Dept. of Things That Delight Me

Yo' momma's so fat, when she does ballet, she wears a three-three.

"NOT Rec. Materials"

My employer, www.dallasisd.org, has a section under "Staff" called "Curriculum Central." The only way you can access this portion of the web site is with some menial form of staff identification, although, considering how fucked up everything else is with DISD, a monkey armed with a mighty Texas Instruments 99-4A could probably hack it in under a grande cafe mocha. I digress.

Curriculum Central has all kinds of turgid reading for the tech-savvy (and not so tech-savvy) staff member. Mostly what it contains is something called the "Scope and Sequence" for each course by discipline. These list what skills are supposed to be taught in each class, and in what order, all on handy pdf files to print or download. There are also some other things such as vendor lists, forms and the like. These are offered off to the side of the main page of Curriculum Central, and it looks like this:

• OIR (Data)
• Dallas Collaborative Model
• GIB (Revised 7-25-06)
• Recommended Materials
• NOT Rec. Materials
• Environmental Education Center
• Inet
• Dallas ISD Home

So you know which one I just HAD to click. The document was one big mundane table: various vendors, what they hawked, why it wasn't appropriate to DISD's needs, etc. Then I came to the following (and I quote verbatim, emphasis mine):

• Company/Address: Madden Football Video Game
• Contact Person/Tel. Number: Submitted by (don't want to be sued)
• Program Purpose: Commercial Video Game
• Intended Audience/Grade Levels: Recommended for use with Grade 6
• Reason: No written curriculum to support TEKS/TAKS skills to be reinforced by game, not researched-based, and excessive cost.
• Submitted: May 2004
• Reviewd: May 2004

As near as I can figure, either the dumbass who submitted it thought Madden '04 would be a good teaching tool for 6th graders, or the person who submitted it was ratting out a coach who was using it rather than teaching. Either way, kudos to someone for recognizing that it was not a legitimate teaching tool.

But wait a minute... I want to know who had the stones to submit a materials request like this, and I want to know whether or not they had a P-card.

And if you are a football coach reading this, fuck you. Fuck you and your brand fucking new stadium, and fuck you with the stack of dry-rotting paperbacks that I have to use in my class room. Of course, if you really are a football coach, odds are you can't read this much in one sitting anyway, especially not without pictures, you fucking fucks.

Dept. of Monkeys Fucking Footballs

Only in the Dallas Independent School District: we're under federal investigation for misappropriation of funds, we're reeling from a more recent but related scandal uncovered by the Dallas Morning News involving the lack of supervision of district credit cards (called procurement cards or p-cards), so what are we going to do? How about a three hour district-wide pep rally for teachers at the American Airlines Center sponsored by Ford?

But wait, it gets better! Our speaker is none other than "Dr. Attitude," a motivational speaker noted for being a "dynamic life coach who specializes in changing behaviors through a positive attitude and who has addressed employees at many top U.S. corporations."

He's a fucking salesman giving us a fucking motivational speech "especially tailored to DISD employees." Oh, and did I mention that there will only be 9,000 parking spaces available for the 45,000 DISD employees? Hmm. Well, I guess we can just load up some busses and--no, wait, we don't have discretionary money available to individual campuses any more to cover the costs of things like this, so we're just going to trust that everyone will show up. We'll take roll.

For more of this sickening silliness, go here:
http://www.dallasisd.org/kickoff/

Free to Good Home: TI-99/4A

So I had a garage sale last weekend, and amongst the fabulous treasures that I tried to hawk on my driveway was my first computer. I was hoping that just maybe some retro-techie kind of person would garage-sail by, geek out, and buy my solid state piece of early-80's technology, but to no avail. Actually, one guy came by with his French friend (no joke, the guy had a French accent) and said, "Hey! Want to see the first computer I ever programmed on?" He was the only one that knew what it was, and the fucker didn't buy it, so now I offer it for FREE to the web-community.

First come, first served, no strings attached: I'm giving away the mighty Texas Instruments-99/4A. It comes with all of its original cables (you can hook it up to a black-and-white or a color television), a tape recorder for storing information (also known as "data" in the computing industry), and a speech synthesizer module that plugs in the side of it kind of like an Atari cartridge. So if you (or someone you know) collect old computer artifacts, drop me a line and it is yours. We'll work out shipping arrangements or, if you live in the DFW metromess, pickup arrangements.

Dept. of Things I Need

This, my friends, is comedy. More of these here:



http://www.evolvefish.com/fish/emblems.html