The week started with one of the earliest tropical storms on record: Tropical Storm Ana.
For reference, the ditch in the second picture is approximately 5 foot deep.
The photograph was taken approximately 6:00 AM on Monday morning.
Things did not improve until early Tuesday.
Personally, I like how the downspout turned out.
On Tuesday, we held a surprise Spring Recital for F_____’s wife. Normally she puts this on herself; with everything that’s happened, she cancelled it this year. My cousin, one of her students, organized and put on the recital for her. One of my jobs was to make this chocolate piano keyboard.
I didn’t get the right dark bars – I got the “mini” kind instead of the “fun size” ones – but still think it turned out okay. Actually, there were two of them, and only one white bar remained at the end of the evening.
Things were both normal and hectic on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; you know, typical end-of-term stuff. My principal surprised me with not one but two kinds of sushi: eel (my favorite!) and yellowfin (which I hadn’t tried before but found to have just the right amount of spice and kick to it).
Saturday I cleaned the house (laundry and dishes) and cut the grass. Go me! Now I can treat those annoying anthills . .
Now, I’m not a copyright lawyer, but I imagine that at some point contracts were signed.
One cannot simply get out of a contract because they find the recipient distasteful. Were that the case, the real estate, automotive, and student loan companies would immediately collapse.
In this case, Cordula Schacht – the copyright holder – is of no relation to Mr. Goebbels; in fact, her own father was acquitted at Nuremberg. Therefore, one cannot make the claim that royalties would benefit a convicted war criminal.
Peter Longerich, the biographer involved in the matter, has argued that a private person should not be given control of important historical documents. To which I ask: who gets to decide what is important?
Were I the judge in this case, I’d rule against Herr Longerich. Others disagree with me; some selections from Twitter:
All royalties should be paid to the Holocaust Museum / Memorials! He shouldn’t even be allowed an estate!
Any money paid by the publishers to any estate connected to the Nazis would be blood money.
No one should profit from this unless it’s as a donation to those affected by the Holocaust or a memorial/museum. Disgusting!
The Spawn of Satan should have no royalty rights under the law.
They ought to be ashamed that he is a family member. But people are greedy and will take $ from whatever source.
And now, a word from our sponsor:
It might not be the original (because let’s face it, Gene Wilder is beyond compare), but John Barrowman redeems the production. Pun intended.
Second, yet another former Nazi is on trial seventy years after the war ended, this time the so-called “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz“. Now, before you get offended or hot and bothered about my tone of type, please hear me out. I am not an apologist for Nazism by any stretch of the imagination, neither do I think war crimes have a statute of limitations. However, I find the overall treatment of former Nazis incongruous.
Case in point: Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were welcomed back sixty years after the fact. In fact, it seems they were forgiven some time ago, as evidenced by this article from the New York Times. I wonder why the world holds such special hatred for the Nazis when other dictators and regimes have been responsible for death on a much larger scale (like the Soviets and – by some estimates – the Chinese).
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’ve nothing against prosecuting Nazis guilty of crimes for which they’ve never been punished, but I don’t understand why we’ve forgiven some and not others.
Another part of me wonders what will happen in ten years’ time (give or take) when the final Nazi is dead. Who will then become the bogeymen of the world?
I suppose it’s also fitting that I’m watching/listening to a Twilight Zone marathon while I work on this. Rod Serling dished out devious damnations to nefarious Nazis in “Judgment Night”, “Deaths-Head Revisited”, and “He’s Alive”. There may be more, but those are the three that come immediately to mind.
In fact, Serling’s closing narration to “Deaths-Head Revisited” has become a staple in my classroom when discussing World War II and how we come to terms with what happened:
All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens,
the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain
standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some
men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they
shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but
worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the
moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become
the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only
in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.
Assuming that Tropical Storm Ana has moved out of the area, I’m off on another field trip: taking a group of top-fundraising students to a fun park. Maybe I’ll get some interesting photographs for Sunday Snapshots.
Inexorably, the wheel of time has once again turned to
Just in case you don’t know, Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can play along! All you have to do is grab the book you’re currently reading, open to a random page and share two sentences from that page. But make sure you don’t share any spoilers!*
*I wish I could take credit for this introduction, but I shamelessly stole it from Heather over at bitsnbooks. To help me make amends, you should go check out her blog.
I’m also reading my own work. No, I haven’t finished The Book; I’m reading exams. Here’s a sample from my physics review:
A .22 rifle weighs 2.49 kg. The bullet has a mass of 2.60
g and a muzzle velocity of 487.68 m/s. Calculate the
kinetic energy of both the rifle and the bullet.
What I’d really like to ask is this:
What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Not Quite In Retrospect
I may have to give Finnegans Wake a pass at this point. I’m not sure why I thought I could knock it out in four weeks at the end of a school year.
Don’t forget to follow me on:
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Twitter – where you can see my thoughts in 140 characters or less. Also, funny retweets.
As I sit here in the school office on this early Monday morning sipping my first cup pot of coffee and inhaling that unique aroma of hot paper and toner, I wonder:
How much have my students actually remembered?
World History, American History, Civics, Geography, and Physics fall off the rollers, a corner staple holding each packet in place: terms and maths and maps; things they’ve seen all semester but won’t pay any attention to until at least Monday next. Exams start Tuesday.
Every teacher knows that tests cannot *really* test the human student, only how well they retain information. Yet, every teacher wants some vindication that the class they’ve taught all year can perform well come end of term. And – if I’m perfectly honest – I know not every class is ready. Ultimately, though, I have done the best I can. I have led them to the well of knowledge, but I cannot make them drink.
Despite the flood of papers threatening to overwhelm my desk in these last weeks of school, I did manage to take a few photographs this week.
This week was Teacher Appreciation Week. This is what I received:
Then, my sister-in-law bought yet another car in her seemingly never ending quest to find the perfect used car. The newest candidate is this 1996 soft-top Mustang convertible:
This week was also the school’s Junior/Senior Banquet – one event I honestly don’t mind chaperoning. Not only did I find a snazzy new silver bow tie (on sale!), but I also found some angry jewelry while my wife looked for something to match her dress:
We were invited by several of the students to come take pictures with them down by the river, which coincided with the heraldric winds of Tropical Storm Ana:
This weekend I was finally able to finish typing my exams and exam reviews. Smokey lent moral support.
Don’t forget to follow me on:
Facebook – where I share news stories, articles from other blogs, and various and sundry miscellany that happens to catch my eye. It’s stuff you won’t see here! Well, mostly.
Instagram – where I show you my Life in Motion and share quotes and such. The widget only shows my last three photographs – don’t you want to see them all?
Twitter – where you can see my thoughts in 140 characters or less. Also, funny retweets.
Seventy years ago, this was not the case. Seventy years ago, the Allied Powers declared victory over Adolf Hitler’s Reich.
I could write about the power and significance of this moment, but the historian in me knows that only those who lived it can truly understand.
In his speech to the British people, Winston Churchill said
My dear friends, this is your hour. This is not victory of a party or of any class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole. We were the first, in this ancient island, to draw the sword against tyranny. After a while we were left all alone against the most tremendous military power that has been seen. We were all alone for a whole year . . . The lights went out and the bombs came down. But every man, woman and child in the country had no thought of quitting the struggle. London can take it. So we came back after long months from the jaws of death, out of the mouth of hell, while all the world wondered. When shall the reputation and faith of this generation of English men and women fail? I say that in the long years to come not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done and they will say “do not despair, do not yield to violence and tyranny, march straightforward and die if need be-unconquered.”
Every year I have students ask how things like the Holocaust could have happened and explain what they would have done under similar circumstances. After kindly explaining that no-one knows what they will do in any given situation until they are in it, I share this quote from Rod Sterling’s Twilight Zone episode Deaths-Head Revisited:
All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus,
the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all
of them. They must remain standing because they are a
monument to a moment in time when some men decided to
turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they
shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their
knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the
moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be
haunted by its remembrance, then we become the
gravediggers.
Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in
the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.
Now I can treat those annoying anthills . .
Running In My Head 