And he's trying to get them met on Chatroulette. He doesn't get much action until the sixth response, but that one's pretty hard core.

(Anthropological note: People from the British Isles (that's right for the UK plus Ireland, right?), have an onomatopoedic spelling of a noise that indicates something like "OMG, that's so hot": "Phwoooar". I've noticed it in some UK books, and Kieran uses it here. Is there a sound file of what this sounds like anywhere? I can't seem to come up with anything that sounds remotely plausible.)

Which kind are you? A number 18, Instigating? A number 73, Slimy Grimy? I myself am certainly a Same Wearing Clothes Each Day number 37, and probably 89, Short.

This is why God created slow motion. I don't remember the last time I laughed this hard at anything on the internet.

A reclusive lurker wonders.

Any of you ever do the cliche Spring Break, rent a condo on a beach with friends and spend the week intoxicated, at least partly at clubs? I admit I did it twice, once in high school and once in college. I had fun. Camping spring breaks are probably my favorite.

It's best to designate at least two days for lounging at home, and at least two nights somewhere sleeping away from your house. Skimp on either one and you don't feel refreshed when it's time to go back.

But since he's not here, someone has to post this:

"I wasn't forced out. I forced myself out. I failed," said Massa. "I didn't live up to my own codes. I own this. I take full and complete responsibility for my misbehavior. And goodness only knows what allegations they're gonna throw at me. There's even new ones today and we're gonna talk about that."

"Now they're saying I groped a male staffer. Yeah, I did," Massa also said. "Not only did I grope him. I tickled him 'til he couldn't breathe and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday."

"I should have never allowed myself to be as familiar with my staff as I was, I never translated my days in the Navy to being a Congressman," Massa said....

Massa also stood by his descriptions of lewd conduct that he has said routinely occurs in the Navy. Beck joked that perhaps Massa could show him a "tickle fight" in the Navy.

"I'm gonna show you a lot more than tickle fights," said Massa. He also added: "Can you imagine transporting back to this today? It looks like an orgy in Caligula. And anybody that's been in the Navy knows it."

I'm fresh from the recording studio, where a band I'm with is doing an EP. Some reflections:

(1) It's kind of freakish how much they can fix. "Oh you fucked up that fill a bit? We'll fly it in from another time you did it better."

(2) Apparently you can't have an iPhone inside this studio. Too much EMI, and it gets picked up.

(3) Active pick-ups on a particular bass guitar were labeled as "farty", so we switched to different bass.

(4) We at one point picked up a Spanish radio station on the monitor/click-track channel. It took a long time to fix.

(5) Goddamn this shit's expensive.

Updates might be sparse through the week, as it's on a farm in the middle of nowhere, which is kind of nice. (Holy crap, stars!)

From Delia Christina, over at Bitch PhD's place:

At my very tony Presbyterian church we once had a social services program to help provide healthier meals to really low-income neighbors....A friend served on this task force and they were told to help develop and test cook menus for this project.

But there were rules:
Think healthier ingredients, not necessarily 'healthy'.
The meal's ingredients couldn't cost more than $10, total.
It would have to be enough to serve at least 4.
Meal preparation couldn't involve more than 1-2 utensils.
The meal had to be cooked/served in the same dish.
It had to be able to be cooked on a hot plate.
Task force members could not assume refrigeration was available.

Those are astonishing rules to me, in the sense of the "hidden codes of different classes", and how unfamiliar I am with the hidden knowledge to survive when you're very poor.

I'm thinking lots of beans and stews? In general, a knife for chopping and a serving spoon to stir and serve with? I imagine some sort of upper bound on prep time would be useful for many families, as well.

This NYT Sunday Magazine article on teacher training has been linked all over the place for the last week. It is very much worth reading: while I don't know if the specific research on teaching effectiveness it discusses is well founded, it is at least addressing what seems to me to be a real gap in how we talk about teaching. While there's plenty of discussion of curriculum, and lesson planning, and addressing different children's learning styles, there's much less about the fact that no matter how well thought out the rest of their plans are, a teacher without the skills to attract their students' full attention and get their compliance in doing work isn't going to successfully teach anything.

And those skills, while boring to talk about, are absolutely necessary -- nothing happens without them. I talk about having been a bad teacher. I'm an excellent tutor: if you give me one person who wants to learn something that I know, I'll have no difficulty getting it across to them. But the skills required to make a class of 35 watch me instead of the clouds out the window, and do what I told them rather than throwing pieces of broomstick at the blackboard or stealing each other's notebooks, were beyond me. And this isn't a matter of good kids versus bad kids -- as a student, I went to a selective high school with kids as 'good' as anyone in the country, but in classes where the teacher didn't have those skills, no one learned anything except that Mr. Steinfink got really upset when people dropped things in the fishtank.

As the article says, there's a tendency to treat basic skills of this nature as if they were a matter of character, and unteachable, so not to think of them as central to teacher training. Still, they're centrally important: a teacher who can hold her students' attention and get their compliance can teach them anything, and a teacher who can't isn't going to get anywhere. If those skills can be taught effectively, that'd be a wildly useful innovation in teacher training.

Although I am, as some of you may have had occasion to observe, and strictly in my own private personal life, the consummate sloven, at least as regards my habiliment, outfit, accoutrement, equipment, array, attire, and dress (nor do I exempt my various fittings, apparatuses, furnishings, gear, and riggings from the compass of my shabbiness), that is not because I scorn or lack interest in the arts of the draper, tanner, furrier, parmenter, cobbler, clothier, cutter, tailor, weaver, or any other member of the crafty horde whose earliest predecessors first made a virtue of post-Edenic necessity, and, transfiguring shameful covering into prideful adornment, eventually rendered the expression of superfluity necessitous once more, something itself, occasionally, shamefully to be covered.

No, indeed! I take a keen interest in the world of fashion. Do not be misled by my miserable appearance. The subtle delights it affords are gin to me. I am like that character of Hugo's who understands every variety of thieves' cant but does not let any sully his own tongue. But, as it is not strictly speaking fashion that motivates my sharing of this image with you, my reasons for the rudeness above alluded to shall not be mentioned herein. I mentioned all that solely to set it aside. Likewise, I propose that we take as read commentary expressing astonishment, dismay, derision, rueful lack of astonishment, anger, sorrow, anger rather than sorrow, sorrow rather than anger, and c. that the woman pictured in the upper left is what passes for "fuller figured". (Allow me also to apologize for the fact that her head is cut off; it's a screencap—you understand how it is—and I wanted to get all of the article text in, a goal whose fulfillment was incompatible with and ultimately triumphant over including the entire image (and indeed the headline).)

Rather, I find that I cannot exile from my thoughts a proposal in the penultimate paragraph of the article, which I excerpt here:

Each time it gets me thinking: What if luxe designers put some normal-sized women in their ad campaigns and runway shows while providing such sizes in stores? I have a suspicion they could pick up some business.

What if! As with all revolutionary ideas, it sounds so simple once one hears it—and yet who could ever actually have thought of it him- or herself? The reason for the apparent simplicity, I suspect, is that this suggestion, though framed in terms of a specific industry, actually is a manifestation of something quite general—thus its seeming familiarity even to those who have never thought about purveying clothing. After monumental thought I've come up with the following formula, which, though it is a rough first pass, is still, I believe, enlightening: if you want to sell things, you should, on the one hand, make such things available as potential customers can actually use and do actually want, and, on the other, advertise the availability of same. If you do one of these things but not the other—or neither of them—you will attract less custom.

Man, those were some pretty lame opening jokes at the Academy Awards. Is anyone else watching the Oscars?

Talk it up here, if so.