A foul start to the day...

Attitude is everything. It motivates action, which increases productivity and improves morale, which perpetuates a positive attitude."
      - Robert Urich

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. I don't, but I have developed a certain reliance on publishers. Some just find it hard to publish a lousy book, I've found.

Similarly, I do not judge a screenplay by the size of the associated advertising budget. Instead, I have come to rely on the casting to help me assess a movie or TV show.

And I have found, over the years, that just about anything with Robert Urich in it was worth my attention. In the end, whatever it was may not have been worth watching (I seem to recall a Love Boat remake from a few years ago), but somehow I enjoyed Urich's performances, even in the occasional stinkeroo. I liked the man behind the character, I guess.

It was thus unpleasant to learn that Urich died this morning of cancer, at the age of 55.

The wind did howl last night... all night long, as if the elements themselves mourned Urich's passing.

Cheers...

Strange weather...

When I did finally look out the window, it turned out that snow of some kind had fallen during the night. The snow was quickly melting under the onslaught of rain that, as far as I could tell, was coming down horizontally, driven by a wicked wind.

The rain had mostly stopped by the time I left for the store, but now, looking past the front window signage, I can see that it's honest-to-goodness snowing, which is not all that unusual for this time of the year, generally speaking, but very unusual given this past winter's track record.

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I've begun to develop a notion that some state-funded initiatives have historically started out well, only to be done in by a combination of factors. I have in mind the public education system, which - assuming I am not mislead by historical and anecdotal evidence - did a reasonably good job of producing an educated citizenry in the early part of the 20th century.

So far, I think I have identified sa couple of factors:

(1) Adults who were or knew people who were uneducated understood, at least on an intuitive level, the importance of getting an education. This is the basis, I think, for the oft-repeated observation of how having a note sent home by a teacher was a cause for concern on the part of students.

(2) Local control of education, which largely prevented nitwits from occupying and (more important) aggrandizing positions of power. The local paper, for example, ran an article recently on a debate raging in the local school system on whether or not testing students is a wise thing. The side arguing against testing has the weight of contemporary educational "theory" behind it, but such theories tend to be borne of the most recent failure of the previous, big-government funded new-fangled theory.

Here, I am reminded of a recent trend in mathematics that proposes curricula based on student self-exploration and discovery, particularly in groups, as opposed to the approaches of the past, which emphasize the presentation of mathematical concepts in an organized manner.
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Customers coming...

Cheers...