Don Quixote isn’t really all wrinkly; that is just the bad lighting.

Actually, I guess he was wrinkly, but not in my living room. Tilting at windmills takes it out of a person.

That speaker is over thirty years old. All the fuzzy foam-front rotted off years ago. It originally belonged to my brother, but when he moved out, he built an entirely new system and he left this speaker, and its identical twin, behind for our parents.

Our parents’ idea of a good stereo was anything with detachable speakers. The detachable speakers were even better if they were not detached.

I ended up with both unwanted speakers, and I still use them. In fact, my stereo system has four large speakers, contained in two rooms. Downstairs, Hub has speakers that are the same size as an average person.

This used to be really cool, until Bose started making little tiny speakers with twice the sound of the big ones. Back in the day, the bigger the speakers, the better the system. Now, the opposite seems to be true.

This works for cell phones, too. Mom’s first cell phone was the same size as her landline phone. Now, I’ve seen cell phones the size of matchbooks. This would not work for me. I would lose something the size of a matchbox. Also, I would not be able to take it seriously; it would always seem like a toy. My cell phone isn’t huge, but when I hold it in my hand, you can see both ends of it beyond my hand. When I absentmindedly lay it down somewhere and then look frantically for it, I do not mistake it for a matchbook.

I used to have a smaller cell phone, but I loaned it to so many people, it became tainted. Over half the calls that came in were not for me. This became worse than inconvenient, so I ditched the contract and bought a Tracfone. I will never go back to a contract; this pre-paid stuff is perfect for me. I know some people have had trouble with Tracfone, but I never have.

I am Tangent Woman; hear me change the subject on myself ’til I forget why I’m here.

Oh yes. Ancient speakers with no more foam.

They still work, and they work extremely well. They are, as electronics go, antique.

One of my dead boyfriends had speakers that nearly touched the ceiling. I think most of our group suffered hearing loss from sitting in Mike’s dorm room with the volume cranked up to eleven.

Most of the time, having really old electronics isn’t something one would brag about, or even let be known. Old electronics aren’t really antiques; they are useless embarrassments. There really should be a scary man with a wooden barrow, walking around neighborhoods calling “Bring out yer dead!” and filling the barrrow with old computers and keyboards and tv’s and cell phones and speakers and turntables, etc.

Kind of like this:

The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead. [a man puts a body on the cart]
Large Man with Dead Body: Here’s one.
The Dead Collector: That’ll be ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There’s your ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not.
The Dead Collector: He isn’t.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m getting better.
Large Man with Dead Body: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.
The Dead Collector: Well, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I don’t want to go on the cart.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, don’t be such a baby.
The Dead Collector: I can’t take him.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I feel fine.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, do me a favor.
The Dead Collector: I can’t.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won’t be long.
The Dead Collector: I promised I’d be at the Robinsons’. They’ve lost nine today.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, when’s your next round?
The Dead Collector: Thursday.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I think I’ll go for a walk.
Large Man with Dead Body: You’re not fooling anyone, you know. Isn’t there anything you could do?
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I feel happy. I feel happy. [the Dead Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the Body with his a whack of his club]
Large Man with Dead Body: Ah, thank you very much.
The Dead Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Large Man with Dead Body: Right.

You will just have to jog your memory for a visual, because once again, Blogger won’t let me post the really cool Monty Python picture I have. What’s with this “no picture” thing, Blogger? Nine out of ten times, I can’t post a picture. And this was a MONTY PYTHON picture, for pete’s sake.

I think maybe I’ve tilted at too many windmills lately. I tried to post a picture of my glucometer but Blogger doesn’t like that one, either. Maybe it was large number on it.

285.

That, and last night’s sleeping pills (which I took out of desperation) have made me dangerously disoriented today.

Uh, that’s desperation in that I simply HAD to get some sleep, not the other kind of desperation that drives people to take pills for more sinister reasons.

I’m sleep-deprived, not crazy.

They weren’t really ‘sleeping pills,’ either; they were muscle relaxants. I’m not going to say that I am stressed to the very edges of the firly brinkmire, but my doctor once told me that even if I didn’t have any bones I could still stand up and walk.

I saw a cartoon once wherein Raggedy Ann was up and walking about, and it wasn’t pretty.

Sleep-deprived. Yes.

All I’ve done lately is whine. I should be ashamed of myself. I deserve to be spanked.

Any volunteers?

Okay, okay, I’m leaving.

I firmly believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator, should contain no idiocy or errors.

I also believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator that DOES contain idiocy or errors should be posted publicly and that the general public should be allowed to mock it.

I suppose that my belief that administrators should be required to be intelligent and able to proofread would be thrown out by the PC police.

This is the letter a principal gave me several years ago, demanding requesting that I take down my bulletin board about Banned Books Week. I had used that same bulletin board for over ten years, and in those earlier years, he had actually praised it for being timely and creative. That was, of course, before he saw Waldo on there.

This is, of course, the same school system that didn’t want me to bring in speakers from the outside to talk about careers because it might give the students ‘ideas.’ These people would have volunteered their time, and it would have been of enormous benefit to the students, but no. Ideas are scary.

A few years later, the same man who denied permission for me to bring in speakers for free, spent nearly a million dollars of taxpayer money to take all the middle school students to town and have paid speakers talk to them about the same thing I could have done for free. By this time, you see, the Trend Wheel had spun back around, and it was now permissable to give the students ‘ideas.’

One of those speakers represented General Motors, and her speech was excellent, although it didn’t sit well with administration. She spoke about high school ‘graduates’ for whom a diploma was nothing but a piece of paper that connoted untruths. She spoke about how an employer should have the right to assume that a diploma pretty much guaranteed literacy and general competence. She spoke about all the money big corporations were having to shell into remedial programs for employees who had diplomas, pieces of paper that represented four years of showing up and not much else. She spoke about how businesses would really appreciate a diploma that told the truth: that if a student had been graduated out of respect for really trying, the diploma should say so, discretely of course, but in terms that the business world would be able to interpret. If the student was just going through the motions of graduation for self-esteem’s sake, the diploma should say so. And if the diploma was rightfully earned because the student had become fully literate and generally competent and had genuinely and individually and truthfully learned how to care for himself/herself in the world in general, the business world should be able to see that kind of diploma and interpret it for what it was: a real diploma.

Oohh, the remarks that were scattered throughout the auditorium. And when we returned to the individual buildings, there was much talk of blueberries and self-esteem.

My friends are mostly lawyers and businesspeople and other educators. Before the edict went out, I often had one of them come to my classroom and talk about what they did all day, and then the students would ask questions. Silly me, I really thought it was helplful.

Sure, they asked my lawyer friends about their individual rights and stuff, but. . . . .

Oh. I get it.

We certainly can’t have our students understanding their basic civil rights and those of their fellow citizens of any age, now can we.

What a narrow escape.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly