Month: May 2005

Yeh, I loved French in college (you shoulda seen the French prof in hot pants! Oo-la-la!), but since then?

Sissy’s WoW #6 is “aperçu,” yet another word in English taken directly from French, so we can have our revenge by mispronouncing it horribly—usually as something like “ape-ur-KOO.” Go ahead: give it your best shot in backwoods, Ozarkian Redneck speech. It’s good for the French to hear their language mudered like that.

But anywhoooo… Aperçu vous le présente:

“An Approach to Assimilating the French into the Ozarkian Borg: a brief outline of the basic principles”

I. Assimilate French cuisine so as to have a point of contact with French culture (common points of reference help cushion the initial contact). Greet the French assimilees with “Ya want French fries with that?”

II. Be gentle with the French assimilees’ inferiority complex when it evidences in snooty behavior by gently commenting, “Y’all better back off. Booger’s got him an itchy trigger finger.”

III. Show the runty little snots some hospitality at local sporting events. “Hey Frenchy! Stand up when you hold them targets” is an inappropriate reference to normal dwarf-sized French height. Better: “Hold that target right in front o’ yur ugly puss, shorty.”

IV. Make sure they know how to pronounce words in proper American English. For sure none of those runts can say “abstinent,” “affable,” “brusque,” “discordant,” “explication,” “exposition,” “ferment,” “garage,” “machination,” or “serpent” correctly. A few whacks on the head with (empty) beer bottles will serve to gain what little attention their tiny lil brains can lend to your elocution lessons.

More in Part II of “An Approach to Assimilating the French into the Ozarkian Borg: a brief outline of the basic principles” once enough Frenchy runts survive parts I–IV…

Coming soon from Bubba Booger’s Books, Ink.

…Whatever modern education has done for the averages, the effect of No Child Left Behind is that No Child Gets Ahead — which is in fact the only way to assure the No Child Left Behind result.

 

Next week I will start a new page (or pages) dedicated to what can be done. One section will be devoted to homeschooling: materials available, recommended reading, and the like. I know there are home schooling networks, and it may be that those are Good Enough, so that all that’s really needed is to link into them. I will also look into supplementary reading and supplementary education materials for those who can’t do home schooling.

In my judgment the failure of education in the US has reached a crisis stage: one could almost say that compulsory education in the public schools comes very close to child abuse.

…there are pockets of excellence left in the public school system but increasingly No Child Left Behind==No Child Gets Ahead is destroying those in the name of equality and diversity. I’m open to refutation of that hypothesis also.

The ACLU released a FBI memo that contains a prisoners report of a Guantanamo guard flushing a Koran.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing the Koran down a toilet.

 

The Pentagon said the allegation was not credible.

 

…The newly released document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made days earlier by a detainee, whose name was redacted, in two interviews with an FBI special agent, whose name also was withheld, at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.

 

The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

I’ve seen various sites claim that Newsweek is vindicated, nothing could be further from the truth.–Whizbang!