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Fox News is Racist

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I really don’t understand how the American public is letting Fox news get away with their smearing of Obama.  People on the channel have called him Osama, equated his fist-touch with his wife as a terrorist gesture, said he’s Muslim, and are now being completely racist by calling his wife, yes, wife his baby mama.  This is not only disrespecting her, but also their two children. The slang term baby mama refers to a woman who is the mother of a child by a man who is not married to her and has no intentions of marriage.  That is not the Obama family in the least.  Don Imus didn’t get away with calling basketball players “nappy-headed hoes,” and rightfully so, so why should Fox News (and I use the term news lightly) get away with things like this?  You know that if someone on the left said something about Bush or McCain there would be a demand for an apology and that person would be fired or would resign.  What if the left started putting up images questioning McCain’s mental health (the very thing that Bush did in the 2000 primaries to defeat McCain)?

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The American public needs to finally speak out against Fox and their propaganda machine.  If they keep going unchecked they will keep making up lie after lie.

I Can’t Watch This

Earlier this evening I tried watching a movie called Funny Games. The basic synopsis is as follows:

In this exploration of our violent society and how depictions of violence reflect and shape our culture, a middle-class housewife Anna tells the story of how she and her husband George and their 10-year-old son Georgie submitted both physically and mentally to the torture, violence, and death foisted upon them by two young, unexpected, white-gloved visitors at their weekend vacation retreat near a lake.

Violence has never really bothered me in movies. I’ve watched movies that have been considered incredibly violent. There has only been one movie where the violence actually bothered me. That was in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes. That movie was not a horror movie as much as it was violence-porn, meaning they tried to get away with as much as possible and still have it rated R. I started watching this movie tonight and I couldn’t. It was making me sick, and it wasn’t that violent when I turned it off. Maybe it was because the serial killers were incredibly nice but you could tell they had bad things in mind for the family. Something about it just disturbed me. When I started to think about it, the new Rambo film gave me this same feeling. I didn’t think much of it at the time because I was ill as I was watching it but now I wonder if the feeling was due to the violence in the movie. Strangely, movies like The Departed, The Boondock Saints, and Pulp Fiction don’t bother me. Maybe I’m getting too old for such violent movies. I typically am a lover of all movie genres, but this may be one I have to start straying away from.

Stand in Line for Me

So, the day that the iPhone 3g comes out, July 11th, I will be having my wisdom teeth removed.  All four of them.  What I need to do is find someone to go stand in line and buy one for me at one of the AT&T stores or the Apple store.  That way when I leave the surgeon, in complete agony, I will have something to do while I rest up and float high on Vicodin.  So, to my lovely sisters and/or brother-in-law, if you would like to volunteer for this tremendous oppourtunity to help out a person in need, I would appreciate it a great deal.  I might even make it worth your while (no, I will not buy you an iPhone).

Lego Indiana Jones

In celebration of the end of the school year, I went out and purchased Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii. I’ve been watching videos of this game for a while and was looking forward to playing it. This game is really fun. It is very easy to play and has great graphics. The story is really good with a bunch of humor added to the original Indiana Jones story lines. All of the original three movies make up this game. The only thing that I wish was different are save points. You can only save once you finish a scene. For someone like me, who only likes to play for 10 or 15 minutes at a time, being able to save mid-level would be a welcome addition. I guess the one good thing about it is since you have to complete the level it increases my chances of finishing the game. So far, I’m only in the first movie, but I can’t wait to get through the next couple. The Last Crusade is my favorite and I’m looking forward to playing that as a game. I think the developers of this game did a great job incorporating all the major aspects of the movies and injecting some humor to the Lego characters. I can’t wait to see what the Lego version of Batman has in store.

The School Year in Review

There are two things that are special about this post. First, it is my 600th post. I’ve been posting for four years now and it just amazes me that I’ve posted 599 posts before this. Thank you to all that read my site. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing. Second, it’s the last day of school. Now that the school year is (almost) over, let me sum up my thoughts.

ISS teachers have to have the toughest jobs (besides SpEd teachers). Besides dealing with the worst kids (behavioral-wise), you have to jump in where their regular teachers left off. When you’re dealing with three grades this makes it even more difficult.

Breaks are nice. During MAP testing I actually got a couple breaks. Other than that, I didn’t have a break all year long. I don’t even have a lunch break. I’m with the kids for 7 hours straight, from 7:15 until 2:15. I do believe I lost some sanity.

If silence is golden, I want platinum. Being in a setting as restrictive as this means no talking. I talk to explain homework to students one-on-one, but other than that, no talking. I’m someone who likes to develop a rapport with students. You can’t do that easily in this job. The silence really is deafening. What little sanity was left after not having any breaks, I lost due to the silence. Of course, once the school day was over you couldn’t get me to shut up. I feel bad for the other teachers.

I would never do this job again. It’s true. This job sucked so bad that I could not fathom doing it again. There are no breaks, dealing with the troublemakers everyday tends to kill your passion for teaching, and hearing one thing from district office about what I can and should do and something totally different from building administration tends to lead to a lot of gray area.

Luckily there were a few teachers who helped me keep my sanity over the year. These were the ones I shared many a happy hour with on Friday afternoons. For those wonderful people, I will forever be grateful.

So what is in store for me? Well, if you didn’t catch one of my previous posts, I’m going to go work for a company that creates, manages, and hosts websites for churches, organizations, and small businesses. It should be a fun time and I’m looking forward to the change in scenery.

So there you have it. It’s been a long year and I’m glad it is over. At the same time, looking back, though this year has been slow, it’s amazing to me that I’ve written 600 posts now. I hope you keep reading.