I Hate This Song! And Other Things, Too.

What is This Drivel?
16 miles into my recent Chuckanut 50k adventure (report forthcoming from Nobody Cares Press) I switched on my trusty iPod so my music could help me forget that I had 15 miles yet to go. A mile later I realized that I hate every song in my library. Help please. I need some new music suggestions. The music doesn't have to be new, but the suggestions do. 


Can We Agree...
That the driver of this truck has some issues?

Yet another eloquent argument from the right.

Remoteness
I just completed my first full time, all online teaching quarter at The Learning Factory. It's an experiment in lowering my stress level and keeping me from going ballistic on a few of my colleagues, and so far, success! It has been three months since my last academic rampage. But this remoteness isn't, to use a phrase that is ever so popular around the cinderblock hallways of TLF, "sustainable" for the long term. I could be wrong, but I think the appetite for online learning is waning, and students seem to be catching on that they pay more for an experience that is usually more limiting and less engaging than face to face classes.

More importantly, when I look into the future using my Obvious Outcomes Glasses, I can see that The Learning Factory and especially the union drones therein are going to start squawking about equity when it comes to online versus face to face learning. But until that happens, weeeeeeeeeee! I'm working from home, baby.


Not having to go to the office on a regular basis takes a lot more discipline and organization than I actually have. I have to have my iPhone remind me on a regular basis that I am supposed to be working, not playing Tropico on the XBOX, which is what I spend most of my time doing these days.


How cool is Tropico? I'll tell you. Super. That's how. But not as cool as this, spotted recently on a Washington State Ferry while commuting to The Boat Yard...

Old School!

Drill Baby Drill?

Both of my readers know that I am no fan of the Grand Ole Party and their conservative (regressive) stances on social issues. And it's no secret that I have little patience for the incredibly simplistic rhetoric that dominates political discourse. Everything gets boiled down to simple dichotomous stances on what are usually incredibly complex issues, which helps no one but lobbyists and politicians.

Today from the Associated Press comes a "Fact Check" that will doubtlessly be ignored or cast aside as the "liberal media" doing the dirty work for the Obama administration...

Headline: More US Drilling Wouldn't Drop Gas Prices

Here's a tickler:

Supporters of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline say it would bring 25 million barrels of oil to the United States a month. That's the same increase in U.S. production that occurred between February and November last year. Monthly gas prices went up a dime a gallon in that time.
The late 1980s and 1990s show exactly how domestic drilling is not related to gas prices.

Duh. Guess what? Most domestic oil is exported as crude oil, not refined in the US. And guess what? Adapting US refining capabilities to process domestic crude (which is different chemically that crude that is currently imported) would be so prohibitively expensive that it is actually cheaper to export our crude and import crude oil to be refined into precious, precious gasoline.

Plus, US production of crude oil can barely scratch the overall world market.

Another tickler:

Unlike natural gas or electricity, the United States alone does not have the power to change the supply-and-demand equation in the world oil market, said Christopher Knittel, a professor of energy economics at MIT. American oil production is about 11 percent of the world's output, so even if the U.S. were to increase its oil production by 50 percent - that is more than drilling in the Arctic, increased public-lands and offshore drilling, and the Canadian pipeline would provide - it would at most cut gas prices by 10 percent.

Of course, if Sudan and South Sudan fall into all-out war and cut off their supply of oil to China, we could all be screwed...But that's in Africa, and we like to pretend Africa doesn't exist outside of Disney movies about funny hyenas, recent Kony-related viral videos excepted.