Riemblog

Apparently the Adobe building in San Jose has been transmitting the text of Thomas Pynchon’s ’60’s novelette, The Crying of Lot 49, in semaphore. This quirky item courtesy of boingboing.net. Here’s the link to the San Jose Mercury News story: http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_6620943?nclick_check=1

On a recent business trip to our nation’s capital by way of Los Angeles International Airport, a few things got me thinking.

First, no one seems to know what a line is. I say this because getting in line in order to get your tickets, in order to check your bags, in order to get to your gate, in order to get to your plane…getting into each and all of these lines is nearly impossible because no one knows what a line is. And at LAX where the line is, or where it goes. This leads to chaos. As I was taught in first grade, “If you don’t see the back of the head of the person in front of you, you are not in line.” Why can one of the great airports in the world not manage to clearly delineate where lines begin, which way they wend, and where they end? It is bad enough being crammed into narrow tubes like molecules of crushed humanity, but must getting onto the planes be such a gruesome ordeal?

Second, I don’t think the screening process is serious. We all have our anecdotal evidence for this. And don’t get me wrong, I am not a whiner. I understand the need for vigilance. I am for it, but I do not think the process as it stands enhances vigilance. Item 1: As I madly dashed away from the x-ray area, laptop flapping, sandals ready to slap on, hoping not to be nabbed for “additional screening,” I caught a glimpse of someone’s grandma being additionally screened. You know the picture, a frail, elderly woman with her hands over her head, legs spread, a wand being put where it doesn’t need to be. Bad enough. Then I saw it, a teenage boy like the ones I teach, posing with his three foot long skateboard leaning on his hip. He may well have been grandma’s grandson. And I flashed back to a kid with blood gushing from the gash in his skull in the hallway at school, having been bashed with a skateboard wielded as a weapon. You can kill someone with a skateboard. Easily. But here’s this kid, ready to get on a flight with his board, and apparently no one has thought twice about it. But no nail file. And poor grandma. Again, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against skateboarders. Anyone who wants to spend more time practicing falling off something that is moving fast and landing on concrete than they spend reading or thinking is just fine by me. Okey dokey. And terrorist skateboarders are a stretch. But how serious is the TSA and the government about security and passenger safety, really?

Item #2: While eating my hideous fish and chips at the Samuel Adams location at Reagan International, past the screening, able to stroll freely onto my plane it occurs to me that people are ordering and being served beer. Nothing strange there, it is Sam Adams’. But the beer is in bottles. Glass bottles. Now I am not paranoid. And I am not a terrorist, but I don’t trust the Sam Adams beer guy to keep track of the beer bottles. And it is very easy to go into a restroom and bust off a bottle-neck and voila, cutting weapon.Stick in carry-on. Carry on. They don’t even serve beer in bottles at baseball games. With good reason. You can hurt people with them. I know this sounds a little odd, but so is limiting the amount of hand lotion or baby food we can take on a plane. If we’re going to be thorough, let’s be thorough. Or admit it’s a show.

On a different, lighter note, I was reading grants for the department of education in Washington, D.C., and I teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District, so I am awash in acronyms and I have grown to hate them. In reading the grants, it seemed that every applicant felt that they needed to create an acronym for their project. Oddly enough, though, this was not among the criteria for funding. But you would think it was. I cannot reveal the actual grant applicants’ acronyms–believe me, you don’t want to know them, but here are two examples of bad acronymism from my district: SDAIE and LEARN. SDAIE violates one of the criteria for a proper acronym: the initials, when put together, should form a pronouceable verbal entity. But SDAIE has been going strong since I started teaching twenty years ago. SDAIE is pronounced su-die. It stands for (I know you’re dying to know) Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English. SDAIE must die. LEARN stands for Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Reform Now. I know, it skips essential initials. But it’s cute. And that’s why I hate it. Burn LEARN. Join me in my movement to get rid of acronyms. Ban Acronyms Now! BAN. Oh, no.

Well, if I thought “Scooter” was bad, what am I to make of this? Courtesy of US News and World Report, by way of Boing-boing. Check out #9. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070813/13rovefacts.htm