This is genius

A Note to Would-Be Room-Moms

We truly appreciate all you do to make our kids' experiences in school as good as they can be, but if you feel compelled to comb my child's hair on picture day, which is perfectly understandable, try to use a clean comb. We'd rather you take maybe 10 seconds to rinse out the comb, or possibly use a fresh one, than to spend a good part of Saturday morning cleaning lice out of our daughter's hair. Luckily, we caught it before any real damage was done and there appear to be none left in her hair now.

The Pumpkin Show

Last Friday was a BIG day! We joined Mama' and Papa' at the 102nd Circleville Pumpkin Show. For those not familiar it's an annual festival in the city of Circleville to celebrate the fall season, and draws visitors from around the area as well as out of state, and supposedly even foreign countries. Calling it a pumpkin show seems to be something of a misnomer since it's really more of a giant festival, or as Cindy opined a Catholic festival on steroids. There were all sorts of rides and games, as you can imagine, plus the usual assortment of fair fare including many varieties of deep fried batter.

Sam and Abby had a grand time seeing all the pumpkins, playing various games, watching a pet parade, and even got to ride a camel! For the most part we had a good time too, though we weren't prepared for either the expenses involved (which in hindsight was bad planning on our part), nor for the size of the crowds. Interestingly the carneys working there said that the crowds were smaller than usual. Go figure.

Incidentally the carneys working the game were very nice and even helped Sam and Abby win a couple prizes.

Perhaps the highlight of the show for Cindy and me was the band playing on the center stage. They appeared to be Jr. High kids but they were covering ZZ Top, The Georgia Satellites, Ozzy Osbourne, and others and doing a pretty credible job. Not entirely what we were expecting but pretty cool.

Bribery Update

Baylor rescinded their program because of the appearance of impropriety. OK.....

Bribery

In general I'm not a fan of ranking systems in the sense that they often times are arbitrary and infused with others sense of what's important. So in college football you often find teams that score a lot of points ranked higher despite often giving up a lot of points, or conversely an SEC team ranked higher than teams with similar records simply because they are in the SEC. Generally though within sports these things can work themselves out. The overranked team will eventually play against a better team (and as Buckeye fan I know about that, though I contend the loss to Florida had more to do with us than them).

For academics no such direct competition exists though schools do compete with one another for better students, faculty and whatever. And often that competition rests on how a school is perceived and evaluated by publications like U.S. News. These rankings are greatly affected by things like spending on instruction, admittance rates, and quality of incoming student. One aspect that is often left out is whether the institution actually educates its students while their in college, or whether they are more/less a finishing school. That said rankings do have some value in that we know that certain institutions are likely better than others, and rankings provide a crude way of assessing those differences.

One would like to assume that institutions are acting in a manner in keeping with their mission and values and not trying to game the system to get better rankings. Such an assumption is obviously foolhardy, but still the audacity of what Baylor is doing is astounding. Baylor is bribing it's freshman class to retake the SAT in order to improve the test scores of it's freshman class, and thus enhance Baylor's reputation. Yikes!

Anniversary and Other Items

Well, it's the middle of October and just a few days before our Anniversary. It's hard for me to conceive that we've been married 11 years, or more precisely that Cindy has put up with me for 11 years, but as I tell her I have much better taste than she does--just look at who we married.

Abby's soccer season is drawing to a close, but last week she showed signs of finally "getting it". She played her best game yet and was instrumental in stopping at least 3 scoring chances for the other team and setting her team up for their first score. She won't be confused for Mia Hamm anytime soon, but she showed definite improvement over her first few games. With 2 games remaining in the fall season I'm hopeful that she'll get her first goal. But regardless she seems to be having more fun now, which is the intent after all.

We got her first report card and for the most part were fairly pleased. She got high marks in virtually everything, though we were a bit surprised that she didn't do a bit better in math. I suspect it may be that she simply got bored when they were testing, which was something of an issue last year. In fact we found ourselves in the very odd, and frankly ludicrous, position of lecturing a kindergartner on the importance of giving her best effort on tests, but that's a slew of other issues.

Sam is doing well and is liking pre-school for the most part. Evidently, there comes a point in the day when he's had enough of it and lies down by himself on a rug and does his own thing while the class is going on. I'm not sure what's up with that, but admittedly there are times during meetings where that seems like a tempting idea.

Last Friday Cindy and Sam spent the whole day at the zoo and had a blast. And then Cindy, Abby, and Sam went again on Sunday while I got some stuff done at home. Needless to say a grand time was had by all, well by them at least.

A few random thougts:

• I know I'm not hip, but every now and then I come across posts on other blogs like this that remind me of my lack of hippness. Incidentally, the author (Kevin Carey) and I pretty much had the same life for a year in grad school. I'm not sure I've met a better writer than him.
  
• Lately I've been into southern rock and country rock bands, and recently discovered the Drive by Truckers.
• Ringo Starr announced that he won't be acccepting fan mail after October 20. Is this really an issue?
• I looked at the kid's college funds and my retirement fund and laughed to keep from crying. Good thing time is on our side.
• I decided to kill the other blog since I hadn't added anything to it in 5 weeks. I may resurrect it some other time.