Stan Taylor

Newsweek just released its list of the top 100 U.S. high schools, and it’s been all over the local news that two Austin area schools, Westlake HS and Westwood HS, made the list.
There is a strong consensus among Austinites that these are both very good schools, but I have no idea how they stack up nationally.
I am generally very skeptical of such lists–or at least of their value–but Ed Felten goes a step further: he questions the methodology used to compile the list.

We have a dewberry patch not far from the house (sorry, I can’t reveal its exact location), and today we had our first picking of the season. We had a very wet winter, but we haven’t had hardly any rain the last month or so (until today), so the berries are quite small compared to last year.
Hannah, Samuel and I picked for maybe 20 minutes and got 3-4 cups, which we ate tonight with some fresh strawberries and a little sugar (and a little Bailey’s for Katie and me). It was a nice dessert for our mother’s day dinner.
Last year, I must have made six or seven big cobblers, but not so this year, unless today’s rain showers make the next round of ripening berries much larger than the ones we picked today–which I doubt.

I just finished listening to the audio edition of Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride. It certainly wasn’t my typical read. I don’t think I would have ever picked up the print edition of the book, and if I had, I may not have finished it. But since I was a captive audience in traffic, I stuck it out and I’m really glad that I did. I would recommend this book.

On of Katie’s wealthy foreign college students told her that he went to buy a car in Austin–no financing needed–and the dealer would not sell it to him without a credit check. Problem is, this foreign student does not have a social security number, which is necessary for the credit check. The student told Katie he was arranging to give the dealer the SSN of some relative who lives in the U.S.
Any idea why the dealer insists on running a credit check if the buyer isn’t applying for, uh, credit?

Make Easter bunny ears from items found around the house–in this case, from items found in the bathroom cabinet (from the photo archives, Easter, 2003):

I’m putting this photo in the file with the naked bathtub photos, to show to the boyfriend when she’s a teenager!

This is awesome:

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.
A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.
Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University, said the discovery appears to spell the end of 666 as the devil’s prime number.
“This is a very nice piece to find,” Dr. Aitken said. “Scholars have argued for a long time over this, and it now seems that 616 was the original number of the beast.”

I would like to offer a sincere, heart-felt apology to all those people who have recently offered me an innocuous ‘Hi. How you doing?’, expecting an equally innocuous ‘Fine, and you?’, but who, instead, received a 10 minute exhortation on my recent weight loss and exercise successes (currently 30 pounds, and running 6-10 miles 3 times per week, respectively). I’m afraid I’ve become an even more insufferable boor than previously.
I’m understandably excited about my diet and exercise, but I realize that you may not share my enthusiasm–or no longer share it, having heard about it day after day. Again, I apologize; I’ll try to do better.

When he was a child, Ron Hudson’s family ran a store and restaurant along a busy highway in North Carolina. In his blog, Ron reminisces about the accidents and deaths that he and his family members witnessed on the highway in their little town. Sounds like it was an odd family bonding experience.

In a recent article in the Austin Chronicle, Michael Ventura predicts the impact that rising oil prices will have on American society and America’s relations with other countries. Ventura’s predictions for changes in American society are as controversial as James Howard Kunstler’s, but I think Ventura’s view of how our international relations will change is right on target:

Gas prices can only go up. Oil production is at or near peak capacity. The U.S. must compete for oil with China, the fastest-growing colossus in history. But the U.S. also must borrow $2 billion a day to remain solvent, nearly half of that from China and her neighbors, while they supply most of our manufacturing (“Benson’s Economic and Market Trends,” quoted in Asia Times Online) – so we have no cards to play with China, even militarily. (You can’t war with the bankers who finance your army and the factories that supply your stores.) China now determines oil demand, and the U.S. has no long-term way to influence prices.
…
There’s only one section of our economy that has [the] kind of money [to invest heavily in mass transit and other infrastructure changes]: the military budget. The U.S. now spends more on its military than all other nations combined. A sane transit to a post-automobile America will require a massive shift from military to infrastructure spending. That shift would be supported by our bankers in China and Europe (that is, they would continue to finance our debt) because it’s in their interests that we regain economic viability. What’s not in their interests is that we remain a military superpower.

Ventura recognizes that China (and, to a lesser degree, Japan, South Korea and the larger European countries) hold our future in their hands. So far, it’s been in their best interest to finance our over-extended lifestyle: we fuel their economic growth as the biggest market for their goods. But if something beyond the lenders’ control affects America’s ability to buy their goods–say a serious U.S. economic downturn caused by high oil prices–then at some point, it may no longer be worth their while to continue to finance our debt. At that point, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
I’m convinced that it will happen sometime. The current situation is just not sustainable indefinitely. It’s just a matter of when, how quickly and how severely it reduces our American lifestyles.

The other day, Fred Clark wrote an insightful entry about religious persecution. The thesis of Fred’s post was:

When protected, privileged and pampered American Christians claim to be facing persecution they spit on the wounds of their brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world and in history who have known firsthand what religious persecution really is. They mock not only their fellow Christians in this great cloud of witnesses, but also those of other faiths who have suffered or are, now, today, suffering genuine persecution.

I wanted to blog about Fred’s post, but I really didn’t have anything to add to it. But today, my cousin sent me the following email (redacted for length, emphasis added), and it immediately reminded me of Fred’s post:

DID YOU KNOW? As you walk up the steps to the building which houses the U.S. Supreme Court you can see near the top of the building a row of the world’s law givers and each one is facing one in the middle who is facing forward with a full frontal view: it is Moses and he is holding the Ten Commandments!
DID YOU KNOW? As you enter the Supreme Court courtroom, the two huge oak doors have the Ten Commandments engraved on each lower portion of each door.
DID YOU KNOW? As you sit inside the courtroom, you can see the wall, right above where the Supreme Court judges sit, a display of the Ten Commandments!
DID YOU KNOW? There are Bible verses etched in stone all over the Federal Buildings and Monuments in Washington, D.C.
…
How, then, have we gotten to the point that everything we have done for 220 years in this country is now suddenly wrong and unconstitutional?
…
I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn’t. Now it is your turn… It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, it is very hard to understand why there is such a mess about having the Ten Commandments on display or “In God We Trust” on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don’t we just tell the other 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!!
If you agree, pass this on.

Talk about tyranny of the persecuted (supposed) majority!
UPDATE: As usual, Snopes.com has a good debunking of the email that my cousin sent.