Fishwife sardines

[Click for a larger view.]

Found on The Hill in St. Louis. Are they worth $10.25? I’ll report back later today.

*

No, not worth $10.25. The sardines are on the larger side, not especially moist, not especially flavorful. They’re meaty, and not in a good way. And the larger size means that the fish innards are a bit larger too. But it’s a nice box.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

A high-school student writes about AI

In The Atlantic, Ashanty Rosario, a senior at Newtown High School in Queens, New York, writes about how AI is ruining his education (gift link). An excerpt:

The trouble with chatbots is not just that they allow students to get away with cheating or that they remove a sense of urgency from academics. The technology has also led students to focus on external results at the expense of internal growth. The dominant worldview seems to be: Why worry about actually learning anything when you can get an A for outsourcing your thinking to a machine?

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Two words

Stephen Colbert, last night on The Late Show, responding to the current occupant’s assertion that Chicago is “the worst and most dangerous city in the World”:

“Worst? And most dangerous? Two words: Fuck You.”

[The capital W appears in the current occupant’s social-media post. The capitals on the other two words just seem right to me.]

Take me out of the ballgame

[Click for a larger, sadder view.]

This what-was-a-baseball is a recent addition to the gravel in front of a butterfly sanctuary where Elaine and I sometimes walk.

Are you now wondering, as I was, what’s really inside a baseball?

Tipping into fascism

Garrett Graff’s “America Tips into Fascism” has received considerable attention. An excerpt:

For years in covering the rise (and return) of Trump and Trumpism, I imagined there was some line that the GOP would not be willing to compromise for greed and power — some incident that would bring party leaders to their senses, some principle or red-line would be unwilling to trade or cross in pursuit of furthering Trump’s agenda. Even after January 6th, I held hope that might be the end. But then Eric Cantor’s buddy Kevin McCarthy showed up at Mar-a-Lago and the rehabilitation tour began.

It has led here, to this moment, where all three branches of the GOP-controlled government have been willing to torch the republic and democracy that generations of elected officials and citizens have tended for 249 years simply to please Donald Trump and avoid running afoul of his temper.

Where America goes from here is a story yet to be written. It will surely get worse — Trump’s push now is clearly focused on locking in an illegitimate claim to power. Whether we can come back from this moment is a story yet unknown. But it’s clear today America is different and, even if we fight our way back, it will never be the same again.

The current occupant on criminality

The current occupant, earlier this afternoon:

“You know, we took many people off the streets of Washington, D.C. They’re hard-core, they’re not gonna be good. In ten years, in twenty years, in two years, they’re gonna be criminals. They’re gonna be — they were born to be criminals, frankly. They were born to be criminals. And they’re tough, and mean, and they’ll cut ya throat, and they won’t even think about it the next day. They won’t even remember that they did it. And we’re not gonna have those people.”

The idea that some people are born to be criminals, that they can never change, and that “we” are not gonna have them: well, where are they going to go, then? Into prison for life, for any offense?

[My transcription. Gonna and ya are true to his speaking. That he’s a convicted felon (with criminal ancestry) talking about criminality is surely lost on him.]

Rollins and Williams and me

The start of another semester: I was teaching a freshman class that was surprisingly lively, with students standing and talking to one another as our time began.

I passed out syllabi, and there were several objections to having quizzes, daily quizzes, but I assured the students that if they did the work of the class from day to day, quizzes would be a ridiculously easy matter. I told them that the highest average for quizzes I had ever seen in a class was 113. That was because every so often I would throw in an extra-credit question, which for some reason only seemed to happen on Fridays. And if you have an average 113 for, say, 25% of your semester grade, it would be really hard not to do well in the class.

I had to end the class after just a few minutes because I was due to escort Sonny Rollins and Mary Lou Williams to a small bandstand in the common area of the building, where they were to play duets. They were guests on campus that day. And as I showed them the way, I woke up.

This is the thirty-first teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In only two of them has nothing gone wrong. The going-wrong here is not cutting class short; it’s missing out on hearing Sonny Rollins and Mary Lou Williams.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). See also Thomas Nashe. Possible sources: a commercial, repeatedly interrupting 30 Rock episodes, with a teacher returning work, student by student, and thoughts of the David Murray/Mal Waldron album Silence (tenor saxophone and piano). The 113 average is from real life, not from the dream world. I was happy to make day-to-day coursework count, which, unsurprisingly, made for better classes.]

“Undigested”

From Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions (1594).

The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions is no. 30 in the Penguin Little Black Classics boxed set.

Also from this volume
“Gold and a buttoned cap”

Occupant?

The current occupant has had no public events on his schedule since last Tuesday, the day of the three-hour-plus adoration session with his Cabinet. On Sunday his social-media account had a post about playing golf with a former NFL coach. But the post had a photograph from an August 23 golf outing.

The forensic and surgical pathologist who last week posted and deleted his speculations about the present occupant’s health suggested that counting the days between golf outings might provide the clearest indication of how things are going. The Donald Trump Golf Tracker shows this past Sunday as the first Sunday without golf since July 13 (when the present occupant was watching the final FIFA match).

One need not be a conspiracy-monger to wonder what’s going on.

[Dates checked with Roll Call.]

Labor Day

[“Migrant shed worker. Northeast Florida.” Photograph by Dorothea Lange. July 1936. From the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]