Socialist Census Forms

Inflatable Census Idol / Emergency Ark, Union Square
Obama's socialists, applying their godless scientific techniques to counting and sorting us like sardines, have sent a census form cleverly addressed to The Resident at my address -- even though they already know who I am.

Thanks to the Facebook "privacy policy" that stays one step ahead of me in its quest to rip me open -- so advertisers and other Internet predators can toy with my beating heart like an Aztec priest -- any information I give the Census Takers will be easy to link to my tax forms, which means the godless IRS may find out I have fewer than the few hundred dependents I claim.

The Census Takers will want to know personal religious details that are none of their business, like the fact that I have 17 wives.

I was going to limit myself to one wife for each month of the year, but five of the first dozen disobeyed me and I had to trade them in.  Then each wife has, I don't know, two to ten children apiece, and they're all on welfare.

"Render unto Caesar the bills from Babylon," I say, because I have to spend all the time I'm not procreating becoming more righteous so [God] will notice me, down here in the multitudes of pseudo-righteous phonies.

Then there's the illegal aliens I rented the basement to -- who I'm pretty sure have built a sub-basement and rented it out to aliens from an even more godforsaken country, where the people are not just ignorant savages who can't even speak English, but freckled in the most nauseating hues imaginable, marked by [God] for the suffering they deserve.

I wouldn't mind the hideously freckled illegal aliens so much -- because, being too ugly to come out in the daytime, they would not compete with me for the work I would take if it did not interfere with my procreating and righteousness -- but I've noticed the floor up here is starting to slouch, and I'm worried they might be building a sub-sub-basement themselves down there, to rent out to beings so alien they don't come outside at all.

I would go down and check, but I'm worried I would never come out again!

So the Census Takers can go to hell!  Righteous, real Americans like me are as unquantifiable as the number of letters in the name of [God].  And maybe the socialists don't know how many of us there are, but [God] does, and the last time I talked to Him, He said His privacy policy will never change, and that...

What happens in this religion stays in this religion!

Say hallelujah!

[ Trying to Break Down Resistance to the Census ]

Park Central Hotel

At 7th Ave & 55th St.  Built in the late 1920s, I think the odd updates -- the modern metal panels and windows -- are what caught my eye.

Like reupholstering an old sofa in a more modern style to make it "look newer," the updating just degrades whatever dignity the original had.  But the hodgepodge surface of the building is still interesting, and rich in its way.

Note the brick arches barely peeking through the metal plates below right.


The hotel once housed luminaries like Jackie Gleason and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the mobster Albert Anastasia was murdered there.  [ via Wikipedia ]

And when I looked (in vain) for a decent photo of the arched base I stumbled on this fascinating bit of recent mayhem: 'Top Model' Chaos Erupts Outside Park Central Hotel.

7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2

Above, 7 WTC from the Manhattan Bridge on a foggy day.

Left, from 6th Ave. in the Village, a 7 WTC wannabe (the "Trump Soho") that proves a reflective surface cannot redeem crappy design.  Note how the charcoal cutout up top helps suggest an overlord gazing down on his realm.  And note 7 WTC in the distance to its left.

Below left, 7 WTC from the Williamsburg Bridge.  Below right, from Trinity Place, across the Twin Towers site.


Both below are from near City Hall Park to the east.


And finally, the shot below is from a ways up the West Side Highway.


[ 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1 ]

The Crookedness of Queens

I'm not sure why, but the photos here -- looking toward Queens Plaza from the bridge over the LIRR to the south -- look crooked no matter what I do to straighten them out.  Above and left, to the northeast.

Below (closeup left), on the southwest side, what looks like "Cleaning Time" worn off around a missing clock on a building in front of Citicorp.


And below, the always hectic sight of traffic hurtling through the Plaza beneath the MTA tracks.

7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1

The surface and detail of a building can affect viewers in the same visceral way size and shape do.  So even a huge box like the World Trade Center's 7 WTC, above, can avoid crushing its surroundings if it has a good complexion.

Of course a reflective surface that mirrors the sky and other buildings makes that easier (and if too many buildings were reflective the city would turn into a giant light-amplifying death ray) but 7's surface is not just reflective -- it has a translucent depth that embodies the thought put into it.


An example of a thoughtless, ugly surface is right across the West Side Highway, at the World Financial Center (WFC), just above and below left.  Its surface looks like brown plastic mailing tape, and the "grand entrance" on the complex's south side, above right, should come with a warning that -- like Lot's wife leaving Sodom -- bad things will happen if you take a good look at it.  You will turn into plastic.

The WFC towers look best when light hits them at the angle below left, but still worse than the most clichéd shot of 7 WTC, below right.


Even 7 WTC's corrugated chrome looks good, below.  Note the speeding pigeons near the bottom left.


[ 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2 ]
[ The See-Through Skyscraper, City Room ]

School Daze

From the excellent season 4 of The Wire
Sure there's the deadly recession and the wars, and the fascist harpies on FOX chanting night and day for our destruction.  But there's a whole 'nother world of problems out there too, like... education.

Obama Calls for a Sweeping Overhaul in Education Law, today's NY Times editorial hails movement toward National School Standards, at Last, and Texas conservatives are rewriting textbooks to make their battle against facts, logic, and decency sound heroic.

The way public schools churn out kids doomed to failure -- and the street corner and prison -- is the cruelest of social problems, and the most difficult to solve because school is where everything -- poverty, race, rights, religion, taxes, etc. -- hits the pavement, and because school systems are such large and complex organisms.

On a hopeful note, Building a Better Teacher unearths a few clues to the mystery of classroom success, in the hope that middling teachers can be turned into really effective ones.  Two of the article's key ideas: there's a method to maintaining order and focus in the classroom, and teachers need to not just understand the subject they're teaching, but how it might be understood (and misunderstood) by 30 young minds.

Meanwhile, Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change.  They are concerned that students will not be ignorant enough to vote for them, so they're forcing textbook publishers to extol their "philosophy," which I believe has been distilled since Reagan to the verse...

What's mine is mine
What's yours is mine
And if you don't like it
F*ck you!

...and stuff about how Republicans were 100% behind the Civil Rights movement until the Black Panthers arrived (carrying shotguns without NRA cards) and proved that Government is the Problem.

I was lucky enough to go to decent public schools.  I had issues, misunderstood all kinds of stuff, and didn't take advantage of school the way I should have, but I remember some great teachers (and even administrators, like the grade school principal who rescued me from multiplication table failure, so I now have the ability to understand... just how financially screwed I am right now).

I've said before that I think a lot of the meaning of life has to do with what you pass along and, as one of the researchers profiled by Building a Better Teacher says, "You could change the world with a [great] first-year teacher."