August | 2012 | bharrington's Xanga Site

Month: August 2012

The Daily News

1   The other day I saw a commercial come on the teevee about a new movie called Paranorman.

2   It looked like any other Pixar thing, except for the plot.

3   With a concept clearly stolen from The Sixth Sense, it seems to be about a kid who sees dead people.

4   At first I thought it was a great concept, and even something I could add to the Heidi Chronicles, my ghost unit I do each year in late October.

5   I watched about ten seconds of the commercial and thought to myself, "This is a HORRIBLE thing to show small children!"

6   When I looked further into it, I saw that it wasn't a Pixar feature, but a relatively new company from Oregon called Laika.

7   All I could think of was, "Who PITCHED this concept? Millions of people would love to be the creator of an animated film concept. Who would even THINK that grotesque, scarily absurdist films would ever succeed? Who would ever think to pitch cartoons aimed at adults?"

8   Hmm.

9   Uh, Disney? Darby O' Gill? Warner Brothers? Hannah/Barbara?

10 I calmed down, but was still a bit confused as to the person who pitched it, and to the person who said, "Let's go with it!"

11   Laika put out the quirky and weird Coraline in 2009, another film that seemed to reach younger adults rather than small tykes.

12   When I first saw the commercial, I screamed at my teevee, "I can't BELIEVE how irresponsible these filmmakers are! Irresponsible parents will take their kids to see this garbage, and they will grow up to be heathens and miscreants!"

13   This morning I walked out to my driveway and picked up the Merc News.

14   At the top of the front page was an article about Paranorman.

15   I had to assume that any responsible journalist would pan this idiotic concept. Just imagine how many parents would not only take their children to see such garbage, but who would eventually have it downloaded or DVD'd permanently in their homes.

16   Gettin' old, man.

17   It turned out that the reviewer, Randy Myers, gave a good review to the film, not only for its technological attention to detail, but about its writing as well. I put my prejudicial rantings aside and decided to read further into it.

18   Myers reported that "it delivers a potent, multipronged fable that touches on meaty themes, from bullying to dealing with death. It also delivers an especially resonant message about not succumbing to a cult of fear."

19   Steady words.

20   I remember when I was younger listening to adults berating the violence of the Three Stooges, and how it teaches small children a message about sawing somebody's head, or putting someone's head in a vice and turning the screws.

21   As a kid, it never occurred to me to saw someone's head. I just thought the Stooges were hilarious. I still do.

22   Call me crazy.

23   Moving on, Part 1: Somehow I got through this week.

24   I had to shift from Google to Xanga to Chrome to Mozilla to Internet Explorer to get all of these wonderful news pieces to you, but I somehow did.

25   Fonts continue to jump, letters wind up in the middle of other sentences, and the entire thing seems haunted this year, but to me, it just makes for a ghostly challenge.

26   Maybe Paranorman arrived at just the right time.

27   Seems early to me. The weirdness in my life usually begins in mid-October.

28   I guess that's the nature of schools in 2012. Our schedules are so strange and different that it's almost as though the cosmos are reacting.

29   So it goes.

30   Nothing I haven't been through before, and there are certainly worse things.

31   But I'm pretty sure I'm going to cut this one short.

32    I could write it off to Friday light, or maybe the residuals of a writer's block that hit me in the pan last night.

33   Whatevs.

34   I have a weekend to re-group, and then start all this nonsense again next week.

35   So I'm gonna cut away here.

36    I've had all the fun I could stand for one week.

37    I think I'm going to pull up Coraline on Netflix, and maybe even grab some popcorn and go see Paranorman this weekend.

38    I might even top it off with a Stooges festival.

39   There are worse things I could do.

40   Okay then.

41   We'll talk to you later.

42    Have a rockin' weekend.

43    See you again.

44    Peace.

~H~

www.xanga/bharrington.com
The Daily News
1   So...Melky Cabrerra walks into a metaphorical bar...and all things Giants.

2   Sorry.

3   How insensitive of me.

4   I won't say much.

5   Don't need to.

6   Just...wow. Dude...

7    Giants' fans...

8    I wanted to say something encouraging.

9    I can't.

10 I just can't.

11

12   I hate it.

13   Beyond words.

14   Am I ready to abandon baseball?

15   Somehow.

16   That's if there IS a somehow.

17   Which brings me to this. We need to move on, and not to look back.

18    Moving on, Part One: And so, here we go. For some reason, Xanga has decided to blue-nose things that LOOK like links on the DN.

19   This means that they are linking stuff that I do not sanction in the DN. So if somehow my idiotic ramblings include blue links, there's no point in hitting them, because they might take you anywhere. Huh?

20   Think they care?

21   I won't answer that one.

22   Yeesh.

23 So any link that shows on this is generally not of my volition.

24    Ahhhh, meh. Click on 'em. They might take you somewhere awesome. Whatevs.

25    Let's keep movin' on. It's all we can do.

26     Moving on, Part Two: I have decided to say very little about the Melky thing. I already went through it with Bonds, and thought about all sports, and of how that sort of thing is clearly rampant. Every single sports hero who is succeeding has been suspect in my eyes for a while now. I don't even want think about football. So I fully intend to...uh...well, I dunno.

27     It ain't just Melky. It's anyone who shows super powers in sports. It's not rocket science to see; it's just a mirror to our lust for super heroes.

28   Sad, sad, sad.

29   Dude.

30 It's the second day of school.

31   I have enough on my plate. Do I really have to respond to stupidity beyond stupidity? Seriously?

32   Meh.

33

29   I'm pretty sure that's all I want to say on that. We are a nation of hypocrites, and every once in a while there is some goofball hero who steps up to look like a Superman, only to be exposed as a dreg, and as a scapegoat.

30   I'm not mad so mad at Melky as I am at American hypocrisy. All our sports are riddled with this idiocy. We couldn't stand it if we didn't have real-life super heroes, and we worship them so much that we look the other way when they do seemingly miraculous things.

31   Dude.

32   I'm done with all of it.

33   Moving on, Part the Third: I'm sort of thinking maybe I could watch four-foot table ping pong.

34   It really involves just two competitors on a four-foot table having at it.

35   It was between that and sumo wrestling, but you KNOW those suckuhs are doping. You don't get man breasts like that without serious steroids.

36   Ah, what's a fellow to do?

37    Hey, I couldn't teach without a morning cup of coffee and an afternoon cocktail of veggie shakes and nothing but goods, so who am I to judge?

38    Meh.

39    My job is to teach, and to throw some intelligence out there.

40    And always a few laughs.

41    So...

42    We're back.

43    Moving on, Somehow Part the Fourth: Here's an item. Yesterday I was in the right lane, driving down the road when some miscreant in a white truck decided that it was cool to pass me at about a hundred miles an hour, in the same lane and on the right.

44    As always, I assumed I would meet him at the light. I moved quietly to the left lane, and sure enough, I not only arrived earlier than he, but much more safely.

45    When the buttmunch pulled up next to me, I was tempted to roll down my right window and scream at him for being a miscreant.

46    Discretion being the better part of valor, I just said under my breath, "Hey, assh$%." You know, the way you do. But I said it out loud.

47     At that exact moment, my cell phone suddenly lit up. I have one of those deals where if you push the right button, your cell phone will immediately call any name you say to it. It was in my left pocket and must have hit a coin or something, but it went off.

48    So I had just finished saying, "Hey, assh$%," when my cell phone talked back and said, "No match found."

49    Unmistakeably.

50    That miserable cur almost killed me, so in my eyes, there is no match.

51     I gave him the Assh$%-of-the-day award. He earned it.

52     Pretty easy gem to claim in 2012.

53     No match found.

54     Indeed.

55 Life's a poem.

56     So this is my third go-round on today's DN. I believe I will tuck this day in and write it off as a learning weekend.

57     No news is good news. Real news drives me into goofiness.

58     So I think I'll retire to bed while I'm still a tad sane.

59     What else should I be?

60     See you all tomorrow hopefully.

62 Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington
The Daily News
1   Wow.

2   Yesterday's DN was actually a miracle launch.
3   I had started it on Sunday night, had written almost all of it, pushed some button or other, and the entire thing vanished.
4   We just shouldn't have school in summertime, I swear to you.
5   Summer erases our minds.
6   I remembered immediately that when I write the DN, I constantly have to push save, just like anything you write.
7   Duh.
8   But you'd be surprised at how often I forget to do that.
9   And I took fifteen units of college courses as recently as 2009.Whaaaaat?

10  I even TEACH students to save as they go.

11  Well, Monday was a sort of test pilot for all the teachers. Almost to a person we had forgotten the various passwords we need to get into our computers, our gradebooks, our emails, our use of the copy machine, etc. It was a hoot watching all these people walking around with a summer mind suddenly having to begin work.
12  We are geared to do that in September, not in mid-August. It's the law.
13   We forget that last year we got out early. Our heads tell us we still have at least a week more until school begins. So our heads tell us that we don't need to think for at least another week.
14   It was pretty funny, because nearly every teacher I talked to felt a bit out of it, even the younger ones.
15   I'm okay today, because we already got the first day of school under our belts yesterday.
16   But Monday was monstrous, and the DN gave me a bit of a struggle. Fonts wouldn't work. They wouldn't do what I told them. I could center some pictures on Mozilla, but not on Google Chrome. But Google Chrome made the DN email gigantic.
17   Plus my laptop jumps letters, so that the word "department" came out to look like this: "deptartment."
18   Too many companies, and too many things working against one another.
19   But it's all cool.
20   You'll just be getting these odd things all year. Just laugh. We are at the mercy of these technological monsters.
21 It's funny, because in the past, each Sunday night/Monday morning prior to the first day back I would have a "jumpin'-out-of an airplane" dream.
22 We've all had them, you and me.
24   It's like when you can't sleep, and you dream of jumping out of an airplane involuntarily, and suddenly screaming, "AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" with three G's flapping our lips.
25   I'm pretty sure anyone going through something immensely undesirable about to happen has the same dream.
26   Fear of firing. College midterms. Job interviews. Haircuts. You get the pic. Your personal world events, coming together like a storm in the sky.
27 You don't have to be Jung to figure those dreams out. "Jumpin'-out-of an airplane" dreams. They usually happen right before you awaken in the middle of the night.
28   Yup. Jumpin'-out-of an airplane dreams. Nuthin' quite like 'em.
29 Moving on, Part One: The good news is that my classes were wonderful yesterday. I got to school relatively early, met this brand new teacher, and showed the guy the ropes.
30   The guy got a phone call on Monday telling him that he was hired. It's a long story, but we had a sudden opening that nobody expected, and b-bay-um! This guy was there. My principal introduced him to me and asked if I could show him around.
31   That energized me, because there is an entire younger generation out there with enthusiasm and eagerness to come into this unique profession and make a difference, yet jobs seem to be scarce. I faced the same thing when I was looking for a teaching job.
32   But this is the time for them to look. The opening of school is stressful for administrators as well as teachers, custodians, support staff, and students. If the school suddenly loses staff members, jobs open, and they need to be filled quickly.
33   This guy was alert, ready, and excited to be there. It was like two days ago someone called him up and offered him a career with benefits. What young person doesn't dream about that?
34   After his interview, I was one of the first teachers he met. He asked if he could watch my seventh period class, and I told him that he certainly could.
35   The lesson was awesome, because I've done this before. I didn't lecture the kids about rules and other boring stuff. I told them a story.
36   It was a story about my daughter Caitlin. Each time I tell it, she rolls her eyes, but it's cute, and adorable. I received applause in all five of my classes, the first time that ever happened in my career. He sat in and watched, so I made sure that every punch would land. Each did. And I've gotten applause before, but not in all five classes on the same day. Yesterday was a first.
37   All real stuff.
38   We have some wonderful young teachers on our staff. As an older teacher, I find it incredible to work with all that energy. Young teachers can make everything around happen. They look to us for wisdom; we look to them to remember why we got into this profession in the first place.
39   Right now that guy doesn't have a classroom. He can't get into a room probably until tomorrow, but what an exciting time for the guy. Our school is an awesome school, and is beginning finally to mature. The younger teachers I met when I first got there are turning into veterans right before my eyes. The place is maturing the same way I watched YB mature so many years ago.
40   It's like watching good rookies mature into professional players in sports. It's the only analogy I can offer.
41   And it makes me want to play better, and to constantly improve my game.
42   I have to. They're watching. And there's nothing worse to watch than a complaining, miserable old teacher. I refuse ever to become that.
43   That's why I'm not going gentle. I still have tons more to do to become better, and I truly think that I can learn from the new generation.
44   But this isn't about me. It's about a new generation of teachers bringing modern methods, technology, humor, and their own generation's experiences to the front. I watch how much heart and soul my own daughter Nicole puts into her job, and it far surpasses what I do.
45 There's a generation out there that is going to step up and make this a better world, and they are showing up everywhere I turn.
46   Makes me smile.
47   It's time to start hiring them, and in droves. It's their time.
48   Let's hand the world over to them. I think they're ready.
49   It's their time.
50   It's their time.
51 Peace.
~H~
www.xanga.com/bharrington
The Daily News

WE'RE BAAAAAACCCCCKKKK!!!

1 Is there any better way to open up the school year than with an introductory by Hunter S. Thompson?

2 God did I miss this.

3 It's just this: isn't it WEIRD to have school opening on August 14? It goes against all things American if you ask me.

4 No complaints. I think it was Mark Twain who once said, "The worst day of summer is better than the best day teaching."

5 Or was it Mr. Feeny?

6 Some guy said it somewhere.

7 When in doubt about any quote, just attribute it to Mark Twain. Everybody else does. Nobody cares about accuracy in 2012.

8 Hey, lighten up. I pretty much say everything with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

9 Anyway, this August stuff is weird.

10  Welp, I guess it is just one of those things, a song by Buster Posey. At least I THINK it's by Buster Posey.

11   So here's the good ol' DN, comin' to getcha, even though it's still summer!

12 So...just what IS the Daily News? It's something that people tell me I write, but that I don't really believe I write.

13   It writes itself.

14   The DN is entering its sixteenth year beginning with this entry.

15    It began in 1996 when the Yerba Buena Performing Arts Department in East San Jose, California mounted the inimitable Guys and Dolls. Due to a lack of intelligence on the part of nearly everyone, I was chosen to be the director.

16 The name of the DN is stolen directly from the tune Guys and Dolls.

17 It started like this: I had directed a few musicals prior to Guys and Dolls, but I always had trouble trying to get information to all areas of the show: the band, the actors, the tech people, the house people, etc.

18    Rather than having tons of meetings with each body of the show, I looked to one of my journalistic heroes, Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle, the delicate and stormy creator of a brilliant form of journalism which he deemed "three-dot journalism."

19   His job was just to hang out at all cool events in San Francisco, of which there were many, and muse about them, and eventually, to muse about his feelings of life, of love, of the City, of the Giants, of politicians, and so on.

20   I shamelessly stole Caen's basic style, put it numerically, and decided that the only name I could possibly adopt was The Daily News, right outta Guys and Dolls.I then posted it on the wall of the building in order to communicate with everyone in the company. It eventually morphed into this folderol.

21   The first eight years it had nothing but hard copies. I was pretty horrible at web building, because I couldn't get past this Egyptian technique called "html."

22   By 2004, technology stepped up and brought us template websites, one of which is the immortal Xanga. I was told that I could build websites with it, and the rest is history. Wiseguy journalism was born.

23 I had decided that I would arbitrarily send the DN to graduates and colleagues who would probably enjoy it, or at least be annoyed by it, but who would certainly get it.

24 I still don't get it, but I do know that the good ol' DN is somehow back, and will report yet another year in the life of this Old Brown Shoe.

25 So here we are, on the morning after the Washington Nationals obliterated my Giants. So it goes.

26 God, or Herb, or Joe-the-Bear, thanks for the spirit, and let's all buckle up for this rollercoaster, 'cuzz it's gonna be a ride. Oh, and Betty Boop.

27 Fasten your seat belts, and welcome back.

28 That's it for today.

29 Live life.

30 Love life.

31 Peace, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

~H~
TARZAN'S BOY. MATT CAIN.

SAME GUY.

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Month: August 2012

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