This and that

* Huh. So now Blogger is going to make blogs with "explicit content" into "private" blogs. They say "explicit nudity and sexual content." I'm hoping I didn't have any photos of Old Masters paintings or anything on here that might have a woman with a bare breast, and the blog gets taken down for that. I don't THINK I do, but it's been a long time I've been doing this blog.

* Trying to make today a reading day so I feel like I'm not a total slacker. Playing with the idea of retrieving old class material from old Blackboard pages and updating it and posting it so the next week's lecture material is up. Except I don't have my textbooks at home. I really wasn't anticipating this to be as bad as it was....last week, I dragged stuff home in case we were closed Monday and then we got no precipitation.

Some places they're talking about "the end of snow days" - where students and teachers are expected to work remotely from home. While there's a huge problem with that for many school systems (it presupposes everyone having a working computer at their disposal and a good Internet connection), it seems to be one of those educational ideas that some people love.

I admit it: I don't love it. The rare snow day (and even when I was a kid in the snowbelt of Ohio, they WERE fairly rare - then again, Ohio was pretty good at dealing with snow) was a treat, a chance to do something different - running around outside making snowmen or sledding or whatever. Sometimes I think that "must keep instructional time high" happens at the expense of a lot of things in childhood that were frankly kind of nice (Valentine's Day parties, Hallowe'en costume parades....) and looking at it from the wrong side of 18, I want to say, "These kids are going to have sixty or more years to be adults....let them have the goofy Valentine's Day party for now, because when they're in their forties, they'll just have to go to work that day and work like normal."

And yeah, I get that when it stretches into weeks rather than days, it begins to become a problem - but in my family we always had books and educational toys and stuff or my mom would teach us some "kitchen chemistry" or something like that.

I don't know. I worry about people wanting to turn kids into little workers too early - seeing as I'm someone who works hard and sometimes finds she has to forgo fun in favor of work. Kids need to "save up" those memories of fun experiences (like Frederick the Mouse, though perhaps I would argue that all the mice could gather up "pretty visions" while they were gathering food, and Frederick could maybe do his share of food gathering...). Because sometimes when you're an adult, the memories of going sledding, or having a party at school, or building a giant fort in the living room on a snow day, are things that are sustaining and important, and I wonder if there are some kids who grow up without memories of fun things....

Again, it comes down to balance. But I think missing maybe one day of school now and then for heavy snow or icy roads isn't going to doom the future of America...

* My birthday is later this week. As is the fashion with some bloggers, I looked up what song was popular the week I was born:

"Everyday People" by Sly and the Family Stone

Mmmmmnnn. Not a HUGE fan of the song, but I suppose it could be worse: a couple weeks earlier "Crimson and Clover" was the big one, and in the summer of '69 "In the Year 2525" and "Sugar, Sugar" were big hits.

1969 was a weird year, that's what I conclude from the range of music popular in that year. Well. Weird kid born in a weird year, I guess.

I share a birthday (day and year) with a few people; the only one I've actually heard of is Willie Banks, who played for the Cubs for a little while.

My birthday also apparently falls on the old Roman holiday of Equerria, which was a day when horses were raced. (Maybe Equestria needs a track-and-field day called Equerria, given their love of incorporating mythology into the world that is being built there)

According to the internet, two things happened on the day of my birth that had some kind of historical import:

- Gen Hafez al-Assad becomes head of Syria via military coup (I'm guessing this was not a positive thing, given that the guy's son is now in power there, and the whole country is in misery)
- President Nixon visits West-Berlin (I don't know anything about this)

Apparently the Grateful Dead also played a concert at the Fillmore West.