Steven Harper's Blog, page 36

End of Year Wind-Down--and Up

This coming week is the last one for seniors. They have class on Monday and Tuesday, then exams and Wednesday and Thursday.  However, the exams are optional and "hold harmless," to boot. This means that the exam will only count if it helps the semester grade. If it would hurt the semester grade, the exam is ignored.  Additionally, the district is again allowing students the option of taking a pass/fail grade instead of a letter grade.

Not surprisingly, only a handful of my seniors intend to take the final.  I don't blame them.  If I had an A in a class, why go through the stress and work of taking the final when it won't do anything?  Only the failing and D students can really benefit from the exam, and most of my D students are planning to take the pass/fail grade.  So my exam schedule this year is on the light side.

But every year we do get the flurry of last-minute, hail Mary makeup work.  And this year we have an added wrinkle.

I was unexpectedly out of the building yesterday, an "A" day in which I meet with first, second, and third hours.  As it happens, Monday is the corresponding "B" day, but it's only a half day, so fourth, fifth, and sixth hours are cut in half. This makes things difficult for teachers like me who want to keep their classes together.  So I had the dual problem of what my "A" day students should do while I wasn't there, and how to handle the "B" student half-day.

I hit on a Good Idea.  See, I normally grade late work at a sharp penalty.  (When I don't, students invariably don't do their work on time.)  I had the sub announce to my "A" classes that we were having Amnesty Friday.  Any missing or late work turned in on that day would receive full credit.  Out of fairness (and as a way of keeping everyone together), I'll also be offering Amnesty Monday for my "B" students.  They can work on the missing assignments during class for that ONE day.

A side-effect of this Good Idea is that my inbox for Google Classroom was flooded with alerts that this student or that had turned in missing work.  I spent all afternoon today grading them.  Oi.

Meanwhile, the seniors are gearing up to leave.  For most of them, Tuesday will be their last day!

We're all looking forward to the end of the school year, this year more than any other.

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The Ex Blog

The ex-president's blog isn't doing well. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trumps-blog-isnt-lighting-internet-rcna890The article doesn't mention the most obvious reason why--convenience.

It's easy to check someone's Twitter or Facebook feed when you're already on those platforms. The stuff automatically comes to you. But a web site? You have to 1) remember it exists; and 2) make a deliberate attempt to visit it. The ex's junk doesn't automatically come to you anymore. The ex can't even link his blog to social media because he's been banned from it.

His more rabid followers will check on him from time to time, but as more time passes and he fails to provide them content 24/7, they'll lose interest. Predictable--and for the ex, infuriating. Good.

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Testing. Testing.

Spent all afternoon hunting kidney stones with MRIs and CT scans, and I'm starving! Time for barbecue.
ETA:The tests were scheduled in advance, and weren't part of an emergency room visit, fortunately. But I was in the hospital imaging center for five hours and was starving by the time I got out.
 When I got home, I had email alerting me to an addition to my online patient chart. That was quick! It reports at least seven more stones, all of them smaller than 5mm (the threshold for an operation) and none of them obstructive--or so it says. The little stabs of pain I get a couple-three times a day occasionally say otherwise!

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No Way!

Darwin and I were going to have our bathrooms redone, but have you SEEN the price of materials lately?? We're going to wait until next year.

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Bad Cam

I bought a motion-activated camera from Amazon. This one, to be specific: https://www.amazon.com/Campark-Camera-24MP-Bluetooth-Monitoring-Waterproof/dp/B08QJ86479
It arrived yesterday. Today, I wrote this review of it:
The problems started the moment I unboxed this camera. The little bits of plastic that cover the lenses were difficult to peel away, which I should have taken as a warning.
I opened the instructions and discovered they were clearly written by someone for whom English is a (distant) second language. Instructions were incomplete or utterly impossible to understand due to grammatical errors. I downloaded the app and it was equally horrible. (The app's header, I might add, was in Chinese characters.) I give kudos to anyone who speaks more than one language, but when you're marketing to native English speakers, you should hire a native to write your directions.
The camera also wouldn't connect to the app. In fact, it wouldn't connect to anything. When I called up the camera's menu and told it to connect to WiFi, all it did was display "WiFi password 1234546." The app itself didn't ask for the camera's password. And there was no way to input my WiFi's password into the camera.
When I tried to connect the camera to my phone (and the app) via bluetooth, the app sent me to the privacy settings section of my phone. It wouldn't do anything at all, let alone actually connect to the camera. The camera acted like my phone's bluetooth didn't exist.
Meanwhile, the camera itself wouldn't record video or take photos. I tested it several times. Nothing. Not a single photo, not a second of video.
I returned it. DO NOT BUY this camera!

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Dead Tread

My treadmill wiped out. The belt has become worn along one edge, and it finally created a snag.  The snag caught on some of the machinery and ... rrrrrip!

I searched around online and found a replacement part and a how-to video on replacing it.  The part is $100, which is rather cheaper than a new treadmill, so I hope I can replace it! The new belt should arrive Friday.

Meanwhile, I have no treadmill.  It's purely VR working out for me, I guess.

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Holy Crap! A Movie!

On Sunday, Darwin and I went to an actual, honest-to-Goddess movie!

See, the movie GODZILLA VS. KONG came out, and we both wanted to see it.  (Side note: the title pretty much says it all. The human characters are utterly uninteresting, as are their concerns. The movie is unabashedly about giant CGI monsters fighting each other. If you want more than that, you're at the wrong movie.)  And we realized we've both been vaccinated, so we don't have to worry about catching anything.  So we went!

It was . . . strange being back in a movie theater after more than a year's absence.  We bought our tickets online and arrived to find the crowds were light, and the ticket-checkers were off-duty, so we just walked in, bought concessions, and sat down. In our lovely reclining chairs. With movie popcorn and soda.  It was oddly exciting, after being gone for so long.  And it was great to be out in a public place without having to worry about infection.

Yes, there's a lot to be said about watching movies at home. Easy bathroom breaks, cheap snacks, not having to drive.  But these are eclipsed by the giant movie screen, the anticipation when the theater darkens, the booming surround-sound, and the reaction of the rest of the audience.  It's also easier to concentrate at the theater. No one interrupts the video to ask if you've seen his phone. The cats don't make demands that must be met right this second.  You don't feel compelled to send or answer texts.  It's just the darkness, the audience, and the movie.

And the popcorn.

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The Problem with Jaws

I recently re-read JAWS, by Peter Benchley.  I haven't read it in probably thirty-five years.  I remember that when I was a teenager, the book fascinated me.

As an adult, I found it . . . less fascinating.

(Even though the book came out 47 years ago, I'll post a SPOILER WARNING.)

The book hasn't aged well, though I also found quite a lot of stuff in the book that really should have disqualified it from best-seller status even in 1974, when it first came out.  I came to the conclusion that the book succeeded purely on the merits of its idea, and the actual writing had little or nothing to do with it.

Why?  Well...

The book is supposed to be a thriller, but the pacing is way, way off.  It starts with a bang--the famous scene when the shark devours Christy Watkins. After that, though, the suspense dies off miserably.  Nothing happens for chapter after chapter.  The main story is the bickering between our hero Brody and the town council about whether or not Brody should close the beaches.  It's slow and dull, and could have been cut to a single chapter.  Later, the shark attacks young Alex Kintner, and the book picks up again--and then we slide back into petty town bickering.

When Brody, Quint (the shark catcher), and Matt Hooper (the biologist) finally--FINALLY--get out on the ocean to hunt the shark, Benchley repeatedly builds suspense, then kills it.  The trio encounters the shark, fight it for a while, then goes back home.  This happens THREE TIMES.  The final confrontation between Quint, Brody, and the shark ends up being rushed--and anti-climactic.  Quint has stabbed and shot the shark several times, and it's dying by the time it sinks the boat, you see.  Brody is in the water, The shark is coming toward Brody, jaw open, and it . . . dies.  It sinks on its own and disappears.  Anti-climactic.  Not only that, THE PROTAGONIST DOESN'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM.  Brody does nothing on the shark hunt but ladle chum and watch Quint and Hooper fight the shark.  He's a bystander in his own story.

And then we have the characters.  Boy, oh boy, oh boy.

Brody is, frankly, boring.  He's a sheriff with a wife and . . . that's really it.  He has no hobbies, doesn't read, doesn't spend time with his kids, does nothing around the house, and treats his wife Ellen almost like property.  He's flat and bland, and I really didn't care if he lived or died.

Matt Hooper is similarly dull.  He's the stereotypical good-looking, rich guy. He has a one-time assignation with Ellen, and when they start talking about their sexual fantasies (as a way of flirting), his dialogue becomes cringe-worthy and painful.  So does Ellen's, for that matter.  Benchley doesn't go at all into Hooper's reactions over the affair. Hooper does only two things in the book--he tries to study the shark, and he has an affair with Ellen Brody.  That's basically it.  I couldn't even get a good visual image of him, and I realized it's because Benchley doesn't describe him, except to say he's handsome and has blue eyes.  Meanwhile, Ellen is described several times in lush detail, and Benchley uses the embarrassingly-bad trope of having her stand naked in front of a mirror so he can have an excuse to have her think about everything from her hips to her hair to her nipples.  None of the male characters get similar treatment, I must add.

Side note: the subplot with Ellen's affair falls utterly flat.  Ellen is bored.  Brody is uncaring.  We see no real stakes about their marriage because neither one of them seems to care much about it.  Brody only becomes concerned about Ellen when he suspects she's cheating.  He never thinks about how much he loves her, and he only actually says it to her once, while she's sleeping.  Although Brody does a lot of self-reflection about his motives for hunting the shark, he never once reflects about his own marriage, how the problem might be that he has failed to maintain his relationship with his wife, how he treats her like a housekeeper and nanny rather than a wife and partner.  No, he gets pissed off at Hooper and launches a half-assed investigation to figure out if Hooper and Ellen were together on a particular afternoon.  To top it off, this subplot is never resolved.

Quint, the shark hunter, gets short shrift as well.  We know NOTHING about him, not even whether Quint is his first or his last name.  We don't know why he wants to hunt sharks, why he's so callous about fish and fishing, or why he's so focused on money. (Money is, in fact, the only thing that motivates him in the book.)  The movie makes him the survivor of a terrible navy accident in which his crew mates are devoured by sharks, sending him down the path of shark hunter, but that's nowhere to be seen in the book.

Speaking of Ellen--here we have another flat character. She only exists in the book as Brody's Wife.  She has almost no life outside this. She seems to volunteer at the hospital, but we only see it once, and then only when she ditches work so she can have her fling with Hooper.  She fixes drinks and cooks supper and argues with Brody and picks the kids up from activities.  She's bored a lot (someone needs to tell Pete that bored characters are themselves boring), and she's unhappy with her marriage.  In other words, she's the stereotype of a 70s housewife.

Actually, ALL the women are especially flat.  Pete clearly hasn't MET any women--or he never paid attention to them.  All, and I do mean ALL, the female characters exist solely in the context of their relationships with men.  The entire conflict surrounding Ellen is about her unhappy marriage and her affair with Hooper.  The shark eats Christy Watkins because she goes down to the beach to have sex with her boyfriend.  Two of the town councilors have wives who make brief appearances, and one is described as a wholesome woman who sits at home doing needlepoint in front of the television.  The other is described as so shy that she can't barely bring herself to make a phone call, and when her husband tells her he intends to uproot them and move away, she murmurs, "Whatever you think is best, dear."  The mayor's secretary talks to Brody, and when he fails to ask her about her dating life, she prompts him to do so.  Daisy Wicker, an acquaintance whom Ellen invites to a dinner party, has no personality. Benchley has multiple characters jokingly point this fact out. Ellen tries half-heartedly to fix her up with Hooper, but she turns out to be a lesbian, so he can't date her.  Every female character in this book is there to have a relationship with a man.

I don't know why Benchley bothers to make Brody and Ellen parents, either.  Unlike the movie, the book barely mentions the Brody sons, and the kids mysteriously vanish during important scenes.  Before the dinner party scene, for example, Benchley literally has the boys sitting on their beds in their room waiting to be summoned for supper--and at the party, they're never referred to even once. They are never put into danger (unlike the movie). They have no character development, or even character.  The lack is jarring, and it would have been better if Benchley had made the Brodys childless.

Every character in this book is also corrupt in some way.  Ellen cheats on her husband.  Brody gives up his principles and gives in to the council.  The mayor is in the with mob.  The newspaper editor is a glutton.  The teenaged boys at the beach grind their pelvises into the sand while they watch girls who sometimes deliberately expose themselves to said boys.  Christy Watkins has drunken sex on the beach with a guy she's only known for a day (and sexually active women always need to be punished, while their male partners do not).  Alex Kintner manipulates his mother.  Alex's mother lets him go into the water because she wants some quiet time (and how dare she).  Quint is only interested in hunting the shark for money.  Hooper wants to study the shark for personal benefit, not to help the town, and he sleeps with Ellen.  A family of fat tourists complain to Brody that they drove two hours to Amity and they haven't seen the shark eat anyone.  I know it's a trope that characters in a horror or suspense novel are supposed to be deserving of their fate, but since we don't care about these people, we also don't care when the shark eats one of them.

The book ends where the movie does--with Brody kicking his way toward shore.  There's no reunion with his wife and sons, no final resolution with Ellen about their marriage, nothing.  And why should there be?  Those things are clearly unimportant.

The movie is superior to the novel in every way.  Better character development, better plotting, better suspense.  The books is yet another example of a crappy book somehow making its way onto the best-seller lists.

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The Great Pandemic Weight Loss Campaign Update 2

As of this morning, I've lost 17 pounds.

I celebrated with a breakfast of French toast made with Egg Beaters and low-calorie bread.  Interesting, the toast puffed up in the frying pan, something I've never seen with regular eggs and bread.

The increased exercise continues.  I run or work out in VR six days a week for an hour or even an hour and a half at a time.  My resting heart rate is now 45. My clothes are noticeably looser.

I'm well on track for my first goal, which is lose 20 pounds May 1.  I'm also on track for my second goal, which is to lose 30 pounds (total) by June 1.

Go me!

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Lake Living: the Lady

I did it at last. I hired a cleaning lady.

It was halfway on impulse.  I noticed a listing on our local social media board from a woman who was looking for cleaning work. Two of her clients had passed away, and she had two openings in her schedule.  I decided to call her.  We arranged for an interview.

K--- arrived, had a look around the condo, and gave me her rate to clean it. She charges by the job, not by the hour, which makes sense--she doesn't have to worry about being accused of slowing down to pad out her hours. She said she come by every other week for dusting, sweeping, mopping, cleaning surfaces, and so on.  I found her rates reasonable, and she gave me references to call.

After the interview, I called her references. The first one gave her a glowing reference.  The second lady was . . . well . . . a snob. She told me in a patrician tone that K--- does good work, especially because, the reference said, "I want my floors cleaned on hands and knees, and she does that" and then she said, "I can't give her a perfect reference because she talks, and I don't know if she's concentrating on the work or not when she does that." And I thought, "Hands and knees? What is this, 'Cinderella'?"

"Does she clean the house properly?" I asked.

"She does," the reference replied curtly.  "And she doesn't steal and she's trustworthy. I've had a lot of cleaning women over the years--"

I can see why, I thought.

"--and it's hard to find good ones.  She's a good one. Even if she talks."

I thanked her, hung up, and called K--- to ask her to start that week.

She arrived on the appointed day and whirled through the condo in a tornado of dust cloths and a thunderstorm of cleaning fluids.  Max was home, and she bustled into his room to change the linens, dust, and vacuum.  Later, Max said, "She cleaned my whole room in ten minutes! It takes me an hour to do all that!"

I refrained from responding, "Because you complain more than you clean."

The commotion freaked out the cats, who vanished for the duration.  K--- whipped the condo into shape, announced she was done, accepted her electronic payment, and left, trailing little fairy sparkles in her wake.

Cleaning is a skill (anyone can learn it) enhanced by talent (some people are naturally better at than others), and K--- has both.  She's better at it than I am, that's for sure.  I'm no slouch at it, but K--- has it down to a science.  Our place is cleaner than it ever was. Interestingly, it =stays= cleaner, because after K--- has gone, we're reluctant to mess anything up.

And, best of all, =I= don't have to clean anymore.

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