Themes and Snarkiness

I discovered two Google "related" products that I am now in love with.

Yesterday, my Gmail account magically asked me what "theme" I would like. I love my gmail account for many reasons, and technically, I don't need a pretty background, but I'm not going to say no. I wasn't totally enthralled with the options. Most are just color scheme, much like you can have the same Windows set up in different colors. I was very interested in the "Tree" theme that supposedly changes based on the location you input, when I couldn't actually get the tree to change*, I quickly lost interest in this theme. I wasn't exactly wowed by any of them (says the woman who has yet to find a blog template that she is completely happy with either), but I really like the personalization aspect. I spend more time looking at my Gmail account than any other website, so at least I can pick the color.

What made me even happier, however, was Let Me Google That For You.** This site is designed for all of those who are too lazy to look something up themselves. It's snarky and passive agressive, but it's also genius. It basically provides a link that you can share with the offending lazy party that not only provides the actual Google results, but also provides an annimation that demonstrates the very complex process of conducting a Google search. This makes me wonder if I should devote my break to developing a "Here let Me Check the Syllabus For You" service that demonstates a similar skill.

Yay, for Google products that don't actually serve any function purpose, but make me happy.

Notes:
* Update: I finally figured this out. The tree does not change, the weather at the top changes, but it only changes if Google recognizes your city. Even though it appears to accept lots of places, if you put in the nearest "large" city, it seems to work better.
**This is not actually a Google product.

Dreams

Apparently pregnant women dream more than normal people. While normally my dreams are not interesting enough tell you all, I had to make an exception since this one involved a large number of my readers and was exceptionally bizarre.

M, cfa, jcampbell, B, and I are all sitting in Chilli's in Washington, DC (where we all apparently now live) discussing what cfa is going to do next year. Somewhere in the midst of this conversation M tries to convince cfa that before she leaves MHS, she needs to pass out M's leftover Obama stickers as prizes. After a lenghty discussion about whether or not stickers are appropriate for highschoolers*, cfa casually says, "I really think it might be weird since the Obama girls are coming to MHS next year and they might think that stickers are weird."

B asks cfa why she is leaving the same year that the Obama girls are coming. Cfa says "it's too much paperwork."

While M and I try and convince cfa that she must stay at MHS, jcampbell stops texting, causually looks up and says "have you thought about applying for the secret service job. They are required to have a least one agent that is certified in education."

Cfa then gives up her day job as an English teacher to become the secret service education liason.

*To clarify this conversation had nothing to do with the political content of the stickers, but was strickly about the age appropriateness of stickers in general.

Lists

Things I need to accomplish this week:

• grade papers
• grade a month's worth of "in-class" writing
  
• fix Blackboard gradebook, so I can post grades
• get new tires for Corolla
• buy multiple bags of Snyder's Pretzels for my mom*
• buy regional beer to take to Arkansas**
• clean out teaching bag
• return Netflix movies
  
• do laundry
• work on synthesis statement
• go to library
• call insurance company

Things I have done today:

• grade two papers
• spend an hour on internet looking for a way to email insurance company
• browse Netflix on demand
• check to see if Bones is new this week
  
• read emails on department listserv about stray cat
• refresh Fedex website to check for package updates
• play with privacy options on baby blog

Clearly my productivity attention span is equal to approximately two papers. I've determined that electronic grading is probably not for me (although it cut down on copying expenses for the internship). Electronic grading means secure dropboxes which requires internet access, which requires me play on the internet instead of working, which means I don't grade. This is a problem.

Documentaries

Lately, I seem to be getting sucked into documentaries at a disturbing rate. The problem isn't that they are documentaries, but that I can justify it as "not really television" because it's "educational." Here's what I've learned...

• Adolescent girls are being kidnapped into prostitution rings in suburbia. I've known, this because Oprah did a show on this a couple of years ago.* This was more of an NBC investigation, but still very disturbing. If I am remembering correctly, Oprah's show was about pimps luring girls into prostitution. The more disturbing thing about this show was that all of the girls were lured by fellow adolescents.
• Drinking the Koolaid is creepier than I'd realized. NBC also did a 2 hour documentary about Jonestown and infamous leader Jim Jones. The clips from the website are really just as informative as the documentary, but I learned a lot about the background of this situation that I hadn't known. My major complaint, however, is that I kept watching for the entire two hours because I wanted to know how the "survivors" escaped the koolaide fate and the documentary never explained. I ended up googling this later.
  
• The Mafia has very strict politeness rules. Okay, this is something that I kinda figured, but this was actually kinda fascinating. Discovery Channel has a two part series on the 10 Commandments of the Mafia. In addition to the explaination about how much lying was expected and how much was too much, I also learned that the linguistically the Mafia is very tightly bound by it's own set of politeness rules (such as introductions) and violations of those rules might get you killed.
  

I am currently trying to convince myself that I need to grade tonight rather than see a modern CSI team recreate the Kennedy assasination, but we'll see what happens.


*Yes, I know this is only one step up from citing Wikipedia.

Crossing the Line

Just when I thought that I was done with election stories that would greatly upset me, I read this article about a SC priest wrote his parishioners a letter telling them they were ineligible for communion if they vote for Barack Obama. I've been very lucky that our particular parish is both one of the most liberal Catholic churches I've ever been to, and has stayed away from mixing politics and religion.

I realize that this is by no means the only instance of organized religion using it's power to affect policy. We saw numerous instances of this in both CA and AR last week, among other places, but it makes me even more sad when a church official uses his position to essentially excommunicate* people who chose to vote in a particular way.

I won't go into all of the reasons why abortion isn't the only human rights issue that should be considered when voting. Encouraging church members to vote one way is bad enough, but to punish them when they prioritize different ideologies (many of which involve other human rights issues) crosses a line that makes me very sad. I am very glad that other church officials are denouncing the move, but I don't know that is enough to undo the damage that individuals like this priest have done.

*for those unfamiliar with Catholic doctrine, excommunication literally means that you are no longer in "communion" with the church. While sometimes, this is irreversible, the act is essentially the same here.

Templates

I need someone to invent an application that asks "What do you need to be doing right now?" when I google Blogger Templates. I wonder if my students will feel better knowing that even though they won't get papers back tomorrow, I have new templates on my blogs.