College football

The college football season is just on the horizon, so I thought I would take a little time out to make some observations, throw out some predictions, and ask a few questions.

1. Bold prediction #1: Notre Dame will spend most of the season overrated in the polls, causing them to earn a BCS berth and be outmatched in a higher bowl game than they deserve. Their unblemished streak of bowl game losses will continue.

2. Question: How much uglier can the Ducks uniforms get? Is industrial steel print really a gridiron fashion necessity? Are these guys serious?

3. Observation: Cal has spent the last few years building up a head of steam while staying in the shadow of USC. This could very well be their year. Don’t be surprised to see them as a top-5 team and Pac-10 champs at the end of the season. Troy can’t remain on top forever.

4. Another question: Does Ohio State really deserve a preseason #1 ranking?

5. Bold prediction #2: Dan Hawkins brings his Smurf-turf magic to Colorado and temporariliy shuts the mouths of the Big-12 nay-sayers by finishing no less than 4th in the conference.

6. Another observation: Those Bulldogs at Fresno State just don’t back down from anybody. LSU in Baton Rouge in October. And they’ll play like nobody’s business, too. At what point will a BCS school offer Pat Hill enough money to lure him away from Fresno? Oops, that was a question.

The first day, the fortieth day, and a few other things

Wow, nothing like 500 kids suddenly appearing at your school to kick start your energy level into high gear! On a positive note, most of our kinders were excited to be there and I only had to intervene once today with a youngster who wasn’t sure he liked this whole school idea. This is going to be an awesome school year.

Today also marks my 40th day of…well, whatever it was I was trying to do for forty days. Actually, I was completely off caffeine that entire time. I’m not sure what my future with that will be. After all, life is too short not to enjoy a good espresso, but I just don’t want to get up to the dependency levels that I had earlier. It’s up to me to find a good balance in there somewhere.

And, I looked into some school administrator degree programs online tonight. More on that later.

Oh, check out the new Storm Map at the bottom of the right hand column. It’s a Flash app, in case you can’t see it in your browser. You might need to temporarily disable any pop-up blockers you have installed if you click on it.

I have no idea why I included a picture of sushi in this post. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I’ve written about.

Oregon’s coastal dead zone

Oregon’s coastal dead zone

Apparently, marine life is dying by the tens of thousands along a stretch of the central Oregon coast. Oxygen levels in the ocean around here have dipped to lethally low levels, causing the ecosystem to not be able to support the life it contains. Oceanographers and biologists at Oregon State University are researching the problem to see if this is a temporary alteration to the environment, or an on-going trend that will change the entire make-up of the central Oregon coast.

When I was a kid, you could go to Newport, fish and crab off of the docks, and go home happy. Now, the sea lions are everywhere and affect the local fishing in the area. They’ve become a nuisance to anybody wanting to enjoy that area. I wonder how the sea lions are being affected by all of this.

New school year, new Dell

So I get to school today, open up my office, and an IT guy is in there installing my new computer. It’s a Dell, running at 2.8Ghz and 1G of RAM. DVD burner, the whole 9 yards. Suh-weet! The hard drive, well, I’m not exactly sure how big the hard drive is. Apparently, our school district has implemented a new system where anything we save gets sent to our own personal directory, which resides on the district servers. I won’t be using the hard drive to save anything. When we turn our new computers off, the whole system gets set back to the point at which it was when the tech guy set it up. The purpose of this is to prevent spyware and other assorted forms of malicious code from infecting our computers. Get a virus? It’s gone when you turn the machine off and back on again. Got some buggy software? Ditto. It’s going to take some getting used to (I’m a desktop junkie), but I think it’s going to prevent a lot of problems in the end.

They did pre-load it with some goodies like the entire Office 2003 suite, FireFox, Google Earth, and Picassa, all things we will use in an educational setting. The tech guys will come along once in a while to update the software.

Back to school tomorrow

Well, not quite. The kids come back next Monday. I’ve been there off and on all summer, and all of this week, but tomorrow is our first official day back for staff. Along with that are the meetings, trainings, etc… that take place before kids get there on Monday. And this is going to be a great school year, I can tell already. It’s hard to believe I’m starting my fifth year there already. I work with a top-notch staff who have a heart for kids and an amazing capacity for bringing out the best in their students. If you’re a school counselor I hope you have a staff like this at your building. And if you’re an educator and you’re headed back to the classroom, have a great start to the year!

Leadbelly

Sometimes it’s good to go back and look at our musical roots. Leadbelly, aka Huddie Ledbetter, was a black American folk and blues singer of the very early 1900’s. He was discovered in the early 1930’s by musicologists John and Alan Lomax, who promptly recorded several of his songs. I believe that this video recording was made right around this time. It was definitely a cutting edge production for it’s time, including color film and audio dubbing.

Leadbelly has influenced countless generations of musicians, some as diverse as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, Stone Temple Pilots, and Kurt Cobain, just to name a few. Take a look at this video and see how far ahead of his time this guy was. This was recorded even before the height of the big band era, folks. We’re fortunate to have such technology as digital video to preserve this incredibly important musical heritage.

A few dvd’s you might be interested in

Looking for something for the dvd player this weekend? If you’ve missed these at your local Hollywood Video, you might want to check them out. I didn’t plan it this way, but they’re all films based on true-life stories. Take a look:

Flight 93

Coming up on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, this is a film that tells the story of the only hijacked plane that didn’t hit it’s intended target that September day. From the beginning, you know the outcome of the incident, so the producers don’t have to over-rely on the element of suspense to hold the viewer’s attention. Throughout the film, there’s just an underlying sense of foreboding. They use that to their advantage, though, and allow the events of Flight 93 to unfold in a manner that is both factually accurate and respectfully somber. In some respects, it’s a very understated film, devoid of over-dramatization. This is indeed a fitting tribute to those unsuspecting heroes. This is one of the very, very few films that I openly wept afterward.
Walk the Line

Walk the Line

The story and music of Johnny Cash have reached a whole new generation of music fans since the turn of the millenium. This resurgence of interest in American “roots” music has hit the big screen in a film called Walk the Line. Joaquin Phoenix plays Cash, and Reese Witherspoon plays June Carter in this autobiographical film that follows Cash from his early childhood, to his failed first marriage, and subsequent marriage to Carter in 1968. Cash’s persona would be difficult to recreate in a title role, but Phoenix gets it pretty darn close. In fact, both Phoenix and Witherspoon actually do the vocal performances of Cash and Carter, in an admirably credible manner. Highlights of the film include a recreation of Cash’s live recording of a performance at Folsom Prison, an album that ultimately outsold the Beatles that year.

The World’s Fastest Indian

The World’s Fastest IndianThis is another based-on-true-life story, this time about Burt Munro, an aging New Zealander who brings his 1920’s-era modified Indian motorcycle to the famed Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah in the late 1960’s. His goal is to top 200 mph, something that had never before been accomplished on a motorcycle that size. Along the way, he has to battle an ocean, a strange new culture, and skeptical race officials who don’t want him to ride. The real story, though, is that Munro becomes a favorite of other drives and fans alike because of his stubborn persistence and winsome, endearing personality. Anthony Hopkins stars, and I haven’t seen him this animated in quite some time. To me, this is his best performance since Silence of the Lambs. The producers of his film do an outstanding job of bringing across the thrill, exhiliration, and danger of this now-legendary speedster performance. This is a wonderful family film.

New bicycling sport

With the upcoming school year, I thought it would be fun to introduce a new sport for the kids to do at recess. This combines the best elements of rodeo and bicycling.

Bully, the video game

A videogame about a kid responding to school bullying has potential for just about anything. At one extreme, a Rated-M version could feature psychopathic kids who plan a murderous rampage through some unnamed high school. At the other extreme, the Rated-E version could have innocent kids just trying to make it to 2:45 without a confrontation with a kid in a black jacket.

Fortunately, Bully, a new videogame from RockStar, appears to shy away from the former. Kids inour country DON’T need any more scenes like this going through their heads. Unfortunately, I don’t see it leaning enough toward the latter. The game features Jimmy Hopkins, a student who attends a boarding prep school somewhere in New England. Without actually having played the game, it looks like there is way too much retaliation and “pre-emptive strikes” against other students and faculty at this school. It looks like it tries to appeal to the fun-and-mayhem from the 12-15 male demographic. From the official website:

Left to fend for himself after his mother abandons him at Bullworth to go on her fifth honeymoon, Jimmy has a whole year at Bullworth ahead of him, working his way up the social ladder of this demented institution of supposed learning, standing up for what he thinks is right and taking on the liars, cheats and snobs who are the most popular members of the student body and faculty. If Jimmy can survive the school year and outsmart his rivals, he could rule the school.

This flies in the face of what we teach kids at our school. Violence of ANY kind breeds more serious violence. Instead, we teach kids how to respond to bullying situation through good refusal and reporting skills. We empower our kids to believe that the strength of the student body can more than withstand the efforts of the few. I also see this game as perpetuating the “us vs. them” paradigm, as well as the misconception that schools just aren’t doing anything about bullying.

So while this videogame could have been a lot worse, it could also have been a lot better. I’ll have to see the game in action for myself for a complete opinion, though.

What do you think about this videogame?

The first 20 days

I’m halfway through my 40 days now, so I thought I’d better check in with my progress. Here’s the run-down:

* No caffeine. Nada, zilch, zip, none. For those of you who are familiar with my coffee habits, you know how huge this is. Let’s just say that if caffeine were a controlled substance, I would have been a junkie out on the street a long time ago.
* Spiritual: Definitely reading more in my Bible these days, but still could use some work there.
* Nutritional: Doing a lot better. No fast food, mostly home made meals. Not sure about the weight loss, but I’m definitely feeling better.
* Professional: That hasn’t changed, still working away to get ready for the beginning of school.

Got another twenty days to go, so I definitely need your thoughts and prayers. It’s interesting that as I deny myself certain things, I get cravings for other things that I never had before. Not sure what that’s all about. In another week or so, I’d like to start thinking about what to do after this 40 days is up.