Fox News is reporting that Alan King, the King of comedy, has died. The Borscht Belt just greatly expanded its borders.

[Update on Tuesday, May 11th]

Alan Henderson has some additional commentary.

Joanne Jacobs has a bunch of testimonials from her readers as to just how worthless high-school, and even college diplomas have become. Particularly dismaying was the inability of young people to do computation without a calculator, or to recognize that an answer was absurd.

Many college students hang on to their calculators much as a young child hangs on to a blanket for security. In my first calculus test, when the professor wouldn’t let calculators used, five of 25 students walked out and 10 other students never came back to class. We ended up with nine students at the end of the semester. I have seen the same problem in chemistry, physics and other courses. When courses get hard, most students just drop instead of studying harder.

I had a chance to talk to Rand at SA’04 and he said I should just post whatever was on my mind and not worry about consistency with the previous course of TTM, which had been a concern for me since I’m 99% aligned with Rand on space policy and much less so on terrestrial politics. Since my Dad’s death I’ve found myself less willing to keep my mouth shut about these things (for reasons which I’m not going to go into right now), so I wanted to check things out with Rand before diving back in. Now that I’ve cleared down some of my to do list I’ll resume posting, and we can see how things work out. I suspect that the upcoming election fight will have us all longing for the solemn dignity of monkeys throwing poo, but hopefully TTM will stay far enough above the fray to avoid the splatter.

I’m having the house exterior painted in preparation for renting it out. We once had a healthy crop of English ivy on it, and after removing it, it left many old tendrils in the stucco that I’ve always found impossible to remove, so persistent are the roots. I’ve tried power washing, to little avail, and thought that it would be a long and tedious job with a wire brush, perhaps combined with some sort of acid. I even asked on a home repair newsgroup, but no one had any obvious easy solution.

But I’m sitting here watching the painters prep the house, and they’re doing what’s obvious in retrospect. They fired up a little propane torch, and simply burn them off, followed by brushing off the ashes. Why didn’t I think of that?

I’m having the house exterior painted in preparation for renting it out. We once had a healthy crop of English ivy on it, and after removing it, it left many old tendrils in the stucco that I’ve always found impossible to remove, so persistent are the roots. I’ve tried power washing, to little avail, and thought that it would be a long and tedious job with a wire brush, perhaps combined with some sort of acid. I even asked on a home repair newsgroup, but no one had any obvious easy solution.

But I’m sitting here watching the painters prep the house, and they’re doing what’s obvious in retrospect. They fired up a little propane torch, and simply burn them off, followed by brushing off the ashes. Why didn’t I think of that?

I’m having the house exterior painted in preparation for renting it out. We once had a healthy crop of English ivy on it, and after removing it, it left many old tendrils in the stucco that I’ve always found impossible to remove, so persistent are the roots. I’ve tried power washing, to little avail, and thought that it would be a long and tedious job with a wire brush, perhaps combined with some sort of acid. I even asked on a home repair newsgroup, but no one had any obvious easy solution.

But I’m sitting here watching the painters prep the house, and they’re doing what’s obvious in retrospect. They fired up a little propane torch, and simply burn them off, followed by brushing off the ashes. Why didn’t I think of that?

Starting a new job. Maybe something tonight, but no guarantees.

The last Oldsmobile will roll off the line tomorrow.

Remember that Claremont psych professor who vandalized her own car, and then claimed that it was done by racists? She’s been charged with filing a false police report, and insurance fraud.

Somehow, I suspect that she won’t be on the tenure track:

Claremont President Pamela Gann has said the college would conduct its own investigation before deciding whether to retain Dunn, whose contract expires later this year.

I’m sure that she didn’t lie–she was just providing an alternative narrative. This loon might make an interesting case study for one of her classes. I wonder how many deluded students she’ll be able to continue to rally to her defense?

Lileks says that Blender magazine wouldn’t know a bad rock song if it ran right up and made its ears bleed.