Oh, for the love...

Pictured below is the day's take:

Are you kidding me? The text is centered again? I should re-name my blog a 2nd time and call it "Centered Text." Anyway, as you can see it wasn't much, but it was honestly more than I expected. I ate only the Ferro Rocher (or whatever) and disposed of the rest, ever mindful of the Legend of the Poison Cupcake.

VD (yeah, I said it again) is a good day to examine the fourth chapter of National Geographic's brain special, "The Emotional Brain." This is the final chapter I will cover. The 5th chapter, "The Aging Brain" is not something that interests me, as I already know that our brains start preparing for death as soon as they reach maturity around the age of 24. Borrowed time, indeed. So, back to the emotions. 

There are only six, according to the scientists quoted in the booklet. They are fear, anger, sadness, joy, surprise, and disgust. An interesting factoid is that humans have what is called an "impact bias" by which we imagine events happening and predict that our reactions will be far more intense and long-lasting than they really are. The booklet also says that we humans underestimate our own resilience. 

On the joy front, 60% of people's predisposition toward joy is genetic (nature). The rest is born of our experiences (nurture). Things that increase happiness include: strong ties to family and friends. Charitable actions. Here's one of Miss Gokey's favorite quotables, verified in...well, blue and yellow text: EXPERIENCES MAKE US HAPPIER THAN POSSESSIONS DO. 

Miss Gokey always uses this as an excuse to take a trip instead of buying furniture, and I totally agree. Finally, older people tend to be more satisfied with their lives than younger people. 

Despite all of these happy facts, the brain, says Nat Geo, has a definite negativity bias. This is apparently evolutionary. We still feel a primal need to protect our family from a looming woolly mammoth. 

The booklet does go into love, but mostly lists the chemicals and brain regions it affects. Nothing good for your VD reading. So, that, over the course of several weeks, has been your brain. Enjoy it while you can, before a zombie comes to make it her/his lunch. 

I have a load of laundry to finish and new episode of Supernatural to enjoy. Although there is a piece of mail I keep waiting for that refuses to arrive (I called to check this afternoon, and it's going to be another two weeks yet), I did get something good in the mail today. If you don't know what it is, you just haven't been paying attention. 

Hopefully my Granny got something good in the mail today, too, from me. Today is her birthday, may it be a fun, productive, and memorable one filled with the kind of joy that lights up both sides of the brain. 

Today is the Day!!!

It's the first day of the rest of your life.
It is the day to attempt to achieve something worthwhile.
Today is the day to move past your past.
Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, so get on your way!

But none of that is important considering what today REALLY is...

It's the day Shiloh's 2nd album, Mrs., is released!
(Their website is still linked to their first album. I'll link their label later on.)
It's not Shiloh, but there's also this, which is at least a part of Shiloh, and here you can hear a bunch of b-sides from Mrs.

You may not all have been waiting for it, but I have.

To celebrate, I decided to go to a real, live record store. There is one in Vegas. Miss Gokey told me where it is: on Sahara and Arville. It's called Zia Records, and it's been in town for about five years, according to the blonde cashier. In my own defense, I moved away from that part of town about six years ago, so...

Oh, wait. There's also one on Flamingo and Eastern, and that one's been there longer. Oops. There are also two in Tuscon and three in Phoenix. Zia is therefore described, in my opinion, as a regional chain. It's a comfortable chain, anyway: loads of vinyl, CDs and movies, containing most, but not all, of exactly what you want. I spent my time there wandering around saying to myself, "I wonder if they have..." and my searches were successful about 80% of the time. So. If you're in the area and in need of a physical media fix, Zia Records is your store.

It was a good time to visit a record shop, considering that just last week, Carl Azuz of CNN Student News was talking about how digital media has overtaken physical media in various ways. I'll discuss that more soon, when I review a bunch of Netflix films I've been watching on weekends. In the meantime...

Although I'm not sure what happens with Mrs. today (there's the link to the label), and far be it from me to tell you what kind of music you like, if you have ever had a cousin, or a broken heart, or if you've ever awakened wondering how you got where you are, Shiloh's music is for you.

If you think it's not, then it's a good thing Carl Azuz informs us that Tuesday is the day when most new media is released, so hopefully you find something out there in this wide, bright world that makes your toes tap today.

Manic Panic!

The title of this post comes from a bodacious and obnoxious hair dye that used to sell in the 1980s.
It has to do with the first celebration on which I will make just a brief social commentary: New Year's Eve in Times Square last night (was that LAST night? Yeesh!). No, I wasn't there. I was snug in a cozy house in Weidman, MI watching the spectacle unfold on national television.

I have never been a fan of Carson Daly (in fact, I'm not even sure that's how you spell it), but I now feel a certain connection with him, or a kind of affection, born from the fact that as soon as we turned on the TV at 11:30, there he was looking and sounding terrified as he held on for dear life to some metal contraption high up in the air. He was saying stuff, but it was hard to concentrate on what he was saying because he was also talking so much about how scary it was to be that high up in the air and how he couldn't wait to be back down on the ground.

Once he was back on the ground, the TV host rambled on about how nice it was to be on the ground instead of in the air. He RIPPED the thing off of his head that whichever pretty quasi-celebrity he'd interviewed had put there, and then his eyes locked in to the teleprompter and he read like a robot. I hope he gets some comp time, or free medication, for his trouble, and I will hereafter view him as a human instead of a symbol of the decadence of American society. I think. Maybe.

I haven't finished reading I Am Number Four yet. I'm about 60% through. There is this totally disgusting puppy-love relationship between two of the fifteen-year-old protagonists and I'm all like, "eew! Gag me with a spoon!" The author, however, again describes feelings of panic in vivid detail, just like Carson Daly did. So. Although this book is clearly geared much more for age 10 than for age 35, there is still something relatable and appreciate-able about it.

Something else happened last night, as well. Shiloh took part in a New Year's Eve show. Despite the world not having ended on the 21st, the Doomsday Dashboard is still up and running (pandemic is trending in 1st place at the time of writing. A close second? Surprise! Economic collapse). I am happy that none of these disasters will prevent us from enjoying the timely record release of Shiloh's 2nd album on February 5th.

In other news, the Northwest Indiana Times reports that New Year's Resolutions are better if you post them publicly, so let this be my public announcement of my official 2013 resolution to be...more balanced.

There you have it. Do you have a resolution, or do you resolve not to make resolutions?

So close you can almost taste it...

...or so it would seem, what with my closest teaching neighbor constantly blathering about the dead bird that he soon intends to eat!

I'm just gonna say it once, because it's true, and then I'll drop it for the duration of the world's existence:

I am supposed to be in Peru right now, but I am not.

Lucky for us, Peru is still populated with tourists, and you can read about my friend's adventures there here, where she compare/contrasts independent and group travel. I have a preferred side of that fence, and I am hoping that by the end of her trip, she will be converted completely to my side. Let's keep tabs on her movements in Latin America.

Two more notes before we get down to business, both dealing with your Greater Chicagoland media. Please join me in impatient anticipation of Shiloh's new album by perusing this lite blurb in the Chicago Reader dealing with the record release which we will never get to experience due to pandemic/cataclysm/megaquake/polar reversal. Please ignore the bit about the puppets, and go to the Empty Bottle because I myself cannot, seeing as I have to teach the very next day in North Las Vegas.

And then, from our friends at the NWI Times via my dad:

Sometime over Fall Break, while riding through the corn fields having a fabulous time, I think I heard this song, which may be content-blocked for copyright reasons when you click on it, on a radio station that my clever friends tell their 10-year-old is Radio Disney.

Immediately, I knew that I would watch Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. And take notes. Here's the plot synopsis in case you forgot what an awesome year 1985 actually was.

(A saxophone will come in handy after nuclear annihilation.)

Max (12-year-old Mel Gibson with luxurious hair) wanders into Bartertown to retrieve his stolen car and makes a bad deal with Queen Tina Turner. At the last moment, he refuses to kill his opponent in the Thunderdome and is sentenced to gulag (ohhh, the 80s!). Halfway there, his horse collapses and is swallowed in a sandstorm, at which point he is rescued by his helper monkey.

He eventually collapses but is once again rescued, this time by a mysterious stranger who turns out to represent some happy people who live in the Narrows at Zion (though the movie was actually filmed in Australia). This canyon is filled with horribly noisy children and others who all believe that Max is their messiah. He handily destroys their worldview.

He punches a woman in the face and for some reason isn't immediately killed.

Of course she runs away anyway and a cohort of happies ends up back in Bartertown. They kidnap Bartertown's brain-person and the inevitable showdown in the middle of the desert ensues.

The good guys win, but Max ends up wandering around in the desert, and whose baby is that?

There you have it. You may now skip watching it, and you may thank me now or later. However, I recommend that you review it because Tina Turner will always be hott. Of course, I was looking forward to the appearance of Grace Jones at the end of the movie, but apparently I was confused, as she never showed up. I don't think I've ever seen Conan the Destroyer, nor do I think I ever want to, so I don't know what kind of short-circuit happened in my brain on that one. :/

This has been a movie review.

After I review the Last Thanksgiving Ever coming up before week's end, it will be time to turn my attention once again to young adult fiction.

This weekend is historically the busiest travel weekend in America. Be safe out there: make sure your apocalypse doesn't happen sooner than it has to.

Chars

Far be it from me to steal thunder from Don Belt and Jonas Bendiksen's article in National Geographic, but that's what I'm about to do. While searching in vain for some writing-prompt-fodder, I happened upon their story and my jaw dropped.

It's about...

Bangladesh.

I sent the article to the literacy specialist to have her figure out the FK/Lexile/whatever-we're-calling-it-these-days, but the end of the population unit passed before I received any feedback. Therefore, instead of having my students read and mark it for themselves, I verbally paraphrased/summarized it for them, and they were...quiet. I might even say rapt. A teacher's genuine amazement can sometimes do that to children.

Here's a summary of the summary I told the kids, generously peppered with large quoted chunks from the story.

The population of Bangladesh continues to grow, but "climate change (if you believe that sort of thing)" is causing the level of the ocean to eat the coastline. In the meantime, the country's three main rivers are constantly flooding, so, in an

ADAPT OR DIE

mentality, "hundreds of thousands" of people have become char dwellers. A char is a temporary island in the middle of a river. The river floods, and an island (char) appears. When the river floods again, the island disappears and another one pops up downstream. So...all of the people who live on char 1 pack up and haul  themselves to char 2. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Here's a quote:
"Ibrahim Khalilullah has lost track of how many times he's moved. 'Thirty? Forty?' he asks. 'Does it matter?' Actually those figures might be a bit low, as he estimates he's moved about once a year his whole life, and he's now over 60. Somehow, between all that moving, he and his wife raised seven children who 'never missed a meal,' he says proudly."
Abe's house is made of sections that can be disassembled and rebuilt in mere hours, and he always keeps the suitcases and legal documents within arms' reach.

He says: "We're all under pressure, but there's really no point to worry. This is our only option, to move from place to place to place. We farm this land for as long as we can, and then the river washes it away. No matter how much we worry, the ending is always the same."

Other news from Bangladesh: they have implemented a fairly successful grassroots family-planning program, and they have an intentional brain-drain because their main goal is to combat overpopulation by getting people out. The story ends when Bangladesh is compared to a little boy who fell asleep on a median in crazy urban traffic there.

Adapt or die.

This painfully heartwarming and inspirational tale of...well, real-life perennial disaster, can be found here.

In the meantime, since it may be my last chance ever to help my electors choose a president, I figured I would go and vote tonight. Here's proof:

Dear society, 

Take that. 
Love, 

One of the kids who falls asleep on medians. 

Drop, Cover and Hold On!

This post is brought to you by the number, "3."

My #3 goal for the day was, "compose a brilliant blog post." But instead, I forgot to write down the school district's definition of an earthquake and exact steps for conducting an earthquake/evacuation. So, what you read is what you get. I've acquitted myself from being brilliant.

That's right, kids! Today was the day of the Great Nevada Shakeout. The website linked here makes it a thing, and it is, but at the middle-school level it's really nothing more than a duck-and-cover followed by a fire evacuation. I say "fire evacuation" instead of "fire drill" because while making high-pitched whining noises to Miss Gokey about it, she reminded me that my middle school's regular old fire drills, because they entail walking 1/4 mile and gathering on the athletic field, are actually evacuation drills.

Earthquake drill!? But WHY, Ms. H, WHY???
Well, you see, here in Southern Nevada we live on top of a hairy network of tiny normal faults. (Incidentally, we also live on top of 1/6 of the Old Spanish Trail, but that's besides the point.) While not as beautiful or interesting as strike-slip faults like the super-destructive San Andreas, the normal faults have made Nevada #3 in the nation for the number of large earthquakes, according to the Nevada Seismological Laboratory.

Oh, San Andreas...
The worst thing about the San Andreas is that it's not my fault. Heheh.
Speaking of, this band I am connected to by one tenuous little drop of blood JUST TODAY posted a link on soundcloud.com to a song they wrote called, "It's Not My Fault." Learn it. Love it. BUY it (when you can). Oh, San Andreas...(and, ok, that there may have been the stroke of brilliance I was going for.)

Whilst a wav file played over the P.A. (hard to hear above my 38 shuffling advisory students), we all crouched down so that our heads were lower than the tables/desks for sixty seconds. Then the wav file announced, "this drill is now over," and we headed out to the athletic fields.

The burning question that was on all students' minds as we walked to the fields: In the event that an earthquake occurs and the ground is shaking beneath us, why would we leave the building and go strolling around on the shaking ground!? Valid point, tweenage brains, valid point. Answer: we assume that the building is going to fall apart, and that outside will thus be safer. 

We may in fact have had a chance of passing the drill...if the gates to the athletic fields hadn't been locked. Let's be honest, though, in real life...

Well, in real life during an earthquake, unless it's huge and large pieces of furniture are flying, the students pretty much just stay in their seats and their eyes get wide until it's over. The teacher (me) puts out their (my) hands in a surfing motion and sort of sways along. I've never experienced an earthquake in Nevada. One happened, but I was oblivious to it. Come to think of it, I was oblivious to the one in Xela, as well, until the students kind of all looked at each other and one of them whimpered. As the students' eyes got wider and wider, the shaking got more vigorous and I was reduced to the surfing stance.

In real life you don't get to participate in a meeting to let you know that there is going to be a "shakeout," so. I forgive the athletic fields for being locked. What's an athletic field to do?

Earthquakes are currently trending at 3% on the Doomsday Dashboard.

I encourage all Nevadans to check out the Seismological Laboratory website for a complete guide to your earthquake preparation. For the rest of you, even the New Yorkers (heheh), I take the liberty of offering you this one little vital piece of info for your kits, which I ripped off from the Seismo Lab. Enjoy!

My Sweet Sweltering Mojave!

It's not Thursday. It's not even Tuesday. Via apathy, distraction, and a brief love affair with German movies, I managed to skip three whole blog posts, even though I swore while leaving Krista's house four days ago that I would attempt to backdate two that very afternoon.

I'm hoping that the magic of the internet will render it impossible for you to REALLY know when this post is being composed. Watch for similar deceptions after the apocalypse!

Speaking of...you may be aware that the Maya calendar ends on 12/21. Coincidentally, this is also the date that my teaching week ends before winter break. Which means that I'll be spending the apocalypse in Vegas. Thus this post's title. As I commuted home this afternoon, the temperature reader in my Subaru reported an outside temp of 102. Weather.com reports that my car exaggerated by 4 degrees. But weather.com has a vested interest in making people feel good. My Subaru does not.

Even if I were spending it in Indiana, however, I would still be warm. The first time I saw the little gadgets I'm posting about, I scoffed at them thinking, "as long as I have a copy of City Life and a baggie full of dryer lint, I can start a fire." And that's true. However, after seeing it work just one time during a trip to Great Basin, I was converted. The firestarter is a much more efficient tool for making and sustaining the force that gives life back to frozen appendages and makes marshmallows toasty, delicious, and possibly carcinogenic.

Here's the process:
1. Buy a fundraising candle from your favorite schoolchild and dig your melon baller out.

2. Fill the cups of a used cardboard egg carton with dryer lint you have previously harvested.

3. Set some water to heat on the stove while you attack the fundraising candle with the melon baller.

4. Pull a tin can from the trash (Vegas) or recycle bin (everywhere else) and get ready to float it in the warming water double-boiler style. (I took the liberty of hyperlinking "double boiler," because I get frustrated when tasks call for materials or ingredients and I have no idea what they are.)

5. Throw the candle shavings into the tin can.

6. Put your heat-resistant glove on and get to melting the wax.

7. Drizzle the melted wax over the lint in the egg carton.

8. Repeat the entire process several times until the wax just holds the lint together, ensuring it won't blow away if it is windy on the mountaintop. *ahem* I mean...if it is windy on the long and winding road you take to wherever it is that you will choose to go on 12/22.

Remember: your new preparedness toys may prove to be fairly useless if you don't take them for a test run. It is also still in the low 100s, so you'll want to do your test run in a place where nights are nice and chilly and you can wear sweaters and hoodies and possibly wool socks and funny hats.

*Flash forward: mountaintop/long, windy road...

When you arrive to the destination where you will build your fire, rip one of the cardboard cups off of the egg carton and position it neatly under your firewood. Because Miss Gokey made a carton full of firestarters in a demonstration lesson, perfectly integrating the Components of an Effective Lesson in an I-do-we-do-you-do scenario, we had plenty of firestarters and I used three of them along with a trusty Bic (because we've come to the time of our last year ever when it is prudent to conserve our magnesium, having practiced and verified that we can indeed use it) to come up with this:

while we enjoyed this:

(them's some Doritos @ 8,000 ft!)

and gazed upon this:

So, although the impending end of the world seems all-bad, preparing for it doesn't have to be. Stay toasty warm (or cool, if, like me, you're sitting on a desert patio tonight) out there, loyal readers!

A Passing Fad?

This post starts by making two points:

1. There are a host of schemes out there that seek to separate you from your money, and 

2. If that person you admire and follow on twitter doesn't answer the questions that you tweet to him or her, you probably shouldn't specifically promote that person on your blog. 

I'll address item 2 first. 

So I follow this one guy on twitter. I think when I was setting up my account, I looked for "who to follow," typed in something bland and inoffensive like "urban geography," and I've been following him ever since. Social media in general, and this guy in particular, has led me to a host of instructional materials that I have been able to adapt for my students' use. I strongly encourage my teacher-readers to look for experts in their subject-matter fields to follow. 

Resting on the laurels of my recent and triumphant visit to the Zombie Apocalypse Store, I took a few days off from blogging and was beginning to fear that I wouldn't find any more fodder. Then, an amazing concept popped into my twitter feed courtesy of my silent and reluctant mentor. It's a seminal urban renewal project for the city of Detroit.

Now, moving on to point 1: my cousin Ryan's band Shiloh recently used an internet site called kickstarter to plead for money to make a new album. The band was successfully able to purchase some studio time to work on their new project. A site similar to kickstarter is indiegogo. These funding platforms will have you donating $1 to 27 different, really-great projects in no time, although personally, when I need money, I use Donors Choose.

Z World Detroit is a project asking for funding on indiegogo.

As you can see, the concept is to take advantage of Detroit's urban rot to make a zombie-themed amusement experience where a group of friends go overnight into the gamescape and get chased by zombies. If they get caught, they become zombies themselves and chase other park-goers.

It's brilliant.

But as you can see from the numbers, it's very ambitious and not getting funded, which I completely understand. Not only does the project pander to the niche market of Zombie Apocalypse enthusiasts, it targets a subset of that market: Zombie Apocalypse enthusiasts who are athletic enough to want to run around overnight with their friends, practicing their skills and such. I also doubt the staying power of the Zombie Apocalypse theme. I think that it will eventually play itself out. However! If this project already existed, fully operational, I totally would have tried to get some donors on my favorite funding platform to send my former 8th grade Explorations students to Z World Detroit.

What a creative way to incorporate the Apocalypse to fill a real need - the need to transform and renew blighted cities.