Wrangling

So I managed to land a job for the month of December, which I'd been really afraid wasn't going to happen.  The Goodman Theatre jettisoned their Young Performer Supervisor on Christmas Carol for reasons unknown (or perhaps he quit?) and I got a call on Monday asking me to go in for an interview Tuesday afternoon.  The interview turned out to be "come in so we can run a background check and then hire you."  Which worked great for me.

So then I reported for work yesterday.  Without ever having seen the show.  I basically got thrown into the deep end and told to swim.  But I'm a good swimmer, so everything went fine.  Helps that the ASM is walking the track with me this week until I can really get on my feet.  The kids are all pros, they've all been in shows before and know where they need to be when.  The biggest challenge of course is keeping up with them and reminding them to be quiet and respectful.  But they're pretty good kids and I don't think the coming month will too bad.  I'm just going to have to come up with a good plan for those two show days...

Still Stuffed

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!  My honey and I went to visit his brother's family at their new home in Lafayette, Louisiana.  It may not be as exotic as where arduous spent her Thanksgiving, but different enough.  We don't exactly have swamps up here. 

While there, we of course treated ourselves to some etouffee, gumbo and sushi.  (Sushi?  Yes, we figured it would be really fresh, more so than we get in the midwest.  I didn't say so at the time, but it wasn't any better than anything I've had here at home).  We also took in some of the local sights, including Breaux Bridge and Vermilionville.  Thanksgiving dinner was spent with the in-law's family, and featured highlights of sweet potatoes with chevre and a blue ribbon-winning apple and cranberry pie, followed by a couple games of Skip-Bo.

David's sister-in-law gave us an earful about the heartbreaking conditions of the Louisiana public school system.  She taught in public school there for a short time before transferring to a Catholic school.  The words she used to describe the difference between the public and private school conditions were: "like a caste system."   Apparently all the families with money send their kids to Catholic school, and the families that can't afford it settle for public school.  But the public schools are as bad (and according to her, even worse) than what we hear about inner-city schools.  While there, David's sister-in-law said she spent most of her time disciplining students and hardly got any teaching accomplished.  She contracted asthma while working in the dirty, dusty conditions at the school.  Students are not given SAT or ACT tests because the schools don't want the parents to know how badly their children are doing.  Gifted students from Louisiana who have moved to schools up north have been put in remedial classes.  From what we can tell, no one makes a fuss about the schools because just about all those kids will have jobs, even if they don't finish high school - they will go to work on the numerous oil rigs in the gulf area.

Her stories made me very thankful that I grew up and live in a state where one can go to public school and get a good education!  It did make me sad for all those kids, though.  Clearly No Child Left Behind has done absolutely nothing to help them and is a law incapable of helping kids and school systems in this kind of situation.  

But I have been tagged by arduous, and must respond.  

1. The colors I wear most often (not including blue jeans) are green, purple, black and brown.

2. My parents still live in the same house I grew up in.

3. I tried to feed a deer a rock when I was about 1 1/2 (yes, there is a picture).

4. My mom called me the "mohawk chipmunk" when I was a baby.

5. I love to play games - board games, card games, anything.  I'm currently obsessed with Scrabulous on Facebook.

6. My cat is cuter than yours and probably more annoying.

7. I desperately want to go to Ireland but am afraid I'll never be able to afford it.

And now I'm tagging Dave Knave, Liz, rage-ahol, David, and John.

(7 people?  Who has time to read 7 people's blogs?)

Rules:

1- Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.

2- Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.

3- Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.

4- Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Yet another blogger against the war

I've been meaning to start a new blog, but I've also been resisting it.  Resisting because who wants to read my soapbox rantings when they hear enough in person?  But I've been frustrated, on an almost daily basis, by what is going on in the world and feel I need a healthy outlet instead of screaming at the radio.  Or the cat.  Or worst, my partner.

So yeah, this one is for me.  I hope  you read it and I hope you get something out of it, but it's for me more than anything else.

What's got my ire today is the whole Barry Bonds thing.  No, I don't particularly like the guy, and if he did commit perjury he should be punished.  But once again, where was the grand jury when it became apparent that we had been lied to by our president?  When it came to light that there were no WMD's and that intelligence had been doctored to go to war?

Well, I'll attempt to tell you.  Probably paid off.  

Not directly paid off, paid off in the sense that war is generally profitable, and gathering enough evidence to prosecute the leader of the free world is probably expensive.

I recently watched the documentary "Why We Fight," and man was that an eye-opener.  I highly recommend it to everyone.  The movie basically says, follow the money.  Our rationale for going to war has a lot to do with how profitable it is.  Profitable?  Isn't this war costing a couple billion dollars a day?  The question is, profitable to whom?

Basically, the companies who lobby for the big defense contracts have gotten the politicians wrapped around their gold-laden fingers.  They make billions of dollars making bombs, airplanes, tanks, boots, armor, etc., and they give a lot of that money to both political parties and to individual politicians running for office.  Should these defense contractors stop making money, they would stop contributing. And because of the lack of restrictions on campaign financing, the withdrawal of these funds would be seen as devastating to both political parties and is to be avoided at all costs.  Therefore, it would appear, prosecuting someone for going to war would not be good business.

Where's the impartial jury, you may ask?  Doesn't exist, not at the grand jury level.  I checked out information about Grand Juries on the ABA's website, and it turns out volunteers who serve on grand juries are not screened for bias.  It would appear that you could hate Jews, blacks, lawyers, artists, whites, republicans, democrats or Barry Bonds and still be allowed to serve on a grand jury.

In that case, where are all the volunteers who want to prosecute President Bush?  Well, they don't get to choose the cases.  The case must be brought by a federal prosecutor.  And all the federal prosecutors who may have been willing to put together a case against the administration were purged by the former Attorney General, because the in-bed-with-big-business administration has been very careful to put its friends in high places.  Therefore, we have a witch hunt - rightfully or no - against Barry Bonds but not President Bush or Vice-President Cheney.

Democracy Inaction indeed.