Last night we ordered Chinese takeout. I offered to go pick it up after The Yankee called it in. The lady on the other end of the phone knows who we are based on one of our habitual orders. You tell the soups and the egg rolls and the entrees and she says “Oh, hi Missus Smith.”
Then I went to pick up during halftime of the Tennessee game tonight and she started asking things about work. The nice lady at the Chinese restaurant, who has people going in and out constantly, knows where I work.
We might be eating too much Chinese.
Tonight we had Italian potluck with friends, and that was awesome. In between I did some work, building a lecture and tinkering with notes for other things and so on. I labored on Labor Day, but there was no grief to it. I sat in a chair at home and typed things. And when I was done, I took a 22 mile spin around town. My cycling app says my ride gave me the best times on four local segments.
This is surely a calculating error, a timing mistake. More likely, none of the fast people in town use this app.
Things to read … because everyone in town should read.
This is a former student, a Fulbright scholar now embarking on a year in Tajikistan. He’s a bright guy, and this will be an amazing adventure. Read along: House of leaves.
Security for journalists, part one
Boomers. When did we get so old?
I prefer the Vyclone app, which lets my collaboration be with my friends, rather than everyone, but this has some uses too: Snapchat lets you watch and create group videos of live events with ‘Our Story’.
7 interesting things about Lee County agriculture
The UK has big, big problems. This is simply a terrible symptom. Scandal hit Rotherham ‘deleted abuse files’:
Top ranking staff ordered raids to delete and remove case files and evidence detailing the scale of Rotherham’s child exploitation scandal, sources have revealed.
More than 10 years before the damning independent inquiry revealed sexual exploitation of 1,400 children in Rotherham a raid was carried out on the orders of senior staff to destroy evidence, it has been claimed.
In 2002 high profile personnel at Rotherham Council ordered a raid on Risky Business, Rotherham council’s specialist youth service, which offered one-to-one help and support to vulnerable teenage girls, ahead of the findings of a draft report, according to the Times.
The raid was to remove case files and wipe computer records detailing the scale and severity of the town’s sex-grooming crisis, sources told The Times.
Meanwhile, closer to home … In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist:
A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Maryland, middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—”taken in for an emergency medical evaluation” for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace’s Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, according to news reports from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.
There’s a lot about this story that doesn’t yet make sense. Hopefully the next draft has some insight, otherwise, it would be particularly troubling.
(Three days later update: There is a lot going on in that story. And local media interviewed the teacher. It would seem there is still a good deal going on in that story.)
