after Labor Day

In my years of subbing grade school I don't remember any cigar boxes.  You know now they have those Hello Kitty and Spiderman backpacks.  At the end of the day they smash all their crap into them and at the beginning of the day they dump it out, it's just a big lump of, uh, stuff that I never probed into.  Well there were probably some good kids that kept their stuff in fine order, but as a sub you never notice the good kids because you are never yelling at them. 

I didn't notice any particular smell in the schools.  My impression was that they were all kept up well, and some of them, the ones built in the 1920's and 1890's, were architecturally impressive, but in the summer they had no air conditioning. 

I expect my kids had some kind of pencil sharpeners in their backpacks or their desks.  But quietly sharpening your pencil in your seat was no fun.  Getting up in front of the class where the pencil sharpener was, was a lot of fun. You could make faces at your classmates and make noise, and just generally insert a modicum of entertainment into the dull drone of daily school routine.

You would think mechanical pencils (we always called them eversharps) would be an improvement, but they are not,  There are so many working parts, they need to be pulled apart, examined and recalibrated.  Those delicate leads that break if you look at them funny, and that funny spring, and the barrel, and the mysterious thing that made the lead come out, all of that more interesting than the dull drone, spoken of previously.


This Chinese AI stuff is too nebulous for me.  I've always believed if you can't write about something then you don't really understand it.  It gets tough though.  When I'm writing my posts I always come across things I don't really know enough about, so then I look it up, and of course it is always more complicated than I thought it was, and it leads to other stuff and I get to the point where I'm really not sure what I am writing about so I try to wrap it all up and get away from it with some snappy line.  Like this.

Smell is our link to evolutionary wayback.  It is probably our first sense senses, and its right in the forefront of the brain where the sensory data come in.  It was Proust's bite into a cookie that led to all of Remembrances of Things Past, though that is probably a literary device, like I used before.

That O'Hare march was a bust.  Not many people showed up, and the cops arrested a few, but it was a gentlemanly affair and both the demonstrators and the cops praised the other side for their good behavior.  Well it was the third of three marches.  The first one was a big success, the second one did alright although some of the leaders dropped out and likewise the marchers, even more so for this one where there were so few marchers that they were easily quashed.

Demonstrations.  I guess they are good for rallying your base, giving those who want to do something, something to do, but I don't see them accomplishing anything in themselves.  The assumption of the marches was that somehow the people of the city had a way to stop these shootings but weren't implementing it so they had to prodded by people blocking their access to the airport.   Too nebulous/


Much has been made of how the Arab Springers were able to communicate with each other through social media and that got the pot boiling, but whatever became of their cause?  A closer example might be the Russkies putting up all those fake facebook pages.  Although there were plenty put up by our own Foxies and Alan Joneses.  But if you watch those crowds at Trump rallies you have to wonder what are they reading or listening to.

Labor Day is in the rearview mirror now, ahead of us that candy swirl of colored leaves, and behind that, Old Man Winter with his curious leer and phlegmy cough.