Catholic church-goers in Oklahoma are mad because they see Jesus's penis in a 10-foot crucifix. Said the husband of artist Janet Jaime:

Reggie Jaime said critics of the crucifix probably aren't aware of its history and meaning to the Catholic Church.

"This isn't just a subjective drawing. This is a historical icon of the church," Reggie Jaime said.

"I can't help what you see in things, or she sees in things, or anyone."

But interpretations are so subjective. Judge for yourself, here!

Via Jammies

Becks is very busy. This is yanked from her buzzfeed. She posted it awhile ago, but it's been one of those items that I've mentioned in nearly every conversation I've had over the past week or two. Perhaps because Heebie U has snowdrifts of pollen, which lap up and over curbs, and lakes elsewhere, where the tippy points of grass just barely poke up through the top of the pollen pond. I don't actually suffer from allergies (I enjoy mine! No I don't.), but I do feel bad for the crying students and hacking staff who seem to suffer quite a bit.

Anyway:

Female trees and shrubs do not produce any pollen, ever, but they do produce messy seeds, fruits, old flowers, and seedpods. Landscapers and city arborists consider this female byproduct to be "litter", and they don't like to see it lying on our sidewalks.

In other words, urban landscapers over-utilize pollen-intensive plantlife--which, in turn, wildly amplifies seasonal allergies.

Poor allergy people.

I recently got into an argument with a friend. I mentioned this phenomenon: how one third of the students predictably fail the review test at the beginning of the semester. Omitted from that post, but true, is that it's nearly always the boys that fail the test.

She pointed out that if something structural with this assignment is causing boys to fail at higher rate than girls, then I should alter the assignment to offer more support. She tossed out a couple ideas: pair up a boy with a girl, pair up students without pattern, have part of the assignment due halfway through the week, etc. I got really worked up and I couldn't figure out why.

I was just like, "NO! Fuck that! It's an easy assignment, and it's time for them to grow up. Or they can fail the assignment. I'm not coddling them." Eventually it became clear that I was worked up because of my general anger about the patriarchy, and the issue became whether or not I was taking this anger out on the boys in my classroom.

Please take it on faith that their performance on this test does not affect how I relate to them in the class. After a week when I get to know them, I couldn't tell you who passed and who didn't. At the end of the semester I'm often dismayed to discover that a student I like a lot failed the review test at the beginning of the semester.

At any rate, I refuse to alter this assignment, despite knowing that boys fail at much higher rates than girls.

Given even my extremely brief experience in a law office, and various blog-mediated conversations since, I do not find this all that surprising (though it is pretty disappointing that one of the things complained (justly) about in the post is evidently the work of a female lawyer with some misplaced priorities). It is, however, quite disgusting. I find myself wishing to say that although it isn't shocking, it is mind-boggling. (via)

* I am aware that Stanley wasn't really shocked by the teabagger thing.

Andy Rehfeldt's "Polka Face" has come up here before (in comments), and his heavy-metalization of "Paparazzi" is also worthwhile. But these things only change the backing tracks, leaving the singing and lyrics unchanged. I have a vision of a much more thoroughgoing reworking but, sadly, lack the means with which to effect it. So I make my idea public: I long to see and hear the Lady Gaga tune, "Shakuhachi".

A complete list of words that David Foster Wallace circled in his American Heritage Dictionary. If I were nosflow more clever and motivated than I am, I would add a thousand-word footnote below the cut. But I'm not. So I'll just select the silver dollar word of the day instead: mansuetude is the opposite of MANDOM.

A picture's worth a thousand words, right?

You're welcome.

By this utterly surprising news item:

Tea party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, tend to be Republican, white, male, and married, and their strong opposition to the Obama administration is more rooted in political ideology than anxiety about their personal economic situation, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

[…]

Their fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

I mean, really, who could've guessed?

Apparently there's a thing on the parenting blogs about keeping your children in rear-facing carseats until age 2.

Hawaiian Punch turns 1 soon, and I'd really been looking forward to turning her around, because it makes the car so much easier if you can hand things to her easily, and also facing backwards, the sun is somehow always in her eyes and she starts wailing.

Ugh. What do the other suburban drivey parents here do?

(Most painfully domesticated post ever?)

I gave up on my father's-voice-in-my-head today and heaved documents at a local tax-preparation specialist, who, within an hour's time discerned that my complicated pile of envelopes equaled my forthcoming reception of money.

I love tax time, and this year was different for me, going to an agency (because my return was a bit complicated, due to band-related income that was reported and declared). The preparer kept pushing me to find things to write off, and I just didn't care to do so. He was so befuddled.

I live here. I like it. I drive the roads. I take advantage of the beautiful natural parks. I'm happy to pay my nugget.

I'm sure I'm an outlier here.

I am completely aggravated with (some of) my students' inability to retain facts that they understand. (I truly believe they understand them at the time.)

The two easily forgotten facts that drive me the most crazy are 1) fractional exponents mean a root, and 2) negative exponents indicate a reciprocal. For students that I've had in precalculus and calculus, I know they've dealt with these facts nearly weekly for the past nine months. And yet I get these faux-concentrating lookaway faces when I call on their group with a question that uses those facts. (Not always. But too often!)

It comes up constantly in calculus that you want exponents when taking a derivative, and that you'll need to understand negative and fractional exponents to analyze your derivative. And yet.

I don't know. I don't think I can convey this degree of teflon-brain. Why can we spend an entire six weeks on logarithms and exponential functions, and then in the following semester, if you mention logarithms they'll say "Oooh! Never heard of them!" Yes you did. And you correctly answered test questions. And you conversed semi-fluently in them. (Granted, reminding them of how logarithms work is much smoother and easier than re-teaching it. It's certainly in there somewhere.)

If any of you propose solutions I'll accuse you of not understanding how bad it is. But if your solution is really great I'll be excited to try it out.

In English one can issue a command to another, "go ...", e.g., "go fuck yourself", "go tell it on the mountain", "go get me a pig's foot and a bottle of beer". And one can also say such things as these: "he went and fucked himself", "he's going to go and tell it on the mountain", "I went and got him a pig's foot and a bottle of beer".

To my mind the latter group aren't really suited for indicating compliance with the commands in the former group. They are more similar to e.g. "he up and fucked himself". (And one cannot say: *up fuck yourself. Though one can fuck oneself up.) But clearly one cannot say that someone complied with a request to go tell it on the mountain by saying he went told it on the mountain.

As horrific as spousal rape might be, isn't that just another issue like coverture that could have conceivably been contracted around?

Ask yourself: Am I a curator?

The correct answer is: If you had to ask yourself that, you are not a curator.

But—!

And really, is this called for? Also, anyone calling themselves a curator when it is clear that they are dealing in merchandise should have their thumbs removed. After all (as the greatest sociologist on the internet—sorry, Kieran—observed) "culture" just means you can buy stuff. Why do you think museums have gift shops? Otherwise they would be void of culture, that's why. So when someone answers the question what is the most important function of curators? by saying it's to present and promote culture through creative, correct and contemporary means we haven't yet excluded dealers in merchandise. (Though we do have someone with an unfortunate fondness for alliteration on our hands.) Or again, if the function is [t]o create a work of art in itself by hanging a cohesive, well thought-out exhibit, this is compatible with a desire to sell stuff. (Note that both of these things are pretty close conceptually to "selecting", just supplemented with "arranging".)

On the other hand, if the most important function is [t]o spark the thoughts of others, intrigue their intellects, and inspire people of all ages to appreciate history, then maybe eric and ari are curators. I don't know! It's a complicated world.

But "I pair the waters with my food" and "There's so many people that are uneducated about water" are particularly special.

I met a guy over the weekend who graduated from a small college in the Appalachian mountains in 1969. He said that upon graduation, he had never heard of the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. (Although he was shortly drafted. Then he heard of it.) He explained this by saying that there was one TV on campus and one phone in their dorm, and they just didn't think about the degree to which they were sequestered.

I had a moment where I had to remind myself that most of the world finds assault-weapon style intense questioning to be rude. Boy did I want to sit him down and pick his brain.

Fuck yeah!