Today I Learned #4: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
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(Please keep in mind that talking about this makes me extremely angry and anything I say regarding religion in schools has nothing to do with anyone here, because I can't think of anyone on this forum who is a fraction as myopic, stubborn, and allergic to common sense as the politicians running my province, nor do they appear to have an agenda to drag my province back to the 1950s)
The draft curriculum I refer to is what the Minister of Gutting Public Education and the Premier of Alberta are hell-bent on inflicting on the kids of this province. At first I referred to it as the "d(r)aft curriculum" on the news site where I post comments (just to suss out how overly sensitive the unaccountable moderators are there), then finally decided to go ahead and call it "the daft curriculum." "Daft" is about the most polite word anyone can think of for it, and it's a legitimate typo.
Waaaay back several conservative premiers ago (like a decade's worth), it was decided that the public school curriculum needed an overhaul. It was a sensible idea, since some subjects still hadn't joined the computer/internet age.
So committees that included all parties, anglophone and francophone, teachers, parents, people of many backgrounds and levels of experience in teaching, child development, subject experts, etc. got together and took YEARS to update and hammer out a new curriculum that also took into account the "calls to action" of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to include indigenous content beginning in the kindergarten levels.
This was a draft curriculum that was ready to be piloted a couple of years ago.
But what happened a couple of years ago is that the election of 2019 came along, the NDP were turfed by a hybrid right-wing party led by an illegitimately-"elected" leader (the RCMP is still investigating Jason Kenney, our so-called premier, for election fraud after he fired the Elections Commissioner who was also investigating this), and the new UCP government promptly shredded this ready-to-be-piloted curriculum that took years to create and cost tens of millions of dollars, because they claimed that it was anti-Alberta, anti-oil, and "pushing a left-wing socialist ideology."
And then they appointed my newly-elected MLA, Adriana LaGrange, as the new Minister of Education, and tasked her with coming up with a new curriculum.
What she did was hire a pack of idiots who are not teachers, not experts in any subject field at any level appropriate for teaching children aged 5-12, some are not even Canadian (and therefore the curriculum has such gems as our national anthem is "Canada" and before we went metric we used "Canadian units"). One of the most notorious examples of their incompetence is the assignment that kids are supposed to "find a map of Alberta, locate Regina and Duck Lake, and calculate the distance between them".
To which I reply: "Hello, Adriana? The Premier of Saskatchewan just called, and he'd like his provincial capital back. Some idiot you picked to write the curriculum thinks it's in Alberta." (iow, you can look on a map of Alberta for the rest of your life, but you won't find Regina there; it's the capital of Saskatchewan)
There are so many things wrong with this mess, I have no idea where to start. Most of the people who made this mess are right-wing Christians of varying degrees of attitudes regarding how much religion (especially Christianity) to cram into a curriculum intended for public schools that are supposed to be religion-neutral and in keeping with the Charter of Rights that guarantees freedom of/from religion. Bible verses are presented in Grade 1, in the guise of "poetry." There was something about immigration that's since been toned down, but the original version was absolutely appalling that "newcomers bring strange new beliefs that we must learn to tolerate" (not sure what 'strange new beliefs' they were talking about - I guess anything not basically Christian, Muslim, or Jewish).
I haven't read the section on health and wellness, but have heard from others that the issue of "consent" means that if you're too scared to say "no" then you really mean "yes" or at least you're not withholding consent. Best birth control method? Abstinence. There are some UCP-supporting parents who are livid that sex education is part of this at all (one man actually said in the comment section that he wouldn't want his daughter learning about any of it until she was at least 14, to which I told him, "So you wouldn't mind becoming a grandpa before explaining to your daughter where babies come from?").
Apparently there's been enough outcry now that the government is not going to push this pile of crap into the schools in the fall of 2022, or at least not all of it. They are going to push some of it into the schools this fall, no matter that a whopping 2% of the teachers agreed to pilot sections of one course, never mind all of them. The social studies portion is the one in need of the biggest amount of change (easier to scrap the whole thing and start over), but math will go ahead this year.
Yep, our students will not be the laughingstock of the world for being taught that a second is 1/60 of an hour.
When I think about early cars, I think about the Ford Model T, and similar things. Which is all accurate. But I also think that at that time anything like this was slow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record turns out that already in 1906 the mark of 200 km/h was passed in a record attempt. I think sitting in one of these vehicles must have been close to a suicide mission. Very daring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record turns out that already in 1906 the mark of 200 km/h was passed in a record attempt. I think sitting in one of these vehicles must have been close to a suicide mission. Very daring.
GinandTonic
Saphire w/ Schweps + Lime
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TIL that if I shake my smartphone really hard, the flashlight turns on!
Is it a Moto? Moto Actions is active by default. Karate Chop is the action to toggle the torch. I keep buying Moto's simply because this is so absurdly useful. Dark and one hand full? No worries, let their be light.
Yes, it is a Moto G Power (2020)
EgonSpengler
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TIL (well, technically it was the other day) that in the Spanish-language dub of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, John teaches the Terminator to say "Sayonara, baby" instead of "Hasta la vista, baby."
Ah, yes, I get it now. As an educator I have seen the effects of such misguided attempts at policy. I also feel strongly about those.
Paul in Saudi
Emperor
Like the American flag, the Filipino flag is folded into a triangle.
Today I heard, 2nd hand from a gastroenterology professor, that the rate of diverticulitis has been increasing loads over the last few years. He blames it on the rise of open plan offices and the attendant rise in people holding in their farts.
New Year countdown is not so old.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/31/1069497706/new-years-eve-times-square-countdown-clock
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/31/1069497706/new-years-eve-times-square-countdown-clock
EgonSpengler
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From the previous thread:
"They say that long ago, the one we call Gluskonba, the first one in the shape of a human being, was walking around. This was the time before the people came to be on this land. Now one of the jobs Gluskonba had been given by the Creator was to make things better for those humans when they got here. And so he thought, 'I wonder what the animals will do when they see a human being for the first time. I better ask them.'
And so Gluskonba called together a great counsel of all the animal people. And then as he stood before them, he said, I want each of you to come up and when I say the word for human being, tell me what you will do. Now the first one to step forward was the bear. In those days bear was so large, he was taller than the tallest trees. His mouth was so huge, he could swallow an entire wigwam. And when Gluskonba said the word 'alnoba', which means human being, the bear said 'I will swallow every human being that I see!'
Gluskonba thought about that. He thought to himself, 'I do not think human beings will enjoy being swallowed by bears, I'd better do something.' And so he decided to use one of the powers given to him by the Creator, the power to change things, a power that we human beings also have and often misuse. Gluskonba said to the bear, 'you have some burrs caught in your fur, let me comb them out with my fingers.' And so the bear sat down in front of him, and Gluskonba began to run his fingers along the bear's back and as he did so, combing out those burrs, he also made the bear get smaller and smaller, until the bear was the size that bears are to this day.
And when Gluskonba said to him, 'and now what will you do when you see a human being?' that bear looked at itself and said, 'I will run away!' Which is what bears usually do to this day."
This morning I heard Joe Bruchac, an Abenaki storyteller, on the radio...EgonSpengler said:TIL the Giant Short-Faced Bear, which lived in North America, may have been the largest mammalian predator to have ever lived. A study of remains estimates that the upper third of the population were 900+ kg (1,900+ lbs). The largest existing specimen is estimated at 957 kg (2,100 lbs). The bears might have stood 1.8m (5' 11") while on all fours, and possibly 3.7m (12') while on their hind legs. Riverbluff Cave in Missouri features claw marks in the rock, believed to be from a Short-Faced Bear, that are 4.6m (15') off the floor. The bear's long limbs indicate its running speed probably exceeded that of contemporary bears. The bear is believed to have gone extinct ~11,000 years ago. And, yes, if you're wondering, there were humans in N. America around that same time.
Artist's rendering, with a light supper for scale.
Spoiler :
"They say that long ago, the one we call Gluskonba, the first one in the shape of a human being, was walking around. This was the time before the people came to be on this land. Now one of the jobs Gluskonba had been given by the Creator was to make things better for those humans when they got here. And so he thought, 'I wonder what the animals will do when they see a human being for the first time. I better ask them.'
And so Gluskonba called together a great counsel of all the animal people. And then as he stood before them, he said, I want each of you to come up and when I say the word for human being, tell me what you will do. Now the first one to step forward was the bear. In those days bear was so large, he was taller than the tallest trees. His mouth was so huge, he could swallow an entire wigwam. And when Gluskonba said the word 'alnoba', which means human being, the bear said 'I will swallow every human being that I see!'
Gluskonba thought about that. He thought to himself, 'I do not think human beings will enjoy being swallowed by bears, I'd better do something.' And so he decided to use one of the powers given to him by the Creator, the power to change things, a power that we human beings also have and often misuse. Gluskonba said to the bear, 'you have some burrs caught in your fur, let me comb them out with my fingers.' And so the bear sat down in front of him, and Gluskonba began to run his fingers along the bear's back and as he did so, combing out those burrs, he also made the bear get smaller and smaller, until the bear was the size that bears are to this day.
And when Gluskonba said to him, 'and now what will you do when you see a human being?' that bear looked at itself and said, 'I will run away!' Which is what bears usually do to this day."
The Magic Number Seven: The Week
By David M. Henkin
(Yale, 264 pages, $30)
The very notion of a book on the seven-day week can seem genuinely startling. That alone affirms David M. Henkin’s thesis in “The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are,” which argues that we are so thoroughly marinated in its conventions that we seldom question its artificiality, or even its existence. Why seven days? Why not 10? (The décade, indeed implemented for some years in France after the Revolution, failed to catch on.) What does the week represent to the modern world—and Americans in particular?
If no one can definitively explain the why of a seven-day system—first used in ancient Mesopotamia and appearing in the Book of Genesis—Mr. Henkin at least gives full throat to the how. The Berkeley historian scours American literature, diaries, periodicals, menus and other ephemera from as far back as the 17th century to unearth fascinating evidence of the stickiness of the seven-day cycle. He establishes the historical pressures that rendered the organization of the week malleable to changing needs of the marketplace, prevailing religions, social custom and the shape of working life. Notwithstanding the book’s title, it is less about “the week” than how and when the week became entrenched in the United States. Mr. Henkin acknowledges the primacy of Eviatar Zerubavel’s 1985 study of all things weekly, “The Seven Day Circle”; his own work does not presume to supplant it. Instead it is deliberately circumscribed in time and geography to chronicle “ how Americans became a people of the week par excellence.” Our work, consumer and leisure habits became “intensely week-oriented” in the early 19th century and remain so today. In turn, America led the worldwide shift toward adoption of a universally recognized week as the primary organizer of time, ultimately both necessary to and driven by oncoming globalization. Other countries fell into line, either slowly or all at once, as when in 1873 the Meiji reforms decreed Japanese adherence to a seven-day week.
Mr. Henkin presents abundant, if sometimes tangential, evidence to support the idea that an essential function of the week is to situate people within the nexus of their social and economic moment. (Lengthy appendices detail menu items offered on particular days of the week at bygone restaurants—brilliant as found poetry, but less so as a meaningful argument for the week’s imaginative hold.) Superstitions easily affixed themselves to various days, especially “ luckless Friday.” In another appendix, devoted to marriage days in a 19th-century sample of counties, Friday might as well wear garlic around its neck. It was the fourth day—depending on the fluctuating start of the week—that appeared most propitious, notwithstanding the nursery rhyme (“Thursday’s child has far to go . . . ”). The Friday shibboleth remains today, but mainly when the day falls on the 13th of the month. Plenty of other markers—laundry Monday, payday Saturday—are long forgotten. Times change. Remember Saturday cartoons?
Conceptions of the week have long been primarily and exquisitely responsive to the ways we buy and sell, work and unwind, which in turn respond to technologic advance. All these have been revolutionized anew by the internet. Now we stream or engage in e-commerce whenever we like. It has untethered us from some long-standing social conventions, from the Saturday movie matinee to the Monday morning commute. The natural world never offered a reason for, say, mandating public executions on the same day each week (Friday, of course). Or making Monday night sacred to football. That we persist in sorting activity in weekly cycles can only be explained by an instinctual need to psychologically manage the passage of time. In his epilogue, Mr. Henkin touches on “the fate of the week in the Internet age,” when we no longer venture to sales at Main Street stores and increasingly rarely to theaters to witness cinema, and spill our sodas, in the presence of others. News is an unceasing river, no longer the province of the weekly newsmagazine or intoned at the same hour each weeknight. Still, the hold of a notional week is tenacious: I was reading “The Week” on “Giving Tuesday,” the day after “Cyber Monday,” which was preceded by “Black Friday.” Weekly “consumer habits,” installed in the mid-19th century, although different in type now, are hard to dislodge. Our work and family lives are organized around a conceit that feels as constant as gravity, but the week is a human invention.
Thus do days display peculiar traits, almost “physiognomies,” in the term of an Atlantic Monthly essay cited by Mr. Henkin: Tuesday “is like those people to whom we dread being introduced, because they have no expression of face, and it is morally certain we shall never be able to recognize them again.” It was written in 1887. Surely the scope of social change since then has done away with such sentimental projection? But here’s the British group Easy Life evoking the same familiar sensations—in 2019: “And every time that I lay her down / it feels like Sunday.”
The current pandemic offered Mr. Henkin a spontaneous real-life test of how psychically rooted the week remains. Absent the touchstones of going to work or play on specific days, many of us felt unmoored not only from time but from ourselves. People reported feeling distraught at no longer knowing if it was Tuesday or Wednesday—and the sense of shock went deeper than missing a few calendar dates. As Mr. Henkin notes, “Losing one’s handle on the week raises the specter of lost memory and lost time.”
In the end, this timekeeping convention is an emotional construct. We need some means of orienting ourselves to the many working parts of our world, a governor on the chaos of so many interlocking functions and needs. The seven-day wheel turns especially neatly for the uses of industry and finance—but so do people. The human impulse to tell stories imposes a narrative arc with beginning, middle and end—and in the structure of the week a fresh beginning is always on the horizon. The week is eternity in an idea.
Ms. Pierson is the author, most recently, of “The Secret History of Kindness.”
By David M. Henkin
(Yale, 264 pages, $30)
The very notion of a book on the seven-day week can seem genuinely startling. That alone affirms David M. Henkin’s thesis in “The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are,” which argues that we are so thoroughly marinated in its conventions that we seldom question its artificiality, or even its existence. Why seven days? Why not 10? (The décade, indeed implemented for some years in France after the Revolution, failed to catch on.) What does the week represent to the modern world—and Americans in particular?
If no one can definitively explain the why of a seven-day system—first used in ancient Mesopotamia and appearing in the Book of Genesis—Mr. Henkin at least gives full throat to the how. The Berkeley historian scours American literature, diaries, periodicals, menus and other ephemera from as far back as the 17th century to unearth fascinating evidence of the stickiness of the seven-day cycle. He establishes the historical pressures that rendered the organization of the week malleable to changing needs of the marketplace, prevailing religions, social custom and the shape of working life. Notwithstanding the book’s title, it is less about “the week” than how and when the week became entrenched in the United States. Mr. Henkin acknowledges the primacy of Eviatar Zerubavel’s 1985 study of all things weekly, “The Seven Day Circle”; his own work does not presume to supplant it. Instead it is deliberately circumscribed in time and geography to chronicle “ how Americans became a people of the week par excellence.” Our work, consumer and leisure habits became “intensely week-oriented” in the early 19th century and remain so today. In turn, America led the worldwide shift toward adoption of a universally recognized week as the primary organizer of time, ultimately both necessary to and driven by oncoming globalization. Other countries fell into line, either slowly or all at once, as when in 1873 the Meiji reforms decreed Japanese adherence to a seven-day week.
Mr. Henkin presents abundant, if sometimes tangential, evidence to support the idea that an essential function of the week is to situate people within the nexus of their social and economic moment. (Lengthy appendices detail menu items offered on particular days of the week at bygone restaurants—brilliant as found poetry, but less so as a meaningful argument for the week’s imaginative hold.) Superstitions easily affixed themselves to various days, especially “ luckless Friday.” In another appendix, devoted to marriage days in a 19th-century sample of counties, Friday might as well wear garlic around its neck. It was the fourth day—depending on the fluctuating start of the week—that appeared most propitious, notwithstanding the nursery rhyme (“Thursday’s child has far to go . . . ”). The Friday shibboleth remains today, but mainly when the day falls on the 13th of the month. Plenty of other markers—laundry Monday, payday Saturday—are long forgotten. Times change. Remember Saturday cartoons?
Conceptions of the week have long been primarily and exquisitely responsive to the ways we buy and sell, work and unwind, which in turn respond to technologic advance. All these have been revolutionized anew by the internet. Now we stream or engage in e-commerce whenever we like. It has untethered us from some long-standing social conventions, from the Saturday movie matinee to the Monday morning commute. The natural world never offered a reason for, say, mandating public executions on the same day each week (Friday, of course). Or making Monday night sacred to football. That we persist in sorting activity in weekly cycles can only be explained by an instinctual need to psychologically manage the passage of time. In his epilogue, Mr. Henkin touches on “the fate of the week in the Internet age,” when we no longer venture to sales at Main Street stores and increasingly rarely to theaters to witness cinema, and spill our sodas, in the presence of others. News is an unceasing river, no longer the province of the weekly newsmagazine or intoned at the same hour each weeknight. Still, the hold of a notional week is tenacious: I was reading “The Week” on “Giving Tuesday,” the day after “Cyber Monday,” which was preceded by “Black Friday.” Weekly “consumer habits,” installed in the mid-19th century, although different in type now, are hard to dislodge. Our work and family lives are organized around a conceit that feels as constant as gravity, but the week is a human invention.
Thus do days display peculiar traits, almost “physiognomies,” in the term of an Atlantic Monthly essay cited by Mr. Henkin: Tuesday “is like those people to whom we dread being introduced, because they have no expression of face, and it is morally certain we shall never be able to recognize them again.” It was written in 1887. Surely the scope of social change since then has done away with such sentimental projection? But here’s the British group Easy Life evoking the same familiar sensations—in 2019: “And every time that I lay her down / it feels like Sunday.”
The current pandemic offered Mr. Henkin a spontaneous real-life test of how psychically rooted the week remains. Absent the touchstones of going to work or play on specific days, many of us felt unmoored not only from time but from ourselves. People reported feeling distraught at no longer knowing if it was Tuesday or Wednesday—and the sense of shock went deeper than missing a few calendar dates. As Mr. Henkin notes, “Losing one’s handle on the week raises the specter of lost memory and lost time.”
In the end, this timekeeping convention is an emotional construct. We need some means of orienting ourselves to the many working parts of our world, a governor on the chaos of so many interlocking functions and needs. The seven-day wheel turns especially neatly for the uses of industry and finance—but so do people. The human impulse to tell stories imposes a narrative arc with beginning, middle and end—and in the structure of the week a fresh beginning is always on the horizon. The week is eternity in an idea.
Ms. Pierson is the author, most recently, of “The Secret History of Kindness.”
Berzerker
Deity
So we have an Indian myth about large bears from 11,000 years ago... and another about Mt Mazama (Crater Lake) erupting 7700 years ago...and a Flood myth 14,000 years ago from the Tlingit
the number 7 is sacred in many places so it wouldn't have been a shock to traditional cultures to adopt a 7 day week.
Warner Bros bought David Bowie's catalog for ~$250 million
that follows on the heels of Sony buying Bruce Springsteen's for $500 mil
the number 7 is sacred in many places so it wouldn't have been a shock to traditional cultures to adopt a 7 day week.
Warner Bros bought David Bowie's catalog for ~$250 million
that follows on the heels of Sony buying Bruce Springsteen's for $500 mil
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Thursday is the fifth day, not the fourth. Afaik the days already had been named after their numerical position, in the jewish religion, where obviously Saturday is the core day (since they care so much about it), and the others are called after their distance from it (eg Sunday is the first, Friday is the sixth).
When the Ptolemaic dynasty translated the jewish religious books, for their jewish subjects, the names stayed in greek too, although we have special (non numerical) names for Friday and Sunday. Curiously, in Greek Sunday got the most prominent name, being "of the lord" (my own name is the masculine version of the term, since the epithet/name of the day is the feminine form
) Probably some byzantine or proto-christian development.
That said, the (greek) name for Friday is clearly alluding to the jewish Saturday, since it literally means "preparation (for Saturday)"
When the Ptolemaic dynasty translated the jewish religious books, for their jewish subjects, the names stayed in greek too, although we have special (non numerical) names for Friday and Sunday. Curiously, in Greek Sunday got the most prominent name, being "of the lord" (my own name is the masculine version of the term, since the epithet/name of the day is the feminine form
) Probably some byzantine or proto-christian development.That said, the (greek) name for Friday is clearly alluding to the jewish Saturday, since it literally means "preparation (for Saturday)"
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The internet age has altered some of these days. For instance, Saturday is no longer Saturday. It's Caturday, and all cats everywhere are to be especially pampered and indulged.
I don't recall all the Lolcat names for the days of the week; I think Tuesday is Chewsday and Friday is Fried Egg. Saturday is Caturday, and I'd have to look up the others.
As for weekends... Dowager Countess Violet of Downton Abbey was unfamiliar with the concept (this clip is from very early in the series, right after Matthew has turned up as the heir after the previous heir went down with the Titanic; the aristocratic Crawleys are somewhat horrified that their newly-met cousin has a job):
I don't recall all the Lolcat names for the days of the week; I think Tuesday is Chewsday and Friday is Fried Egg. Saturday is Caturday, and I'd have to look up the others.
As for weekends... Dowager Countess Violet of Downton Abbey was unfamiliar with the concept (this clip is from very early in the series, right after Matthew has turned up as the heir after the previous heir went down with the Titanic; the aristocratic Crawleys are somewhat horrified that their newly-met cousin has a job):
Berzerker
Deity
Lawrence Brooks died at 112, he was the oldest WWII vet...and possibly oldest man in the country
https://apnews.com/article/new-orle...world-war-ii-7f524c95f9b3ac8f52ee487ed16a4cf1
https://apnews.com/article/new-orle...world-war-ii-7f524c95f9b3ac8f52ee487ed16a4cf1
Bunday are for posting buns.
Also, you of all people should know that every day is a Caturday.
Well, Maddy would certainly agree with you. She stood on top of me today, demanding I get up and feed her. When I didn't move fast enough, she started using the organ as a scratching post. She knows that annoys me.
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