1 So…Andy Rooney walks into a bar…
2 Funny man, intelligent and witty.
3 They had a special on him last night. It was pretty fun to watch.
4 Here’s a link, if it works:
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/rooney/main3419.shtml
5 I got some stuff off CNN’s wire last night, so here are a few Rooneyisms:
Andy Rooney, who died Saturday at the age of 92, had the last word each week on the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes.” Here are some of his great lines from those essays, along with a few others, that reveal his talent as a writer and the dry wit that made him famous.
“I try to look nice. I comb my hair, I tie my tie, I put on a jacket, but I draw the line when it comes to trimming my eyebrows. You work with what you got.” — from an essay on his eyebrows, Nov. 24, 1996
“We need people who can actually do things. We have too many bosses and too few workers. More college graduates ought to become plumbers or electricians, then go home at night and read Shakespeare.” — from an essay on finding a good job, March 21, 2010
“We didn’t shock them, and we didn’t awe them in Baghdad. The phrase makes us look like foolish braggarts. The president ought to fire whoever wrote that for him.” — on the start of the war in Iraq in 2003
“I recently bought this new laptop to use when I travel. Look at that. Fits right into my briefcase. It weighs less than three pounds. I lose that much getting mad, waiting to get on the plane through security at the airport.” — from an essay on computers, Feb. 11, 2009
CBS commentator Andy Rooney dies at 92
“We can all be prouder to be human beings, because that’s what they were. They make up for a lot of liars, cheats, and terrorists among us.” — on the astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger after it exploded on takeoff in 1986
“Not many people in this world are as lucky as I’ve been. … All this time I’ve been paid to say what is on my mind on television. You don’t get any luckier in life than that.” — from Rooney’s final “60 Minutes” essay, Oct. 2, 2011
“One of the things we can be sure of over the July 4th weekend is that news reports will keep telling us how many of us are going to die in automobile accidents.” — from Rooney’s first “60 Minutes” essay, July 2, 1978
“The third rule of life is this: Everything you buy today is smaller, more expensive, and not as good as it was yesterday.” — from an essay on coffee cans, Oct. 23, 1988
“A lot of these products are actually pretty good. But why are they always trying to con us with the contrived pictures on the box that don’t look anything like you get when you eat it?” — from an essay on the pictures on food packages, Dec. 4, 1988
He will be missed.
6 Moving on, Part the First: Nicoley had a lot of people run to her support over the weekend and as of last night, she did much better. Wait. What’s with the font issues. We’re getting smaller. Remember the People Mover in Disneyland, where we would shrink? Oh noooooooooooooooo!!!! Oh well, I’m over it. Hope you are too.
7 Moving on, Part the Second: What a lot of people don’t know about the teaching profession is that during the school year, lesson plans need constantly to be put in place, every single day. And every single day a teacher must be meticulously planned. This is not always easy, since teachers also have to attend meetings, grade papers (my nemesis!), meet with parents, answer emails, attend IEP’s, write recommendations and pretty much let the job run them…just like any job. But we don’t need fellow workers coming up and criticizing our hard work and dedication. That’s bush.
8 Classroom management is always sited as the hardest part of the job. It is sometimes, but once routines are established, all the bookwork tends to dominate. It is especially tough if you try to teach English, because a simple brief look at Facebook will let you know that “alot” of people out there never really learned good writing skills. Let me help some of you out.
9 I would include myself in that mix, by the way. Even though I know grammar backwards and forwards, I still read some DN’s where my editing got away from me. I edit the DN pretty carefully each night, but sometimes an item will appear with two “the’s” in it, or I might accidentally spell milk “mikl”.
10 What is especially atrocious is the amount of misspellings we teachers get, even at the purported best school in the entire district. I see common words misspelled so often that every once in a while I question whether I spelled them correctly or not. And I won my sixth-grade spelling bee, best in the entire skool.
11 While correcting the tons and tons of papers I make it a point always to have a dictionary nearby. But I get SO jumbled from the mistakes that I might type “dictionery” and then question if it is right or not.
12 Well, our grades are due this Wednesday, and I spent my entire weekend continuing to read and grade essays. I’m in my third week of doing that. It is imperative that I get those done before Wednesday.
13 Yesterday I spent almost two hours on half a class, and this was just entering the grades in School Loop. When I went to save them, I pushed a wrong button and everything disappeared!
14 Fortunately I know not to wallow in those situations. Well, I wallowed for a few minutes, then realized I was simply costing myself time, and that yeah, I just spent two hours doing something and it disappeared, but facts is facts.
15 I got on with it. I not only finished it in one-fourth the time, but even got another half class done before I got three essays I thought I had already graded from a student who didn’t follow directions properly. Her papers were in another folder, so right while I was on a roll, I had to take another twenty minutes to read and comment on her stuff.
16 Glamorous stuff.
17 At that point I just figured I was exhausted. I had graded all the stuff on Friday and Saturday, and it is still an enormous job trying to get all the papers in all the classes into those little squares by Wednesday. It’s endless. I even get a neck ache sometimes.
18 Anyway, enough about that. The deadline is huge, and I didn’t need almost two hours taken from me yesterday, but it happened.
19 Moving on, Part the Thoid: I awakened at 3 a.m. and was able to type out some of this, but the schedule is grueling. I have finished entering only half of the essays, and still have tons of scraps to do. Scraps are like papers without names, smaller assignments, make-up tests, etc.
20 So I’m gonna cut this DN short once more.
21 Sometimes duty calls. Oh, and for the record: It’s “A lot. Two words.”
22 Hope you have a great Monday. Hope you enjoyed the Rooneyisms.
23 Fly low.
24 Peace.
~H~
