Learning to Hit Range Balls with the Walkers

In keeping with my training goals, yesterday I learned a lot about hitting golf balls. Firstly it is not as easy as it looks. Once you get over the feeling that you look totally ridiculous, you might be able to hit a few. Also some guys golf in a cowboy hat.

We had hail, dark and stormy skies

Here at Jason's house, we have a unique vantage point for storm watching.

                                                       Hail and South Dakota Weeds

 

                                                             Dark Skies After the Storm

                                                                  A Crisp Horizon Line

 

             Little Bit Tornado-y

Cutest mammal showdown

Chipmunk V Denise

Sexting epidemic hits South Dakota town

While much concern is expressed over the sexting habits of tweens and teens, the way over 30 crowd is not immune to this dangerous trend. Recently in Vermillion, SD a sexting outbreak was reported at the home of one A. Fish. It is believed the carrier was actually a Nebraska native-while little was previously known about her potential sexting habits, the targets quickly learned that no one was immune. These sextings were directed at unsuspecting party goers, who despite their misgivings were nonetheless strangely compelled to sext her back. These sextings were particularly graphic.  One reply was said to describe the sexting initiator's breasts as totes adorbs. Visuals were also included in the barrage, suffice to say, much was learned about the term funcenter. Which once seen cannot be unseen. If you see this woman, know she is sexty and dangerous.

I May Not Be the Greatest Mother Fucker...

But I am the FIRST!

The Weekend Isn't Even Over, Yet We Have Already Delivered the Goods!

I wish I could get paid

for being a donkey whisperer....

Jefe, In Apartment, Unplugged, Concert for the Fans, 2013

So I recorded "Pure" by The Lightning Seeds.

At the end of the video you can hear someone say "Excuse me"; I thought, uh oh, my windows are open and I've annoyed one of my neighbors!  But it was actually two little girls who wanted an encore!  Yeah.  I've got fans.

Here I hit record during the second of my two encores, so a little interaction with my adoring fans is preserved for posterity.

Yeah, I really should have gone out and interacted more with my fans.  When will us rock stars ever learn?  It doesn't kill ya to sign a few autographs and schmooze a bit.

Friday I'm In Love

Here is The Cure.

Note: during the spontaneous speaking part, the feminists I'm talking about are that probably pretty small group of feminists known as TERFs (Trans-exclusionary radical feminists).  That was probably not clear in such an improvised speech.

Trans persons have been on my mind lately.  For awhile I've been puzzled and not sure what I think and knowing that I needed to dig in and do some research because just thinking about things I would follow a process like:  "Well, it seems we have a biological sex; yes there are many cases that don't fit a simple dichotomy, but the vast majority of human beings are either male or female.  Gender roles are pretty clearly social constructs that can be and often are extremely damaging.  But trans seems to fly in the face of that, trans people seem to affirm gender roles and some seem to be so tied to gender roles that they are willing to undergo MAJOR FREAKING SURGERY in order to affirm those gender roles.  What up with that?"  And, to my knowledge, I've never met a trans person so it was all a puzzle to me.

Well I finally took the time to do a little digging this summer and I found a perspective that surprised me.  I don't know if I really have the language to describe it as yet, but I'll give it a try.  When you read people's stories it seems clear that it isn't about gender roles really at all, it's not about femininity or masculinity as such, it's about feeling very, very, strongly that the biological sex thing is either wrong or too limited.  It's not so much a theory, not so much an attempt to categorize and define, it is a lived experience of body dysphoria.  So then what are we to do?  Do we tell people "no, no, you were born with a penis, so that is your fate no matter how much that feels wrong to you, no matter how much pain it causes you---you are stuck."  Do we tell people "no, no, you are a person with a vagina so you are defined by that, you don't get to define yourself---we define you as female."

Also, in the course of poking around on the intertubes about trans matters, I came across some feminists who were very vehemently anti-trans.  Some of them going so far as to believe that trans women are tools of the Patriarchy, not accepting trans women as women but insisting they are men hell bent on invading and controlling female spaces.  This perspective seemed very untrue compared to the stories trans persons told of themselves.

Anyway, I've been thinking about that stuff this summer and so when it came to improvising...the speaking bit went that direction!  So, it wasn't some general slam on feminism, if that's how the improvisation sounded.  I am very much in favor of feminism.

BaDOOM! 

Everything Will Flow

This one's going out special to my old pal Suspiciously pleased.  It's by Suede.  I tried to Goth it up a bit with my vocal stylings.  Was I successful?  You be the judge.

Mason Jennings Song

Yeah, here's a sad break-up song called "Moon Sailing On the Water".  Geezey Pete Jefe, way to bring down the party!

Edited: because for some reason the first time only the first minute or so of the video was uploaded.  I know, you're thinking--hey, that would have been better.  Well Suck It!  I have reloaded the full video with all it's sad break-up songiness complete.

New Order

Yo it's New Order's Temptation ya'll.

It's A Golden Age MashUP!!

...but what song is it mashed with?  What song? What?  You'll have to watch to find out!  And  YES, this video is 8 minutes long!  HAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!  Oh.  Bejimber me timbers.

Waiting For Superman Part Deux

Here is a little music accompaniment to my previous post...

Waiting For Superman

This is the shortest of three assignments I had due last Friday.  It's a reflection on the documentary Waiting For Superman which we watched for class.  I wanted to revise it and work a few things differently then post it...but, BaDOOM!  Not gonna happen this week, so here is this...I was just happy to have the opportunity to quote The Flaming Lips in a paper for school.

If you haven't seen the movie...

SPOILER ALERT!

 
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Reflection On Waiting For Superman

            The foremost response I have to this film is that it is incredibly one-sided, heavy-handed, and emotionally manipulative, and though it has some points to make, it would have been a far better film and its audience would have been far better served if the filmmaker had been more concerned with presenting an honest, robust, and reflective picture of the situation and less concerned with eliciting the particular narrow emotional response that it achieves.  I’m going to reflect on one scene from the film that I think most powerfully shows the filmmaker’s unexamined assumptions and the filmmaker’s propensity for propaganda.

At the end of the film we are subjected to the long scene (it seemed to last at least a half an hour but it was probably more like five minutes) wherein the kids are waiting to hear their names in the charter school lottery.  As the number of placements available drops to zero, and most of the kids we’ve been following are not called, our hearts break along with theirs; a viewer cannot help but respond to tears standing in the eyes of children and parents as their hopes are crushed.  Throughout the film we were told that the public schools these kids will be forced to attend are broken.  The high schools they will attend are failure factories.  The cycle of poverty and crime goes on and on and the only way out is education.  But bad teachers, intractable teachers’ unions, and byzantine bureaucracy stand in the way of these kids receiving the education they need to escape a dismal life of failure.  Plucky reformers like Michelle Rhee try to work within the system but they are slammed down hard by the awesome might of the unions.  Other plucky reformers find a way out, a way to slip slightly to the side of the system and create charter schools free from the crippling hands of the unions and the dead weight of bad teachers.  These charter schools are the only hope for these kids, the film tells us, but space is limited so they have one slim chance, one small hope to escape their fate—the lottery.  As that hope slips away, the children and their families are devastated and we, the audience, are devastated too.  We are devastated for these children because the film sets us up to believe that now their lives are over and there is no hope for them.  The children have received the sentence of death—death via public school attendance.  By choosing this “dead children walking” frame for this scene and for the movie as a whole, the filmmaker sets up very heavy-handed, emotionally manipulative, false dichotomy and ignores a more nuanced reality.

First of all, (ignoring the fact that these kids are all in a massively successful documentary film and if they don’t all have college trust funds from this then there is something very wrong with the filmmaker), what do all of these kids have in common aside from a desire to attend a charter school?  Each one of them is blessed with at least one very strong advocate, parent or guardian, fighting for them, caring for them, and supporting them.  Having advocates like that is a far more powerful aide to future success than the particular school a child attends.  The film does those advocates a disservice by painting a “charter school or doom” dichotomy for these kids.

Second, this heavy-handed scene plays on a false “receive a great education or be doomed to a life of poverty” dichotomy.  Now it is the case that education is a road out of poverty for some people, but there are no guarantees, our society has wider problems than that.  The road out of poverty via education is a path for the few, not the many.  What I mean is:  what would happen if educators were successful beyond their wildest dreams?  What if no child was left behind, every single member of a generation received a great education, graduated from high school, and, let’s take it a step further, graduated from college?  Would poverty simply disappear because we were able to wave millions of college degrees at it?  No, of course not.  Our system is structured to have winners and losers and we could easily end up with millions of highly educated burger flippers and hotel cleaners.  Or, I suppose the hope is, or the assumption behind this film and legislation like No Child Let Behind is, that education will create a nation of American technocrats that will allow the United States to “beat” China, India, Mexico, and everybody else in the world and insure prosperity for our citizens.  Since it has slowly become too “icky” (i.e. socially and politically unacceptable) for us to have an underclass in the U.S. (although that particular battle is far from over—there are many, many people who are just fine with having an underclass), people hope that poverty will be eliminated through education and there will be enough room in the middle and upper classes in America because an educated nation could be a nation of four hundred million rich people if only we have the gumption to exploit the rest of the world.

This film rests on the assumption that everything is fine with our society at large and it is only our broken public school system—broken by those pesky teachers’ unions—that is problematic.  If only those kids could have gotten into charter schools, their lives would be saved.  If only we could fix our school system, then all the poor kids would get their shot at a picket fence and a two-car garage.  I agree that our school system is broken.  There are too many bad schools, bad teachers, and bad educational experiences for children.  But maybe our schools are broken because our society is broken, and the schools simply reflect that.  I have long thought that the great hope imbedded in education is a hope of societal transformation.  The hope is that producing generation after generation of highly educated citizens will give us a populace with the tools needed to create and maintain a just society.  But that too is too much of a false dichotomy.  If it is to happen at all, a just society won’t come through fixing the schools then letting the schools fix society.  It won’t be a simple step-by-step, cause and effect, process.  To quote the band The Flaming Lips:  “Tell everybody, Waitin’ for Superman; That they should try to hold on best they can; He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them, or anything; It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift” (from The Soft Bulletin, 1999).  Not only is the problem of poverty too heavy for any reformer to lift, or any charter school to lift; poverty is too heavy for our entire educational system to lift.  Education can be a part of it and an important part, but a just society will need many strong institutions to help with the lifting. 


2 August 2013 Edited to remove my name which popped in there due to the copying and pasting from my assignment.  I'm trying to be a little more careful about interwebs anonymity these days.