Grumpy’s blog

Like many people, I've heard the rumors of a pregnancy pact among high school girls in Gloucester, Massachusetts. I certainly hope that we've all heard by now that it was not true. If you haven't read how the whole mess got started, Poyntner has an excellent article about it.

The United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world’s longest life expectancy. It doesn’t even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Ezzati’s finding is unsettling on its face, but scholars find further cause for concern in the pattern of health disparities. Poor health is not distributed evenly across the population, but concentrated among the disadvantaged.

I'm not completely finished reading this article yet, but what I've read so far is interesting and seems to reflect what I see going on around me in rural Missouri. Click on the link above if you would like to read the article too.

Actually, I'm supposed to be revising a very, very dry paper about poetry, theology, and Renaissance popular culture.

Bleh.

I'm a little behind getting pictures from this spring loaded onto my computer.

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This is the pasture in front of the house during the spring burn. Now it's really green, mostly in weeds. I think the preferred term is "native grasses."

Today was the last day of school where I teach.

Here I sit, in my classroom. The chairs are up on tables. CNN is droning softly in the corner, and I’m slowly grading my way through finals. Grades are due by Tuesday of next week, so I have a little time.

I am really tired.

Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can.

Read the article here

... mass man is the man who has no transcendent purpose in life, who lives in an eternal present moment which he wants to make pleasurable in a gross and sensual way, who thinks that ever-increasing consumption is the end of life, who goes from distraction to distraction, who is prey to absurd fashions, who never thinks deeply and who, above all, has a venomous dislike of any other way of living but his own, which he instinctively feels as a reproach. He will not recognize his betters; he is perfectly satisfied to be as he is.

Read the article here.

I'm making progress. I'll be working on it again tonight too.

I wish I knew what it was about.

Why do you think it is some people don't get along with you?

They're jealous, the peasants.

I'm supposed to be writing a degree paper this semester.

I just found out that it's going to be about swearing in Donne's works.

I have no instructions on any requirements for the paper.

A draft is due next Tuesday.

After weeks of diligent practice, the wife and kids were all set for the yearly Easter cantata at church. Only one of them made it. The wife and the younger kid came down with respiratory infections on Saturday and had to stay home. There's Grandma, bringing the older kid home now.