Allergy season, April weather and a blizzard of deadlines have conspired to distract me from my main purpose in life, to wit, devaluing the other, more prestigious properties along the Infobahn. (“Jesus, what is it with that Mad Dog Media guy? Weeds all over the place, paint’s peeling and the goddamn racket coming from the joint at all hours. …”)
Also, we finally got around to watching the 2010 documentary “Inside Job” and it left me thinking more about sticks and stones than words, which as we all know cannot really hurt anyone. Jesus H. Christ. It makes you want to cash out what’s left of the old portfolio, close out the 401 (k) and the savings/checking accounts, buy gold and guns, and bury the former in the back yard while keeping watch over it with the latter.
To drain the bloodlust, watch “The Parking Lot Movie,” another 2010 documentary, this one about a gaggle of offbeat parking-lot attendants in Charlottesville, Virginia. Talk about the other end of the financial continuum. The gang argues with cheapskates, chases drive-aways, and responds in kind to the contempt that trickles down upon them from the blue-blooded commodores of the land-yacht flotilla.
One attendant notes that as the automobile grew in size over the years, they actually had to start turning some behemoths away because there were no spots large enough to accommodate them.
“You could almost see the truncated syllogism in their head,” one attendant says. “Like: ‘I bought the car; how could there not be a place to park it? Surely it comes with a parking space.’ ”
The tagline is, “It’s not just a parking lot. It’s a battle with humanity.” Or the lack thereof.
Mad Blog Media 
“truncated syllogism?” this guy’s doctorate in english has taken him a long way…
http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/E/enthymeme.htm
I actually have this film on DVD. The person who made the “truncated syllogism” line worked at the Corner Parking Lot while doing his graduate work and now works at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. So apparently you can get a job with an art history degree (not English), and it has, arguably, taken him a long way.
Not mentioned in the film is that one of the former attendants went on to be a Rhode Scholar. So yet another has gone a long way (lot further than me, anyway).
And O’G, we screened “Inside Job” as well recently (our library is awesome, just don’t tell the local Tea Partiers that it’s an example of Socialism and it’s working). Watching it reminded me of watching “The Smartest Guys in the Room” a couple years ago and thinking “you just know this sort of shit is going on elsewhere”. Yea, well, little did I know that all of the banks were Enron on steroids.
Sort of makes me glad that I don’t have any money left to lose.
And while you’re checking out recent documentaries, see if your library has “Gasland”. Good film, pretty well made (enough to get an Oscar nominations, if that’s worth anything). Nice summary of what we’ve been going through on Colorado’s west slope for years now. It’s so nice being an energy colony.
If we valued people with an education, while holding them and us to some standard of pragmatic rational productivity maybe we wouldn’t be having a shouting match with folks who really think not extending the debt limit or not protecting the environment, or not getting the top 1% that has 99% of the wealth to pay something like a reasonable share of the cost of running the country are brilliant ideas handed down from on high.
Naw, instead the debate is which lead box is best for burying money.
Even if you ignore some of those comments from the Right about too much education making one a liberal, we put out a heck of a lot of Ph.D.’s in the sixties and seventies in a whole raft of fields. It was boom time in America and everyone thought they could go to school forever, land a job in the Ivory Tower some day, teach in a quiet little place, chase after pretty undergraduates, and retire in your dotage with a decent pension and TIAA/CREF.
Unfortunately, just as our advisors were teetering off into The Land of Emeritus, the state and federal economies tanked and higher ed contracted.
Its bad enough in the sciences, where we still occasionally get government handouts when we are not being attacked for saying rational things about climate change and peak oil. I knew geoscience faculty who stopped taking graduate students back in the ’80’s, seeing the handwriting on the wall. Its really brutal in the fuzzy studies, esp. with Republicans in power and all those IOUs Uncle Sam has to pay back. About the only way to get money with a degree in the fuzzy studies is to get a real job in something else. Or, practice your “would you like fries with that, Sir?”
Frankly, I wish some of our surplus Ph.D. labor would get into the classroom in the K-12 system. We are putting out too many idiots and not enough thinkers.
Sad.
Oh, and p.s., I think we need strong humanities and social science departments. Last thing we need is a world full of geeks and coneheads.
P.P.S.: I’m not sure the world needs any more journalism majors, either (and that goes double for those hangers-on in their parents’ basements hunting advanced degrees instead of honest work). There are only so many chairs available on “Fox & Friends.”
“Frankly, I wish some of our surplus Ph.D. labor would get into the classroom in the K-12 system. ”
Spent four years doing reference at a nationally know education college 22 years ago. It was a shadow of its former self, living off its reputation. The business model was teach undergrads who had demonstrated a minimum level of talent sufficient to get in teach them lots of education theory and other ‘teaching’ skills, but only the barest of subject knowledge.
The experience convinced me that getting subject specialist with some depth to their expertise when given the basics for managing a class is the way to go.
Unfortunately national level school evaluations really push education towards teaching to the test and that only makes the problem worse.
Back in Hawaii, when I was at the university center at Manoa (and first started chatting back and forth with O’G), there was not a requirement that K-12 teachers have a degree in their specialty, as BenS says. You had to have a teaching certification but no expertise. They were trying to change but between the Dept of Ed’s hidebound bureaucracy and the teacher’s union protecting the entrenched, it was tough.
My low point with the Hawaii Dept. of Ed. was when they lobbied the State Legislature to kill a bicycling education bill aimed at funding a one week (1-2 hr/day) program for 4th graders because it took time away from studying for standardized tests. Meanwhile, the kids were hyperactive from gorging on junk food from vending machines used to raise money for education. Put them on Ritalin. Yeah, sure.
If you have an advanced degree or even a good B.S. degree in something valuable, you can typically make more money doing something besides teaching, at least in New Mexico. What that says about the value we put in an education worries me.
BenS, Khal — I hear ya on the educationese vs. subject tension. I teach at the university level, and our top criterion for faculty is that they be world-class researchers — but then, at our place, we also demand that they be excellent teachers. Anyone with a PhD has sat in a classroom for many thousands of hours, many of them thinking “I could teach better than this clown!”, and indeed, there’s a sizeable number who do a fantastic job with almost no formal training.
Amazing what you can learn at this site, thanks Khal and Chris; I think.
Where did the “off-beat cycling journalism” end and the rhetoric begin?
You haven’t been reading very long, have you? Patrick uses this (his personal blog) to express his opinions on all sorts of subjects. I wouldn’t have it any other way!
Sarcasm John sarcasm.
I’ve been reading O’G since he was a wee pup back when Mud Stud was hip. Which, coincidentally, was a ways before this whole blog was created. Unfortunately back then we had to wait two weeks (if we were lucky) to read his wit. Now we get it at least once a day.
O’Grady’s blog is more like shooting the shit around the pickle barrel. Sometimes its bicycling, sometimes its not. Often it diverges pretty fast.
On that note, I’m going to go put the light wheels on the commuter.
True dat, gents. It’s the Mad Dog Media Gen’ral Store, with us’ns jest crackin’ goobers an’ crackin’ wise. What was it Heinlein had Lazarus Long reply when a descendant said he required LL’s wisdom? Something like, “You’ve come to the wrong window, son. Try across the hall.”
We saw Inside Job and couldn’t quit looking at each other is disbelief. We’ll have to check out The Parking Lot Movie. Sounds interesting. Hey, we’ll take movie recommendations wherever we can find good ones.
If you found “Inside Job” illuminating, you’ll be interested in a program Frontline did in 2009 called “The Warning” also about the 2008 meltdown. You can watch the episode here for free: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/
// Even if you ignore some of those comments from the Right about too much education making one a liberal … //. Interestedly, the GOP won the college grad vote in prez elections every year since numbers became available … until ’08. But instead of working harder to win in back, they went scorched earth. I swear … Nobody knows nothing. What neither party has figured out is, elections are rarely won and are usually lost. It’s a race to suck the least,