a hard time lately
Some days…Tres and all the others that are having bumps in the road
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnf_cWYj1Uw
Prodigality, dissipation, liberality, luxury; unfavorable news
One of Matthau’s best roles.
If you’ve not seen Hopscotch, I highly recommend it. A masterclass in understated humor.
Why are the Aero Precision 30mm mounts on intergalactic back order?
Aero Precision has been having trouble keeping stuff in stock lately. I hear rumors that they’re badly overextended and circling the drain of bankruptcy.
Ugh. I like their scope mounts.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2222042/
I watched this earlier today. Manages to cover most of the typical tropes of the genre, while still being fun.
And frankly, I’m a sucker for anything with Michael Rooker.
https://x.com/maxmorton6gdm/status/2045863888109862917
“Fuck you, Tulsi. Be my bitch. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
This may be the key to Trump – he is such a bullshitter he doesn’t realize when he is being bullshitted.
I’d love to hear Trump tweet about that idiot Candidate Trump.
https://x.com/jeffbezos/status/2045874068763632017
Moar! Moar!
Prime+++ Delivery?
Elon Musk @elonmusk
Congrats
======
I like when these Supervillains We Need are in direct competition. Greatly benefits us all.
(I wanna go up to the moon for a 3-day weekend. Build me my playground and hotel. And fun-to -eat-in space food. Chop chop.)
I want to go to Mars and get with a three titted hooker.
The way the youths listen to Glen Campbell.
A more in depth look at the curious timing over the knifing of Swalwell.
https://www.sashastone.com/p/eric-swalwell-flew-too-close-to-the
Documented PRC spy? Who cares? Anonymous seven-year-old regrettable sex? That’s the ticket.
That’d be a key attack from me v the DNC. Only reason it wouldn’t be is if the Republican Caverns are equally full of skeletons and vaguely sentient, walking corpses.
(Yep. I’ll just keep right on waiting, won’t I? Patiently. ..sigh.)
At some point “critical thinking” boils down to being able to say, in the face of Expert Opinion, “That can’t possibly be right.”