wine snobs

I admit I can be a bit of a food snob sometimes. Not too much, because I’m too cheap to eat at fancy restaurants, and because when I’m lazy it’s easier to pop some pizza rolls in the oven. But I’m from New Orleans, and that means loving good food. And loving good food means you have to hate the bad stuff. But there’s one area of snobbery I simply condemn outright. And that, my friends, is wine snobbery. I dislike alcohol snobbery in general, but some types I can at least sympathize with. I totally understand not liking cheap American beer—I find most of it drinkable, but some is just disgusting.* But I’m hardly a beer snob—I usually just stick with something from Abita since drinking it makes me feel like a good New Orleanian. And the high-end beer snobs are really just as bad as the wine snobs. And maybe connoisseurs of scotch or brandy or whatever notice a difference among various brands, but I’m not much of a hard liquor kind of guy, except for vodka, and if you think it makes a difference what kind of vodka you drink, you’re a moron.**

underfunding gifted education

I read a distressing article in the Times-Picayune this morning. The article describes how the “Louisiana Association of Special Education Administrators”* wants to get rid of gifted and talented programs in Louisiana, keeping all gifted students in regular classrooms, with no special opportunities for them. Take this quote from a letter written by their president:

“We question the ability of anyone to prove that a student with a 4.0 GPA needs special education services because his educational performance is significantly affected.”

This is galling on so many levels. First of all, many gifted students don’t have a 4.0 GPA because they’re bored out of their mind in class and have no interest in material that is far beneath them. Secondly, if a student could be learning much more advanced material but is instead stuck covering subjects far below his intellectual level, his educational performance is being “significantly affected.” Sure, 99th percentile standardized test scores may look good and pull up the average for everyone else, but they really mean a student isn’t being challenged enough. A student like this may “perform” well, but his time is being wasted and he’s not allowed to reach his potential.

cell phones

One device sits in the pockets or purses or bags of just about every American. A cell phone. And while these are obviously useful, practical devices that people like having, they create a vast multitude of problems.

saying there have been 44 presidents

You’ve probably heard that Barack Obama is our 44th president, or heard people in the media refer to the George Bushes as “Bush 41” and “Bush 43” to tell them apart. This is silly, because 43 different men have been President of the United States. The confusion arises from Grover Cleveland, who was president for two non-consecutive terms, from 1885-1889 and 1893-1897, so he is usually counted as both the 22nd and 24th president. Our system of presidential elections makes it unusual for someone to be elected to non-consecutive terms, but in countries with a prime minister or premier, offices which are typically controlled by the party leader of whichever party holds the legislature, this happens frequently. Consider Wikipedia’s list of Canada’s prime ministers. In eminently sensible fashion, those who served at separate times are simply numbered in accordance with when they first served, regardless of however many separate terms they had. So Stephen Harper actually is the 22nd Prime Minister of Canada. If the Candians followed our approach, they’d call him the 27th prime minister.

bad clock management

I could devote an entire blog to stupid things done by football coaches–punting too much on 4th-and-short, passing the ball with a lead late in the game when running would all but seal the victory, making ill-advised replay challenges, and so on. But for now I’d like to focus on one especially grievous clock management error which I’ve seen made countless times: kicking a game-winning field goal and leaving time on the clock afterward.

a capella national anthems

I like “The Star-Spangled Banner” a lot. I am definitely not one of those people who wants to see it replaced by something else.* However, when the song is performed, whether at sporting events, graduation ceremonies, or anywhere else, it is most commonly performed in a manner which invites complete and utter musical disaster. More often than not a lone singer, completely unaccompanied, stands at the 50-yard line or homeplate or wherever and stumbles his or her way through a mess of a rendition.

misusing greek letters

One of the downfalls of being a classicist is knowing the Greek alphabet, and seeing how often it is horribly misused makes me cringe. Most people having a passing familiarity with most Greek letters, either from high school math classes or college fraternities and sororities, and many people can even match each letter to its name. But knowing the actual sounds? Heaven forbid! So society is deluged with ad campaigns that throw in a few Greek letters with no regard for what they are except for having a passing resemblance to a completely different English letter.

notre dame football

I was going to make my first sports-related blog post about how much I hate Ohio State football, but they just suck (2-6 vs. non-Big Ten ranked opponents since 2005) and are very douchebaggy about putting “the” in front of their school’s name. Not really enough for a whole post. Instead, I’ll turn to another pretentious, overhyped, overrated, craptastic team from the Midwest. Who? Notre Dame, of course. Somehow, a long time ago, they won themselves a large national following, probably because people root for anyone that wins a lot (that explains why so many people root for the Yankees or Red Sox for no apparent reason). It may be hard for you younger readers to believe, but once upon a time Notre Dame didn’t suck at football. They won a whole bunch of national championships, but their last one came in 1988. Since then all sorts of distinguished teams have won national championships, teams like Georgia Tech, Colorado, Washington (!!), and many others. Not Notre Dame. Yet their fans (many of whom are unfortunately employed in the media) keep talking about how wonderful Notre Dame is and even how they’re going to win a national championship this year.* Or, at least, they were going to before they lost to Michigan. Please remember that Michigan went 3-9 last year.

cats (the musical)

In case you’ve made your way to this blog without knowing me, I’m a big musical theatre fan. Very big. I probably see 30 or 40 plays a year, most of them musicals, I listen to cast recordings, I take frequent trips to New York to see Broadway shows. But there are some shows I simply cannot stand. Two and a half of the most miserable hours of my entire life came a few summers ago when I was forced to sit through a youth theatre production of Cats. Now, it wasn’t the production itself that was the problem. The performers (well, the leads, at least) were all very talented, the set and lights were well done, the choreography was well executed. But how the hell this show ran for eighty million years on Broadway, I have no earthly idea.

omitting the serial comma

Ah, the comma. Such a versatile punctuation mark. One could talk about it for days on end, though I have to imagine there are better things to do with one’s time. For now, though one particularly intriguing usage is worth discussing. I’d like to talk about the serial comma. It is also called the Oxford comma, and, according to Wikipedia, the Harvard comma, but I’ve never heard anyone refer to it by the latter name.* For the sake of this discussion, I’ll just call it the serial comma, since using either of the other two names would serve to embolden the arrogant douchebags who attend either of the pretentious snotty universities in the alternative names. (Perhaps at a later date I will discuss my hatred for the idea that going to a big-name school makes you better than everyone else, even though if you’re smart enough to go to a school like that, you’ll probably do well in life no matter where you go to college.)