If any newer readers want to read more about Little Quinn’s life, you can find links to posts I wrote during his days on Earth in my “Notable Dispatches” page, accessible by the tab link at the top of the main body of this blog.
On the “Saga’s End” post — the post I wrote on the day he died — there was an outpouring of support in comments, but those comments are now gone because they were left on an old commenting system that I no longer use here. I did save them all on my hard drive(s), however. But the general lack of condolence on the post as it exists now does not reflect what happened at the time.
1. If you could interview anyone on your blog (alive or dead) who would you chose and why?
This is a common question, so I’ll try to give an answer I haven’t given before. Leonard Bernstein.
2. What do you feel is your strength as a blogger?
An almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
OK, that’s actually one of the secret weapons of the Spanish Inquisition. I like to think I can string words together in a way that expresses the jumble in my head in a way that doesn’t suck.
3. Can you share a little bit about yourself that you have not already mentioned on your blog?
You know, once you’ve been doing this almost nine years, it’s hard to find anything like this that I’m still comfortable mentioning here! I suppose that the pies in my face in the post two down from this one might qualify, but it’s there, so…if I haven’t mentioned it yet, I’m not likely to!
4. If you were forced to change the name of your blog, what would you change it to? Why?
Opinionation in Overalls. Or Blatherous Babble in Bibs. Or Droning in Dungarees.
5. What do you think is the most fulfilling part of being a blogger?
I love the writing, and when I write a post that I particularly like, I dig the feeling of satisfaction I get as I click “send”. But the nature of blogging is the interaction, really. I like it when I get good, thought-provoking comments or links back from other peoples’ blogs.
6. What would you do with your last day if you found you had only one more day to live?
Find a bakery and start the biggest pie fight I could.
7. You’ve been doing medical research for decades and have finally found a cure. What was it that you found a cure for and why did you choose this particular ailment?
Oh, man…that’s a tough one. Cerebral palsy, which took my son? Or pancreatic cancer, which took my mother-in-law? or could I widen my scope out far enough to eliminate all cancers?
8. What is your most guilty pleasure?
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I freely and openly admit to liking all of the things I like.
9. Answer only one. What is your favorite book, movie or TV show?
OK, fine, I’ll play by the rules, despite my instinct to cheat on questions like this.
Book: The Lord of the Rings Movie: Star Wars: A New Hope Teevee Show: Firefly
10. What do you think is the very best smell in the world? The one smell that can take you back to a time and place of a very vivid memory in your past?”
OK, I didn’t cheat on the last one, so I’m cheating here.
Pizza baking. I love the smell of a cooking pizza, and it invariably reminds me of the good times I had working at Pizza Hut. Now, there were some bad times there too, and in no way would I ever want to go back to that part of my life, but I do fondly recall some of those times.
Roasting turkey. This reminds me of holidays in my home as a kid.
And then there’s that “city smell”. If you’ve ever walked down a busy street in a vibrant city with lots of restaurants and cafes and whatnot, you know that smell. It’s a thousand different food smells and urban smells and other smells wrangling together. Whenever I smell it, no matter what city I’m in, I’m whisked away to the first time I recall really noticing that smell, when I was walking along Yonge Street in Toronto with my sister one winter.
I’d just like to thank everyone who has weighed in either here, or on Facebook, or in e-mail about today’s anniversary of Little Quinn’s passing. It really doesn’t feel like it’s been five years, sometimes; other times, it seems like it’s been longer. Maybe some time I’ll write more about the various strategies The Wife and I used to cope and get through all of the challenges that Little Quinn posed, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. (Keep that in mind, all you regular readers — we’re two months away from the next edition of Ask Me Anything!) Those challenges were many, and they went on a long time even after he was gone — a longer time than I had even thought likely. The passing of a child is a long-haul kind of thing.
Some of you seem to worry — and this is perfectly normal — about the inadequacy of the words you have to offer. Believe me when I tell you, any words of support and love and understanding are the right words. As long as they’re from the heart, they’re the right words, and I value each word that anyone has ever said to me about him.
So anyway, now back to regular content, huzzah! (But I’ll probably be skipping Sentential Links for this week. I just haven’t been online much, and judging from my traffic numbers, none of you have, either!)
I spent a muchly-deserved, muchly-anticipated long weekend over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a great time. Details and photos and such after the break. This is a “daily life” type of post, with a bunch of photos. But there’s also a punchline at the end which you may find amusing, if you’ve ever thought I warranted some kind of “just desserts”….
Thanksgiving Morning here at Casa Jaquandor is a lazy affair. The Wife and I are often quite tired heading into this particular weekend, as our jobs both tend to pick up and become very hectic as the Holiday Season approaches. We’re always grateful to have a morning that consists of lazing about, watching the Macy’s Parade, drinking coffee, and eating donuts. It’s especially relaxing because…we don’t cook T-giving dinner.
For the last five or six years, our tradition on Thanksgiving has been to eat out. With my parents not really feeling like cooking the massive meal anymore, and with their drive to our home being about an hour, we’ve decided it’s best just to go to a local restaurant. We tried a couple of different places early on, and were disappointed, but then The Wife and I discovered Danny’s a few years back. We first went there on an October night several years ago, whereupon we discovered that they were open for Thanksgiving with special meals, including a turkey dinner. We loved their set-up, and we had a winner. So that’s where we go. This year, they did away with the “special Thanksgiving menu” and instead set up a buffet line, with all the usual Thanksgiving selections. (Almost all, actually — The Wife didn’t get her beloved green bean casserole.)
After the mid-afternoon meal (when we sat down, the Lions led the Patriots 17-10, but when we left, the Patriots had won 45-24), my parents absconded with The Daughter for a couple of days at their home, allowing The Wife and I some quality time together. This was extremely welcome! The Wife and I have, in the past, found it entirely too easy to lose sight of making time for one another — especially since for years we’ve worked opposite shifts at our respective jobs — so now, we tend to aggressively plan our time together and make the most of it when it comes. And we crammed a lot into the 48 hours we had together!
After T-giving dinner, it’s become our own little tradition to go to a movie. This year we selected Unstoppable, the runaway-train movie with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. But since the show-time was still ninety minutes away, we were able to run home and change into more comfortable clothes.
Among the many virtues of bib overalls is that of all pants, they are by far the most comfortable to wear in the hours following an enormous meal.
So we went to see Unstoppable, which we loved. I’ll have a full review of the movie up sometime soon, but I do want to note that the Regal Cinemas in the new addition at the Walden Galleria Mall is a great place to see a movie. They’ve somehow made the concept of stadium seating even better, with seats that rock a bit and armrests/cupholders that swing up and out of the way, which makes for easier hand-holding with one’s sweetie during a movie. Yay! (We tend to like the action pictures on T-giving Day. Not sure why.)
The next morning, of course, was Black Friday. We’re not the types who go out at four in the morning to find the best deals on stuff; we do go out shopping a bit, but later on, after more morning relaxing and coffee.
Later on we ventured out to do some shopping. JCPenney (clothes for the kid), Barnes&Noble (book ideas for the kid — but none purchased), JoAnn Fabrics (sewing supplies for some of The Wife’s projects), Home Depot (bought a Dremel 4000 rotary tool, huzzah!), and a few other stops. We had lunch at Panera Bread, where I looked kind of bored:
We also planned to make a nice dinner that night of steak, and squash, so it was off to a grocery store to pick up those items among a few others, including…three coconut cream pies.
More on the pies later….
But amidst all of this, we were also having some frustration with a local tire dealer. Our minivan needed new tires, and to make a long story short, The Wife got a quote for new tires several weeks ago, and then, in the intervening period, the tire place changed managers. This new guy proceeded to muck things up to the point that next time we’ll just go someplace else. (For the locals: it wasn’t Dunn Tire. Not going there in the first place was probably our first mistake.) This manager guy started off by telling us he would honor the quoted price, then said that he could only honor the quoted price if we got the same identical tires as last time (which weren’t in stock), then told us he couldn’t honor that quoted price unless we could prove, with receipts, that we’d had the previous tires properly rotated every…however long it is you’re supposed to allow to transpire between tire rotations.
Anyway, The Wife got more and more angry until the guy finally got all apologetic and offered a $100 discount for the “miscommunication”, but we’re still unhappy and do not plan to go back. I love it when management people blatantly screw up and try to blame it on a “miscommunication”. Ugh!
During all of this, lake-effect snows started to move into the region, for the first real snowfall of the winter.
To give an idea of how quickly the snow bands can move at times, this intersection — about 2 miles from Casa Jaquandor, the corners of Southwestern Blvd. and Milestrip Rd. — looked like this ten minutes after I had driven through it the first time. That’s what can happen in Buffalo, folks! It’s been a very mild winter thus far — the one day before this that we “had snow”, a couple weeks ago, it was an overnight dusting that had already melted by the time we got up.
Now, however, the “blustery” has arrived.
Our other main shopping destination that day was the Orchard Park Antique Mall, which is a big store that is full of antiques, offered by different dealers. We spent close to two hours there, that’s how big and fascinating a place it is — you can find everything there from beautiful antique jewelry to vintage action figures to old books to old furniture. Just an amazing place.
And in any antique store, you can find lots of questionable stuff as well. At one point we saw a set of glow-in-the-dark plastic figurines from the Casper the Friendly Ghost movie that came out in the 1990s. The Wife and I recoiled in horror, because these figurines were a tie-in item when we worked at Pizza Hut. Aieee!
And then there are things which are well-nigh inexplicable:
I do not want to know.
After that — about five o’clock — we went to pick up the completed minivan and returned home for our steak dinner. Later on we drank some wine, we watched The Man with the Golden Gun…and we attended to the matter of those three coconut cream pies.
Obviously we couldn’t eat three entire coconut cream pies — not just the two of us, at any rate. So, to what use did we put them? Where did those pies end up?
Well…here’s where they ended up:
Yup. All three, in my face.
What can I say? I’m a sucker for a pie in the face. This is a fate that befalls me every once in a while, and as my good friend Belladonna once said, “It’s a bit of a rediculous tradition I suppose, but it has been fun and keeps me from taking myself too seriously!”
The holidays can be a deeply emotional, and for some folks, troublesome time of year. I find that getting hit in the face with a pie is a good antidote to that. Yes, I believe in “pie in the face therapy”. Hey, it can’t be any less effective than some other “therapies” out there!
Here’s how it went down:
I hope your Black Friday was as much fun as ours (new tires notwithstanding)!
UPDATE: No, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been pied. My last pieing can be found here. (Ignore the date on that post — I backdated it to keep it hidden as a kind of “easter egg” for people who went digging around for it. Now, I figure, why hide it?)
How can it possibly have been five years since I last held my son? Time is awfully relentless. Wow.
This photo was taken just days before he decided that he’d had about enough of his limited life here with us. I can’t say I blame him for that, but…well, it would have been nice if he could have said something first. But then, it would have been nice if he could ever have said anything, at all.
Anyway, I sure hope he’s OK, wherever he is right now.
I’ll be spending some quality time with The Family over the next few days — first just with The Wife, as my parents take The Daughter for two nights, and then with all of us for the rest of the weekend. That being the case, I’ll be taking a break from the blog. I’ll have new content up either Sunday or Monday, depending.
For now, here is a partial list of things for which I am thankful — partially recycled from last year, and with some new additions.
Cheddar cheese so sharp it makes you pucker Sesame crackers Our azalea plant Our ivy plant Cats Get Fuzzy My blog Other peoples’ blogs George Lucas Star Wars My dining room table Klein screwdrivers LED flashlights William Shatner Sela Ward Mary Stewart’s Arthurian trilogy Stephen King The hardware store in my old hometown Angle grinders My new jigsaw The glory years of the Buffalo Bills Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation every night at college Surprising The Daughter with a new Webkinz Ms. Pac-Man Sergei Rachmaninov The Beatles Van Halen Baked pasta dishes Pizza Cookies Harry Potter Guy Gavriel Kay Big, thick poetry collections Small, artfully illustrated poetry collections My drill Schopp and the Bulldog (Buffalo sports talk radio guys) Fried chicken Italian sausage The Amazing Race Elections Aaron Sorkin when he’s on his game Steak Chess Big breakfasts that leave me full until mid-afternoon Light breakfasts that take the edge off until a nice lunch Firefly The Mentalist Tasting something good at a restaurant and figuring out how to make it at home Ice cream at the roadside place down the road The County Fair Libraries JRR Tolkien Route 20-A in the fall Sandals Using the scissor jack at work Blue denim bib overalls Hickory-striped bib overalls Pies on the table Pies in the face Pies in MY face Monty Python Aquariums and science museums The Origin of Species Complete collections of Shakespeare Thick, fuzzy socks in the winter Eggs Watching the Super Bowl Watching figure skating Discovering new authors Liking books on the re-read that I didn’t like the first time Daniel Craig as James Bond George Lazenby as James Bond The Y My MP3 player My cell phone The Burchfield Nature and Art Center The Daughter learning the string bass John Williams Hector Berlioz Toronto Roast turkey Chicken wings George Carlin Hayao Miyazaki Baby Fiona Little Quinn The Daughter The Wife
This has apparently been going around the Interweb a bit, so you may have seen it, but for those who haven’t, the Readers Digest Condensed Version is this: a professor of business at the University of Central Florida gave a mid-term exam, graded it, plugged the grades into a spreadsheet, looked at the results, and noticed that the grades on this particular mid-term were ticking noticeably higher than for midterm exams from previous semesters. Then someone anonymously provides him the obvious reason why: some students managed to get a copy of the “test bank” for the course and circulated it amongst a bunch of other students, who used it to prep themselves for the test. In other words: they cheated.
Now, I’ve been outside the realm of academia since I graduated college in 1993, so I had no idea what a “test bank” was. Basically, as I understand it, the companies that publish textbooks also provide, as a service to instructors, things called “test banks” which are nothing more than giant collections of test questions, from which instructors can then pull questions for their exams. My understanding is that in this case, there was a “test bank” of 700 questions from which 50 were drawn, so students using the test bank to prepare themselves had a pretty big job ahead of them. It seems to me that if those numbers are accurate, then maybe their time might have been better served just studying the course material. In fact, it seems to me that maybe a case can be made that when you prep for a test drawn from that many questions, maybe in a way you are studying the course material.
Anyway.
I’ve always found that there’s something of a grey area when it comes to cheating. There are obvious cases of cheating, clearly: a kid who hacks a professor’s computer to steal the test behorehand, or another kid who decides to plagiarize a paper for a course. But then there are things like this, where from certain perspectives, it certainly seems like cheating, while from others it just seems like…well, not really, I guess. It’s cheating, but it’s cheating that seems to me partially aided and abetted by “the system”. It’s not unlike the use of steroids in baseball in the 1990s: cheating, yes, but the system was set up at the time to make it very easy to do, with very little penalty.
The whole process of the way this course seems to operate seems a bit…lazy? Maybe that’s too strong a word; certainly there seems to be an “assembly line” aspect of the teaching enterprise going on here. That prof gives lectures, and the students go off to “labs” to do…more coursework, I guess. There’s not a whole lot of context here to go on, but the structure seems to put a lot of the work of running the course on the heads of the lab instructors, from grading the exams and homework to spending long hours creating a new mid-term exam once the old one has been compromised. But when you have 600 students taking a course, I suppose there really isn’t a great alternative.
Some other things strike me from the video. First, the professor here continually refers to “forensic analysis of the data”, which will presumably reveal all of the cheaters. I am no statistician, so I’d be interested to know how the data can reveal the difference between a student who prepared for the exam by use of the test bank and a student who prepared for the exam by traditional studying of the course material. He implies, a number of times, that the cheaters will soon stand revealed and that at that point, the folks from Academic Affairs — whom he really seems to be going out of his way to make sound like a bunch of relentless Imperial Stormtroopers — will decide their fates, particularly with the ominous statement, “I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you’re not graduating.” He also says something like “The net is closing around you even now!”
But then he also offers the cheaters a deal: all they have to do is admit that they cheated, and take a four-hour ethics course, and…all is forgotten. They’ll take the same re-written midterm as anyone else and go on from there. Well, that certainly does not seem to me the type of offer one makes to someone when “the net is closing around them”. It doesn’t make sense to offer a deal that carries with it minimal effort and zero long-term consequences for the guilty if you’re already certain of their guilt and are near to proving it. This whole part of the lecture strikes me as the kind of veiled threats of legal action that collection agencies use; for all their harsh language and legal-sounding threatening, it turns out that collection agencies are really pretty toothless.
And frankly, I as a student was present for more than a few instances where the teacher had to dress down the entire class for lack of specific knowledge as to which student did something naughty, and in my experience, the teacher or principal or whomever always pretty much lost the room when he or she uttered the phrase “You know who you are.” (Actually, the prof in the video has an even more laughable line than that: “The days of students figuring out new ways to beat the system are over.” Yeah, dude. Sure they are. As of this day, all future forms of cheating have been rendered impossible! Huzzah!!!)
I didn’t really witness much outright cheating when I was a student. I myself never cheated, although the thought did occur to me a few times, here and there. I was always deterred more by the thought of dolorous consequences than by any good and noble commitment to my own learning, although I did generally think that I’d rather have a bad grade be my own doing than a good grade be artificially achieved. Generally, though, I just didn’t have the confidence that I could pull it off and I certainly didn’t want to get caught. I’m like the guy in Dial M For Murder who says that he only believes in the “perfect murder” on paper: “My murder would be like my bridge-playing — I’d make some stupid mistake and only realize it when I noticed everybody else staring at me.” Plus, since I was a Philosophy major, there really wasn’t much you could do in terms of cheating beyond plagiarism — and on plagiarism, I do have a pretty rigid moral code. But when your exams are all-essays all-the-time, well, you either know your shit or you don’t.
There was one cheating incident that I remember fairly clearly, though, from my grade school years. In seventh grade, several classmates of mine somehow managed to get access to our math teacher’s grade book, and they took that opportunity to take a pencil and adjust their own grades upward. I don’t recall how they managed to score a few minutes of unsupervised time in her room, but they did. And then, afterwards, they bragged about it, so everybody knew. Someone blew them in, and that was that. One fine day we’re gathered for class — it’s toward the end of the year — and in storms the teacher, grade book in hand; she announces that she’s just discovered that the grades in her grade book don’t match the grades she routinely turns in to the Guidance office (a story she made up to cover the fact that someone had reported them, which everybody figured out anyway).
This particular teacher was…well, let’s just say she was not one of my favorite teachers. At all. Never liked her in the slightest, although she was inexplicably beloved by most of the rest of the school. (It’s the same teacher in Item #7 in this old post of mine.) After making her announcement, she proceeded to take malicious glee in tormenting the kids who had cheated, saying things like “Hey, you’re looking a little pale there!” and stuff like that. I always thought that was crappy on her part — you’ve got the kids by the hair, just take ’em down to the principal and be done with it. But that teacher sure enjoyed dealing out public humiliation to her chosen few. I don’t recall what the consequences were for the cheaters in that instance, but it certainly made for an interesting few days in a small school.
Anyway, moral of the story: don’t get the test bank.
So, I took The Daughter to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the other day. We loved the movie, just loved it; but then, we’ve loved the entire series to this point — even the occasionally sickeningly-sweet first two, directed by Chris Columbus — and this is the one where it all comes together. Some of this will involve spoilers, so my thoughts are below the fold.
What I liked most about Deathly Hallows was that it didn’t make the mistake lots of movies make these days: it didn’t confuse “dark” with “relentlessly grim”. The film is dark, make no mistake about it. The way JK Rowling wrote the story, this is the one where Harry and friends basically get their arses kicked around for just about all of the story before finally figuring out how to turn the tide. Prices are paid — heavy, sad prices. Hermione must bid farewell to her family, magically erasing their memories of her so as to protect them; Harry has to watch the Dursleys, who never liked him much at all, give up their home so as to protect them. More and more unhappy events are piled on, along the way, and the film ends with the saddest loss of all.
But for all that, there is quite a lot of humor in the film: some genuinely funny stuff, and some stuff that is the humor that comes of people who are in the midst of grief but who find themselves laughing because they must. Deathly Hallows piles on, but it doesn’t do so relentlessly, which is a very welcome development. That’s what I liked most about the film.
Random observations:
:: There isn’t a single weak link in the entire cast. Not one. I love how perfectly the three leads — Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson — have been together long enough now that they can play off each other almost effortlessly. Their friendship is real, and it shows onscreen.
:: Some critics have noted dismay at the perfunctory nature with which Mad Eye Moody’s death was handled, but it felt real to me, in a way. Not everyone dies in a heroic final act, filmed in slow motion, with everyone else watching him go. Sometimes you have no idea until someone just bluntly tells you: “Mad Eye is dead.” The moment lingered, just enough, and then it was on to the next thing, because sometimes in war you don’t even have time to grieve.
:: I also think that by handling Moody’s death in this way, it made Dobby’s death at the end that much more emotional. There have been deaths along the way, and losses, and constant fear of losses — before we finally get one that hits home in all the usual cinematic ways. I found Dobby’s passing to be the best ending point for half the story; it leaves Harry at his lowest point. How can he keep going now? It’s been so hard just to find one Horcrux and destroy it. There are three more out there, and Voldemort has just found the Elder Wand. What a witheringly bad place to be, heading into the story’s climax.
:: The film didn’t really solve the structural problem JK Rowling created with the “camping all over England until they happen upon relevant information” nature of the central part of the story, but the film did take advantage of that opportunity to highlight some fine character moments, including the wonderful scene where Harry and Hermione dance to some rock tune.
:: In the book, Neville Longbottom doesn’t show up until the end; but here, we get one quick glimpse of him, standing up to Death Eaters who are searching the Hogwarts Express. The overall arc of Neville’s life, from loserish nerd to Kicker of Magical Arse, is one of the most satisfying things about the books, and I look forward to seeing Neville’s huge moment at the end of Part II.
:: There’s a “jump out of your seat” moment in the film that doesn’t conceal itself at all. You know it’s coming. You even know when it’s coming. And you still jump. That is effective filmmaking, folks.
:: The animation that accompanies Hermione’s telling of the story of the Deathly Hallows is absolutely brilliant. It’s one of the finest moments in a fine film.
Bring no luggage. Wearing the same clothes for a week is a small price to pay. Plus, the airlines now charge you for check-in luggage AND blankets. Pretty soon pressurized air will also be extra.
