Quote of the Day

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as 'bad luck.'”

--Robert Heinlein (as quoted often by Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit)

Quote of the Day

“Your moral compass is not a tool to be used to measure everyone else’s lack of morals.”

--Unknown

Darren Went On A Cruise And All I Got Were These Stupid Quotes

Off to Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas, two places I haven't visited before!  The watchbeast and the house will be well cared for, leaving me free to graze at the buffet without a care in the world.

I'm not taking a computer and won't have internet access on the ship, so I won't be posting anything new.  Instead, I've scheduled a "quote of the day".  Here's today's:

“There are stupid people in every policy argument. But I have never encountered a debate where all the stupid people are on one side. And you do not enhance your own side’s reputation for cleverness by dismissing your worst opponents' worst arguments; you win by engaging with your best opponents' best arguments.”

--Megan McArdle, http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-02/a-sad-fact-from-today-s-bag-of-hate-mail

Kettle, This Is Pot. You're Black.

Teacher union hypocrisy is so easy to point out because there's so much of it.  Here's yet another example:

Misja has taught French and English for 38 years. During that time, she’s rejected union membership because she doesn’t agree with the PSEA’s social and political agenda. She’s a religious objector, a Roman Catholic who opposes the union’s support of groups such as Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions.

In Pennsylvania, teachers who choose not to be a member of the local union still have to pay dues in one of two ways: They can become a “fair share” member and pay a prorated membership for representational services; or in Misja’s case, they can apply for a religious waiver and the union directs their dues to charities they agree on.

Sometimes the two sides don’t agree where the money should go. 

Pennsylvania law provides no mechanism to resolve the dispute and the union is permitted to hold Misja’s funds in escrow until it’s settled.

State lawmakers have taken notice. House Bill 267, sponsored by Republican Rep. John Lawrence, recently advanced out of the House State Government Committee. It would give teachers more influence over where their money goes.

“My proposal does not change the ‘fair share’ process. … My proposal removes the requirement that the union and the religious objector must agree on which charity will receive religious objectors’ funds,” Lawrence said. “Instead, the individual religious objector would simply have the ability to designate a recognized 501(c)3 organization of their own choosing"...

Misja initially requested her money go to a Pittsburgh pro-life group called People Concerned for the Unborn Child. Her second choice was the National Rifle Association Foundation, which was rejected by the union on the grounds it was “too political,” she said.  (boldface mine--Darren)

Shameless.

Vocational Training

When it comes to college, I'm the opposite of a Bernie Sanders supporter--I don't think college should be free for everyone, I think fewer people should go to college. I've said before that if I were running the show, no one needing remedial classes in math or English would attend a university.  They'd get their acts together at community colleges and then, if they still think they need a bachelor's degree, they could transfer.

I also don't believe that everyone needs to attend a university.  It's educational malpractice to tell students that the path to success goes through a university; higher education is merely one possible path to success.

Joanne Jacobs has three consecutive posts on vocational training:
Kentucky gets real about career readiness

Kentucky has gotten real about career readiness, writes Hechinger’s Emmanuel Felton. High schools get the same reward for preparing graduates for “middle-skill” jobs as they do for preparing them for college...

“When the Obama administration made some federal funding contingent on the adoption of college- and career-ready standards, most states decided college and career readiness were one and the same,” he writes.

In Kentucky, however, schools are encouraged to create direct-to-career paths with expectations “focused on technical skills and the ability to find and parse informational texts and apply math in occupational situations.”

Job training doesn’t require college skills

Students don’t need college-level academic skills to learn marketable job skills, write Northwestern researchers James Rosenbaum and Caitlin Ahearn.

Occupational certificates require 8^th to 10^th grade-level math and English, according to community college faculty in California and Illinois.

From special ed to the workforce

After years of “inclusion,” only two-thirds of special-ed students earn a regular high school diploma. Those with intellectual or developmental disabilities are even less likely to complete high school. As adults, most are unemployed or underemployed.

Now, “specialized workforce academies for students with intellectual/developmental disabilities are growing in popularity,” reports Alia Wong in The Atlantic...

Workforce academies are controversial, writes Wong. Some critics value inclusion above all. Others complain “the programs pigeonhole severely disabled students into a vocational path and as a result never encourage them to consider college.”

Some colleges offer special programs for intellectually disabled students, she writes. However, these focus on social skills, not preparing students for jobs they might be able to do as well as anyone.

If nothing else, these programs are more honest, and humane, than telling students who don't go to college that essentially they're failures.

This Math Error Isn't "Cool"

I'm all about "handy" things.  This poor man's air conditioner is pretty nifty:

What can you do with old plastic bottles? Not much you’d think, apart from recycle them. Except, you could make a zero electricity air conditioning unit.

Easy to make, fun--but how well does it work?

The Eco-Cooler reduces temperatures by up to 41ºF (or 5°C), which is pretty impressive given it costs next to nothing to make.

Doh!

41 degrees F is 5 degrees C, yes, but the scales have different starting points. The Celsius scale marks freezing water at 0 degrees, while the Fahrenheit scale has water freezing at 32 degrees.  Thus, an increase or decrease of 41 degrees Fahrenheit has to account for that 32 degree "start"; therefore, a 5 degree C decrease is 9 degrees F.  Not bad, but not 41 degrees.

If that's too esoteric for you, there's always the conversion formula:

F=(9/5)C +32

From the formula you can see that a 5 degree change in Celsius will give a 9 degree change in Fahrenheit.

With temperatures in the Sacramento area projected to be in the 100's this weekend, I wish a few discarded water bottles could drop air temps 41 degrees.

An Obama-style Constitutional Law Professor

From Rolling Stone:

Why It's Time to Repeal the Second Amendment
"[It] needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact," says constitutional law professor

This article--heck, even the title and opener above!--show clear evidence of why Rolling Stone should stick to music.  There's as much reality in that article as there was their bogus University of Virginia gang rape story, which deserved so much more of an apology than Rolling Stone provided.  So rather than fisk the article above, which needs to be corrected almost line by line, I'll just point out that this seems to be par for the course for Rolling Stone.

Unions Behaving Badly

Over at Union Watch, Larry Sand (who is President of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, of which I am a member) shares three anecdotes about unions behaving badly.

The bad:

Ocol’s idealism and passion to make things right served him well in his new position. A math teacher, he became famous by creating an after-school chess club. Knowing that most gang violence occurs between 3 and 6pm, he decided to keep as many kids in school as he could and teach them to play chess. He eventually expanded his program from high school students and invited children from the local elementary school to join, ultimately involving over 100 at-risk kids. Over the years, the wildly successful program has produced several chess champions and received accolades from the Cook County Board of Commissioners, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and President Obama.

But then, Ocol did something bad, really bad, at least according to the Chicago Teachers Union. Not willing to abandon his students, he decided to shun the one-day teachers’ strike in the Windy City on April 1^st. As punishment for his “crime,” the union is demanding that he give the pay he received for working that day to them. Ocol made a counter offer. He said he was willing to fork over his salary, but wants it to help fund his 35 member chess team’s trip to the White House. Ocol was supposed to have a hearing on June 6^th, but he refused to go because he said he needed the time to coach his students.

So in a city that is home to the highest paid teachers in the country – where more than one in three students drop out – CTU is doing its best to hound a dedicated educator and idealistic human being into submission over not participating in what was very possibly an illegal one-day strike.

The ugly:

In Yonkers, NY, we have a reverse problem where the union, instead of trying to punish a good teacher, tries to help a violent teacher save his own skin. Investigative journalist James O’Keefe went into the local union office posing as a teacher who claimed to have physically abused a student while using a racial epithet, and subsequently fled to Mexico, unannounced, for two weeks, because he didn’t know what else to do. The episode, available via a 17-minute video, lays bare the union’s priorities. The local union president and vice-president instruct the teacher to talk to them “theoretically” and not to admit anything. The union bosses clearly couldn’t have cared less about the abused child, but rather counseled the teacher how to save his job, advising him what lies to tell and what truths to avoid.

The perky:

Just last week the Buffalo (NY) School Board voted to take away the no-copay cosmetic surgery rider that has been in the collective bargaining contract for years. The district is strapped for cash, and decided to redirect the millions of dollars a year it spends on face lifts and tummy tucks to its students instead. The nerve! The union, you see, is using the issue as leverage to get a new contract which they haven’t had since 2004. Local teacher union president Phil Rumore said “removing the cosmetic surgery provision without a new contract is a slap in the face to teachers.”

Go read the whole thing, if you can stomach it.

Group Projects

For the past few years I've taught only pre-calculus and statistics.  I don't assign any group projects in pre-calc and only a few in statistics. 

I'm not a fan of group projects.  When people say that students need to learn to work together on a task, or that many heads are better than one, I point out that when that happens in the workplace there's an assumption that everyone brings something to the table.  I think we all know that isn't necessarily the case in the K-12 classroom.

We're getting new curriculum and textbooks in stats this coming year, so I'm not sure if I'll do the same projects that I've done in the past.  For the ones I have assigned, though, part of the reason I do it is because the data collection, analysis, and report would be a lot of work for just one student.  One other group project I assign, I admit I use groups because I don't want to read 90 reports--I'm not an English teacher.  All the bosses and accreditation folks want to see cooperative learning/group work, though, so that's what I give them--just not very much, because I'm not convinced it's all that useful in most circumstances.

I don't like it for the same reason that students don't like it:

As for group projects, “the smartest kids do all the work because the grade matters to them,” students say. Slackers slack.

One achiever told Downey he’d always dreaded group assignments or labs until he took nothing but advanced classes his senior year. “When you work with someone who wants the A as much as you do, group projects can be pretty fun,” he said.

Orlando

If you're on the political right, Orlando is an issue of Islamic terrorism.

If you're on the political left, Orlando is an issue involving the 2nd Amendment, homophobia, possible Tea Party connections, and fear of a backlash against Muslims.

Occam's Razor.

Update:  I definitely nailed the first two, the third was only partially a joke, and the fourth is coming any moment.

Update #2, 6/14/16:  How will the reporting change if, as is now being reported in some outlets, the shooter was himself gay (you don't need to be on Jack'd or Grindr if you're going to case a nightclub)?  A member of two of the left's favorite groups, will the cognitive dissonance cause heads to explode?  Probably not, they'll just stick with the gun control angle.

Remember that Episcopalians, Mormons, and Catholics all have the same access to firearms in this country, and you don't hear mass murder stories about them.  Just sayin'.

Communism

I've never before heard of this:

It was the least heralded migration in American history.
 
At the height of the Depression, several thousand American emigrants left New York on the decks of passenger liners waving goodbye to the Statue of Liberty, bound for Leningrad.

Over 100,000 Americans had applied for jobs working in brand new factories in Soviet Russia, ironically built for Stalin by famous American industrialists such as Henry Ford.

Those American emigrants who entered the "workers' paradise" were certain that they were leaving the misery of unemployment and poverty behind them. They considered themselves fortunate.

Their optimism would prove to be short-lived. Most were stripped of their American passports soon after their arrival.

Considered suspect by Stalin's paranoid totalitarian state, the foreigners were swept away in the Terror.

The American jazz clubs, the baseball teams, and the English-language schools set up in cities across the USSR, would quickly vanish with them...

At the height of the Terror, the American emigrants had besieged their embassy, begging for passports so they could leave Russia.

They were turned away only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking NKVD agents.

Inside, the American diplomats had known about these disappearances almost from the very beginning. But they did little to save their fellow countrymen, whom they had christened "the captured Americans."

Was it Lenin who said that the goal of socialism is communism?

Nixon Said It's Not Illegal If The President Does It

It must not be racist if the president says it, either:

More Voter Fraud (And Guess Which Party It Favors)

It's not a voter fraud "problem" if it helps your side:

An investigation by CBSLA2 and KCAL9 found that hundreds of deceased persons are still on voter registration rolls in the area, and that many of these names have been voting for years in Los Angeles.

For example, John Cenkner died in 2003, according to Social Security Administration records, yet he voted in the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, and 2010 elections. His daughter told the station that she was “astounded” and couldn’t “understand how anybody” could get away with this.

Another voter, Julita Abutin, died in 2006 but voted in 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014. According to CBS, the county confirmed they have “signed vote-by-mail envelopes” from Abutin since she passed away. So either someone has been forging her signature or her ghost has quite an earthly presence.

The investigation revealed that 265 deceased persons voted in Southern California, 215 of them in Los Angeles County. Thirty-two were repeat voters, with eight posthumously-cast ballots each. One woman who died in 1988 has been voting for 26 years, including in the 2014 election.

This report comes 20 years after the contested election of Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., from this same area. An investigation by a U.S. House committee found that hundreds of illegal ballots were cast by noncitizens and improper absentee ballots.

CBS reports that California is the only state that does not comply with the Help America Vote Act of 2002, something the Obama administration has basically ignored.

Another One Bites The Dust

Will there be any companies left in California to provide $15/hr jobs?

Jacobs Engineering Group, one of the world’s largest engineering companies, is preparing to move employees from its Pasadena headquarters to Dallas, becoming the latest major corporation to relocate significant operations from California to Texas.

The Fortune 500 firm, founded in Pasadena more than half a century ago, already has 300 employees in downtown Dallas and is weighing a more significant relocation. Mendi Head, a spokeswoman for the firm, confirmed the plans in an interview Monday...

“It should concern everyone in the community. The kind of jobs Jacobs Engineering provides, especially at the corporate level, are exactly the type of jobs we want in our community,” said Gary Toebbin, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Professional services have been a bright spot for California, generating outsize job growth in recent years.

The engineering giant isn’t alone. Jamba Juice said last month that it would move operations from Emeryville, Calif., to Frisco, Texas, and in 2014, Toyota announced a relocation of its headquarters from Torrance to Plano, Texas.

Jacobs did not say why it is eyeing Texas, or how many employees would leave. Toyota and Jamba Juice both cited the expense of California real estate as a motivation. Texas has no personal income tax as well.

“No doubt there is a trend. Texas has been the number one destination every year for the last eight years for California companies,” said Joe Vranich, the owner of Spectrum Location Solutions, a consultant for companies considering cross-state moves.

In January, Vranich released a study showing that 1,669 companies had left California since 2007, with Texas receiving the largest number. He estimates that many more companies actually departed, but the moves weren’t publicly reported.

I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, as that's what Crazy Ole Uncle Jerry tells us.

These Words Aren't Words (and if they are, they shouldn't be)

It's bad enough when people, trying to sound sophisticated, merely come off as both arrogant and clueless when using the word myself.  You give something to me, not to myself.  I myself will accept what you give.  Not so hard, see?

There are a few others that are my pet peeves.  The first being dis.  Dis- is a prefex meaning separate, or not.   There are dozens of words that begin with this prefix--disrepair, dissatisfied, and disassemble, to name a few.  When used as a word instead of a prefix, though, dis has come to mean disrespect.  Why just that one word and not the others?  I have an idea; if you don't want someone to demonstrate disrespect towards you (I cannot stand the use of disrespect as a verb), try speaking standard English as a start.

I heard a new "word" yesterday at my training at school, and this word has skyrocketed onto my list of unnecessary words.  The speaker referred to a reduction in incidences of misconduct at school.  Incidences?  The word incidents functions just fine.


I lived for three years in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and new arrivals would talk about the need to acclimatize, or get used to the altitude and weather.  Does someone really need to acclimatize, or do they need to acclimate?

And lastly, one of my "favorites".  There is such a thing as "orientation", but that does not mean that the participants are being "orientated".  No, they're being "oriented".

Do you have any other examples?

Soviet-Style Psychiatry

It wasn't uncommon in the Soviet Union for people to be locked away as mentally ill merely for opposing the government.  Psychiatry has been put to some very cruel uses, especially in totalitarian states.

You'd think we'd have learned from that, but this woman certainly hasn't:

Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness.

 She made the assertion during a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals. 

I'm sure that those of us who don't believe in anthropogenic global warming would also be seen as mentally ill.  Or those of us who don't believe in socialism.  Read the linked article, marvel at the "Hiroshima/Nagasaki orgy of mass destruction" or the "years of carpet bombing operations by the Nixon administration caught in a vice grip of anti-communist paranoia", and wonder what kind of people the author thinks need psychiatric treatment at the hands of the state.

Let's turn this around a bit.  It's only been in my lifetime that the DSM removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.  Homosexuals are, what, 3% of the human population?  And today's front page "victims", transgenders, are 3/10 of 1% of the population?  If we're talking about what's "normal" vs what is a mental illness, surely those groups have a better claim to being called mentally ill than capitalists and patriotic Americans, at least if we consider that the smaller the group in question, the further from "normal" that group is.

But no, we won't go there.  Calling homosexuals and transgenders mentally ill is a bridge too far--but our political enemies?  They appear to be fair game for our friends on the Left.

Today's Coin Show Purchases

I didn't buy any coins today, but I did buy a few banknotes and learned a little something in the process.

My "educational" note was clearly a 1 ruble note, with writing in 3 similar alphabets including Cyrillic.  That indicated to me that it was Eastern European, not from the "Stans" of the former USSR.  Not knowing what it is was all the reason I needed to buy it!  I showed it to a friend of mine who can pronounce Cyrillic but I didn't recognize what he was reading as being a country--turns out it's kinda not!  He sounded out what appeared to be the "country" name and did a Google search which determined that the note is a Transnistrian ruble.  What, you've never heard of Transnistria?  Me either, before today!  Turns out that Transnistria is an autonomous/breakaway region of Moldova that, while nominally independent, is not recognized by the United Nations.

(click on currency pictures to enlarge)

The next cool note I got today is from Bhutan.  Look how beautiful it is!  Money doesn't have to be green, black, white, and ugly; rather, it can be colorful and beautiful:

And now, as is my style, some inflationary notes.

The first is from Argentina.  At the turn of the 20th century Argentina was a country on par with the United States economically, but bad government eventually led to periods of severe inflation.  The inflation got so extreme that Argentina even replaced its currency a couple times in order to combat it, but "a rose by any other name":

Throughout much of the latter half of the twentieth century, Argentina was plagued by a weak currency and high inflation. In 1985, in an effort to fight inflation, which had reached 2,000 percent, the government replaced the nation's traditional currency (the peso) with a new currency called the austral. One austral equaled 1,000 pesos. However,inflation continued to rise. In 1989, inflation reached 5,000 percent, making the nation's currency almost worthless. In response, the government again changed the currency in 1992, replacing the austral with the nuevo peso Argentino (new Argentine peso). One nuevo peso was equal to 10,000 australs. Inflation was finally brought under control when the government fixed the nuevo peso to the dollar at a one-for-one exchange rate. While this almost completely wiped out inflation, it also meant that the government has little control over the value of its currency. After the currency was pegged to the dollar, it once again became simply known as the "peso."

I'd never heard of the "austral" currency before today, now I have one:

Brazil also has a late-20th century history of weak currency and inflation:

Real became the official currency of Brazil in 1690 and since then its official status remained intact till 1942. Only in 1942, the currency named Cruzeiro replaced real. The currency rate was 1000 reis = 1 cruzeiro.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil went through a period of high inflation and hence this South American nation had to change its currency numerous times. Until 1986, the Brazilians dealt with Cruzeiros . In that year three zeros were removed and the currency was changed to Cruzado .

After a couple of years another three zeros were removed and the 'new cruzados'-(Cruzados Novos) were introduced to the people of Brazil. In 1990, the Cruzeiros once again were in vogue after replacing Cruzados Novos . Finally another three zeros were reduced and the currency came to be known as Cruzeiros Reais.

In 1994, with the implementation of the new financial plan, the new currency Real was launched. Thus after a long time the currency of Brazil was stabilized. 

Here is my 1000 cruzados note with "three zeroes...removed", with a counterstamp of 1 new cruzado (cruzado novo):

And now, the hyperinflation.

In this post, and in the links to other posts in that post, I show my currency from the worst hyperinflationary periods in history.  Prior to today I had notes from 3 of the 4 worst inflationary periods ever (I treat the Srpska Republic inflation as part of the general Yugoslav inflation), but today I added the 4th--the Yugoslav inflation itself.  As I said in this post, whenever you have this many zeroes on your money, you've got problems:

50 million, 10 billion, and 500 billion dinars.  The first note is 1/10,000 of the last note, 1% of 1%.  If that's too much to take in, try this analogy:  if that last note were $100, the first one would be a cent.

It was a good day at the "coin" show today!

Update, 2/23/18:  More about Transnistria!

Transnistria is the size of Dallas, Texas. Nestled between Moldova and Ukraine, it has a population of just under 500,000 residents who mostly speak Russian.
And in the eyes of the world, it doesn’t officially exist. 

Once, Transnistria was part of Moldova, but in 1990 it declared independence after the fall of the Soviet Union and Moldova’s alliance with Romania. There was a brief war, with some 1,500 casualties, which ended in something of an impasse. 

Transnistria remained independent from Moldova, but is not officially recognized as its own nation. It’s not a part of any other country, and yet it’s not a country in its own right. Its money is completely useless outside of its borders, its passports unusable.

The Flowers Become Ever More Delicate

This is what happens when you let the inmates run the asylum:

Students at Johns Hopkins University are protesting the school’s plan to start giving actual letter grades to first-semester students — claiming that freshmen having to receive letter grades would create a mental-health crisis on campus far too severe for the school’s resources to handle. 

 

For decades, Johns Hopkins has concealed students’ first-semester letter grades — marking their performance in these classes as simply having been either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” — from potential employers and graduate schools. According to an article in the Baltimore Sun, however, the school has since decided that this policy might be encouraging too many students to take their first semester less than seriously (um, ya think?!) and that it therefore plans to change it beginning in 2017. 

 

Now, you might think that giving grades for schoolwork seems like a reasonable thing for this school to do . . . but many of its students don’t see it that way. In fact, the Sun reports that more than 20 student groups are protesting the change — arguing that not only would it cause widespread mental breakdowns, but also that, according to some groups such as the Black Student Union, it would be particularly unfair to minority students, because they often “must experience racial discrimination combined with difficult classes that some of their previous schools might not have properly prepared them for.”

These are some of the most privileged people on the planet--and no doubt want to lecture me about my so-called privilege.  They want and they want.  Are there any adults left to counter this craziness?

Guilty Pleasure

I don't read books much anymore, at least not for pleasure.  Mostly now I get audiobooks from Audible and listen to them when I have the opportunity.  I originally started ordering them when I wanted something to do when on my elliptical trainer (reading is too difficult them) but it's been, uh, more than a couple days since I've been on the elliptical.  But I still order the audiobooks because I enjoy the format.

One type of book, though, I'll buy in dead-tree format.  My guilty pleasure is Clive Cussler novels.

Cussler's novels are kind of action-adventure, James-Bond-y or Jason-Bourne-y novels that are just campy enough to entertain me.  They're over the top, but it works.

One thing that entertains me is that Cussler can't write a woman's character to save his soul.  Every woman is an archetype of what men want women to be--they're smart, strong, athletic, tough, but feminine when they need to be.  They're all Lynda-Carter-as-Wonder-Woman, every one of them, unless they're one of the bad guys, in which case they're just bad men with internal plumbing.

But I enjoy the stories.  They're complete and total escapism.

Cussler has many series.  I read all of the Dirk Pitt books until Pitt was so old that he had to be replaced by his twin son and daughter, Dirk Jr. and Summer.  At that point I stopped with Dirk Pitt, having read 19 of them (I just counted, they're on my shelf).  But then I came upon The Oregon Files.

The Oregon is a "tramp steamer" registered in Iran, but behind the rust and squalor lies one of the most advanced warships on the planet--certainly the most advanced privately owned ship.  It's crewed by members of The Corporation, men and women mercenaries who are all part-owners of Oregon and The Corporation.  I like having a ship and a crew to read about, I like the teamwork--and the several members of the crew make for many different possible story arcs.

I've read 9 books in The Oregon Files series, and today at Costco I came upon a 10th one.  It was cheaper there than on Amazon so I bought it.  And there's an 11th one still to get.

I now have something to keep me occupied for the next couple days.

Update, 6/11/16:  Turns out I bought the 11th one at Costco--found the 10th on Barnes & Noble in the format I like so I ordered it.  It was supposed to arrive Friday (yesterday) but got here Thursday instead.  Good job, B&N, UPS, and USPS!

I have to get Piranha, the 10th, read before I leave on a cruise in a week.  Rather than taking audiobooks with me, which instead I will listen to when I drive to Canada in July, I'm taking some pulp sci-fi books with me on the cruise.  Any I read I can just leave in the ship's library for someone else.  I have to get the 11th Oregon Files book read before school starts!

It often surprises those who know me, but I'm the world's slowest reader.

Day 1

Went to bed at 4am.  Got up at 10 am.  Nothing planned today, may go see a band play from 9:30pm-1:30am tonight.

Life is good.  I love summer break.