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May 29, 2008

Intelligent Design Revealed and Vindicated

Let me lay out the facts and then you can decide.

Two weeks ago my wife misplaced her reading glasses. After days of looking and not finding, with my wife in tears, I systematically tore the house apart. i wont say i was close to tears myself but I was getting there. Then, in a place we had both searched time after time i found a little set of “Granny Glasses”. They are half glasses that usually just sit on her nose and try to slide right off, but, they suffice. Still she was so miserable that I made her an appointment for new glasses. Unfortunately the appointment was two weeks away. I kept my eyes open thinking that at any moment we would find the old glasses.

i made the old jokes about, ” no doubt as soon as we get the new ones we will find the old ones”.

Attention! Punch line coming!

Today we went in for the appointment, got the evaluation and ordered the new, 96 dollars worth of new, glasses.

We walked into the house, my wife put down her purse by the foot of the couch and five minutes later, bending to pick up the said purse cried “Oh! there are the glasses”. and so they were, behind a cushion on the couch. Prediction vindicated but funny eh?

We now had two pair of glasses and one on order. ” if you didn’t believe in intelligent design before please try to explain all that as accidental humor. Tell me someone isn’t toying with us. You think this stuff just happens?

Oh Yeah?

Well then explain this one as happenstance and pure coincidence. I left the house for one hour. In fact I just came back. When I walked in the door I saw my wife was sitting in her recliner weeping piteously. Glasslessly. In that one hour she had lost both set of glasses.

As for me and grandpa, we believe!

And now i am going to go bang my head against some convenient wall and listen for distant stifled laughter.

Time now passes

Morning dawns.

And the lost and re-lost glasses are back. She knows not how.

An on going saga of some sort of design.

Someone’s obviously plotting this stuff. Whether or not society has the guts to admit it and teach it in school is beside the point. We need to have the courage to discard outdated science and face the facts, courageously looking the truth squarely in the eye. Things can’t get this spectacularly messed up in some sort of evolutionary accident. That would be like explaining the astonishing structure of the eye by postulating incremental chance mutation. Personally, I favor blaming some sort of committee work. I don’t know exactly why but it has the feel of that sort of messed up almost adolescent (humorous) planning that I have come to know on all those school committees I’ve been on. Who knows how bad those committees could have confused things for us if they got to watch it on some sort of cosmic big screen, alternately slapping their knee’s and howling with glee while whooping for further funny changes. i wouldn’t be surprised to find that there are cosmic storyboards.

I’m just say’in “think about it”, give it a chance. It makes perfect sense. We have to be brave enough to discard science and admit the truth when we sense it.

Well, its several days later. We finally, yesterday got the new glasses. in fact i was just searching the house looking for them. as my wife just said, “It’s upsetting”. Yes, it is.

ha ha…. found them

day later lost again

See? we are being toyed with. I’ll be quoting Omar before long

May 18, 2008

doomed

Laying aside the fact that a college class couldn’t figure out if 215,000 was ten percent of four million (it was, as they said in four classes, a little early in the day for that kind of deep stuff) I think our doom is come upon us when they ask:

“was president Buchannan’s last name Pierce?”

“What is an economic institution”

and my favorite,

“Is lenient bad”

I got a million of em, a million.

ooh, oh. I’m going to repeat one I gave earlier cause it fits so well here.

I was packing up and getting out of class… I think… when a guy said to a girl, “Is that a new tatoo?” she said “what?”. They repeated this three times until she slowly said, “New? New…. N E W?” i suspect a vocabulary lack of this magnitude might hinder deep learning.

May 01, 2008

Moby Dick

no wait, … Its Omoo

Today, Thursday, i was teaching a unit on the development of an American culture. As we discussed Melville I told the class that when they turned 45 and noticed that their brains were no longer working they would take up crossword puzzles to try to kick start the reluctant brain cells. At some point I said they would open the L.A. Times Crosswords and see ” Book by Melville.” Do not hesitate, I advised. Just write Omoo. Puzzle makers love it for the triple vowels. In fact three times in my 38 years of teaching this unit I have gone home after saying that, opened the Times Calendar section, turned to the crossword section by the “funnies” and found exactly that. I said i was going to hope real hard and go home today and look, hoping against hope.

Eleven down,

MELVILLE ADVENTURE.

Yep,

Its Omoo.

I told them that they would thank me some day and realize that history was indeed a valuable study.

Exonerated!

now imagine the passage of time: Thus:

And one day later

Whee !

Doing crosswords, right now, Friday, and its

18 Down

Novel whose name means Island Wanderer.

Yep

Omoo again!

Generous of fate eh?