It’s a no-brain­er for me! I’d rather be or hug the gal on the left any day!

Some­how, though, the Make Me a Super­mod­el judges found the waif on the right more wor­thy of praise than Jen Hunter, the hot babe on the left who actu­al­ly won, thanks to input from fans.

The skin­ny gal, Mar­i­anne Berglund, looks like a kid play­ing dress-up to me. An under­fed, sick, awk­ward kid who has­n’t quite hit puber­ty. Putting her next to Ms. Hunter is just cru­el.

Which one would I rather have my daugh­ter emu­late? That’s not hard, either. If I ever see Katie look­ing like Ms. Berglund, she will be on the way to the hos­pi­tal in a trice.

Thanks for the link, Alice_Bunnie!

Beth Dit­to’s music (the group’s name is Gos­sip) isn’t quite my thing, but I’m tick­led by the fact that she’s total­ly unapolo­getic by who she is.

I feel some kin­ship with her about hav­ing a big voice, too. Some of us are just blessed with them. Yes, we can (and some of us have!) learn good tech­nique so we aren’t always loud—but we’ll always have big voic­es.

The very first per­son I thought of on view­ing skin­nyvideo is She’s Pre­cious. But all my lus­cious friends, and all of you who appre­ci­ate them, should watch it!

I just read about it at Sex in the Pub­lic Square. I haven’t thought about it before, but what she says makes sense. If you’re a sex­u­al­ly active adult who could tech­ni­cal­ly con­ceive, but you don’t want to have a child right now, it’s a good thing to keep on hand.

I’d be inter­est­ed in hear­ing about your expe­ri­ences in buy­ing it OTC, if you do so. It isn’t an issue for us, so we don’t have a rea­son to buy any.

My school “upgrad­ed” its Ora­cle-based stu­dent records man­age­ment sys­tem weeks ago. I know that it is Ora­cle based because ever since the “upgrade,” every time I try to access my “stu­dent por­tal” (my pri­ma­ry means of inter­act­ing with the school, as an online stu­dent), I get an “Ora­cle Site Builder” page.

Since the actu­al class­es are done on anoth­er site and I could still log in there, I kept wait­ing for the promised fix. The tra­di­tion­al “screwed up the finan­cial aid” prob­lem has got­ten to the point where I real­ly need­ed to get in to see what they’ve done so far, though, so I pushed fur­ther today than I have before and final­ly pushed a “help” (I use the term very loose­ly) desk per­son to actu­al­ly help me.

He took down all my infor­ma­tion and said that he’d have to go to his boss, but he’d call me back Real Soon Now. I had oth­er irons in the fire, as well as his (rather unique) name, so I con­sent­ed.

Odd­ly enough, my phone rang again in about five min­utes.

“We nee­da ver’­fy your info­mashun.” (I’ll have to drop the attempt to repro­duce the child’s mush­mouth here. My spellcheck­er is hurt­ing too much.)

Ok — we went over my stu­dent num­ber and so on again.

Boy: “You don’t have an account.”

Me: “You mean my account has been delet­ed in your upgrade?”

Boy: “No, that can’t hap­pen. You ain’t nev­er had an account.”

Me: “That’s non­sense. I can log in and get the Ora­cle Site Builder page, there­fore I have an account.”

Boy: “We can’t log in, so you don’t have an account.”

Me: “Why are you try­ing to use my log-in? You’re sup­posed to be try­ing to fix my account, as an admin­is­tra­tor.”

Boy: “We have to be sure you’re real­ly hav­ing a prob­lem.”

Me: “You mean that you assume I’m lying before you’ll do any­thing.”

Boy: “No, we just have to be sure you’re not doing it wrong.”

Me: “Well, obvi­ous­ly, you’re ‘doing it wrong’ because I’m sit­ting here look­ing at the Ora­cle Site Builder while you can’t log in. Do you want me to e‑mail you a screen print as proof?”

Boy: “What pass­word you using?”

Me: “What kind of ques­tion is that? I don’t give peo­ple my pass­word. Don’t be stu­pid.”

Boy: “The pass­word don’t work.”

Me: “That’s because you don’t know my pass­word.”

Boy: “It’s sup­posed to be (stan­dard default pass­word).”

Me: “No, it should NEVER be (stan­dard default pass­word) after a user’s first log-in. In fact, if your sys­tem were set up prop­er­ly, it would force users to change the pass­word after the first log-in, and at least once every 30 days after that.”

Boy: “No, it’s sup­posed to be (stan­dard default pass­word).”

Me: “Are you an IT major?”

Boy: “Yes, and the pass­word is sup­posed to be (stan­dard default pass­word). If it ain’t, we can’t log in to peo­ple’s accounts.”

Silent­ly think­ing “and that’s the point, dolt,” I went in and changed the pass­word to (stan­dard default pass­word), since that’s just about all I could do.

Me: “Ok, just to make you hap­py, I changed it. Try to log in now.’

Boy: “Now it’s right.”

Me: “So you can fix it?”

Boy: “I have to call you back.”

Me: “I don’t think so. I’ll just stick with you. That way if you find any­thing you don’t under­stand in my records, we can work on it togeth­er.”

Boy: “You have to call (num­ber for por­tal help desk). They have to fix it for you.”

Me: “Why did­n’t you send me to them in the first place?”

Boy: “I had to see if you real­ly had a prob­lem.”

I changed the pass­word while he was giv­ing me the 800 num­ber, of course.

Boy: “What did you do?”

Me: “What­ev­er do you mean?”

Boy: “The sys­tem says I have to log in again.”

Me: “Well, sure­ly as soon as you saw that I real­ly had a prob­lem, you logged out, since you had no fur­ther rea­son to be logged in as me. Nor do you need to log in as me again. I changed the pass­word again.”

Boy: “You can’t do that. It’s sup­posed to be (stan­dard default pass­word).”

Me: “Have your sysad­min give me a call if he has a prob­lem with it, but so far you’re the only one who ever has. Buh bye!”

I haven’t found any­thing he changed in my records. Not yet. I just don’t trust the lit­tle bas­tard. It also fright­ens the hell out of me to real­ize just how many stu­dents must not ever change their orig­i­nal pass­words, since he’s accus­tomed to blithe­ly log­ging in to every­body’s accounts, and it’s appar­ent­ly a stan­dard prac­tice in the depart­ment!

Are you tone deaf? How’s your tonal mem­o­ry?

My score was 94.3%. What’s yours?

I haven’t men­tioned how Katie is doing in school in a while. While there have been some adjust­ment issues switch­ing over to “school” from home­school­ing, she’s got all As. The “life by the bell” thing has been a nui­sance, and she and one of her teach­ers just do not com­mu­ni­cate on the same wave­length, but she’s deal­ing with it. She adores her art class, some­thing I’m def­i­nite­ly not equipped to teach at all.

Two of her three aca­d­e­m­ic class­es are advanced, and the third would be but was already over­crowd­ed when we reg­is­tered her for class­es. So much for hav­ing trou­ble get­ting into high school as a home­school­er.

The sched­ule isn’t easy on her body or the fam­i­ly, but again, she’s deal­ing. She does have increased fibromyal­gia symp­toms as a result, and has had to add a dai­ly nap to her sched­ule after school.

One of the most dif­fi­cult issues is hav­ing cer­tain lines of dis­cus­sion “off lim­its.” That’s just too weird, after years of being encour­aged to fol­low her inter­ests and inquiries wher­ev­er they lead. While she’s attend­ing a rel­a­tive­ly lib­er­al school, the fact that it is a school means that there are con­straints on sub­ject mat­ter.

Her lit­er­a­ture teacher referred to chasti­ty belts as a medieval urban leg­end ear­li­er in the year, and when she start­ed explain­ing just how very wrong he was, he slammed the dis­cus­sion to a close. If the man is going to be so slop­py with his facts, he should­n’t be sur­prised when he encoun­ters dis­agree­ment!

Sam and I met some­one yes­ter­day who said, “Advanced class­es are how we seg­re­gate these days.” I point­ed out that they cer­tain­ly aren’t new, as my own class of 1984 was tracked into advanced, reg­u­lar, and reme­di­al (although the last two weren’t called that, pre­cise­ly) tracks, too. I found it an inter­est­ing state­ment, but we were in the mid­dle of Charis Books and dis­cussing many things, and did­n’t get to pur­sue that one as far as I’d hoped. What do you think of it?

It seems that my grades are final­ly in.

Stu­pid required com­put­er class: 93.54, and it was that low because the lazy fool teach­ing it refused to cor­rrect the WRONG answers in the com­put­er­ized tests. Seri­ous­ly — she nev­er argued that the answers weren’t wrong. She just refused to adjust the grades. For instance, on one quiz, her answer insist­ed that all HTML tags occur in pairs. Um, no, idiot. Despite exam­ples, she’s too lazy to cor­rect the tests. The class began with an “intro­duc­tion” to com­put­ers in gen­er­al, specif­i­cal­ly to Win­dows PCs, and nev­er got past sim­ple Word (not any­thing like mail merge), Excel (not even up to piv­ot tables) and the sim­plest of Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions. I want my time back.

Sta­tis­tics: 99.54. Not bad for my first math class since 1985 or so, math pho­bia be damned! The pro­fes­sor nev­er grad­ed three of my quizzes, but I’m fair­ly sure I did well, and appar­ent­ly I did­n’t need them. I got 196/200 points on the final, and pre­cise­ly what I missed is dri­ving me crack­ers. Why, yes, I am obses­sive-com­pul­sive, why do you ask?

It was most like­ly the one ques­tion where I could­n’t even begin to fig­ure out just what he was ask­ing. It was a four-part ques­tion, and I know I got two parts right (those were pret­ty clear). The oth­er two were ran­dom guess­es. 25 ques­tions total (most hav­ing mul­ti­ple parts) means that I prob­a­bly got half of that ques­tion (#17, as I recall) wrong, which would be 4 points out of the 200. I guess that was it, then. I wish I knew the right answers, though!

Now — how do I retain what I learned in the sta­tis­tics course, which could be the sin­gle most use­ful course I have ever tak­en in my life? I can def­i­nite­ly see the pro­fes­sion­al appli­ca­tions when I’m work­ing again, but here at home I don’t have a whole lot of rea­son to those cal­cu­la­tions.

Give it a lis­ten, even if you think you don’t like coun­try music. It lacks the tire­some “my coun­try right or wrong” pseudopa­tri­o­tism!

Legal­ly, ’cause they’re cool with it. In fact, I found out about it from their very own newslet­ter.

All We’ve Got — the music is through the cam­era, so it’s hard for me to fol­low the lyrics, but the music is great. The video begins with Chris speak­ing strong­ly (with some pro­fan­i­ty — may not be work/kid-safe) to get out the vote.

“Don’t Wan­na Say Good­night” — the song is new to me, and anoth­er with poly con­tent. It’s love­ly.

Go to their web site for more cool­ness, of course!