Radio Free North Hollywood

The plan is still to move to France. Amelia deserves to grow up in a town with a castle. Plus I trust their public schools more than I trust America’s. I only know three public school systems well. Today let’s start with Kentucky.

Kentucky used to* pick one or two good students from each class, lavish all the funding and attention on them, and let everybody else watch football and take Home Ec. I call that the “last son of Krypton” theory of education, though they didn’t set it up that way on purpose. It has to do with something called “bubble sorting.”

That looks like a lot of things, but the important part is to notice that if you read from left to right the image ends up with the lightest ones on top and the darkest ones on bottom. Any similarity to the average product of the Kentucky educational system over the last two hundred years is unintentional but poignant nonetheless. Here, look, that image makes a lot more sense if you look at this too:

What “bubble sorting” means is that you look at two numbers in a series, no matter how big the series. Pick two. If the one on the left is lower, do nothing. If it is higher, switch them. Then proceed through the series, in whatever manner you choose. The higher numbers “bubble” to the top.

Kentucky accidentally set up a system like this. I believe they did it in all innocence. In every grade, there is a “good” teacher and a “not as good” teacher. “Good” students get the good teacher. Obviously what “good” means is extremely vague and there are a lot of other factors, but what it means is that, as time goes on, students who are *good at impressing teachers* get better classes, more interesting teachers, and more opportunity. Students who do not impress teachers as much, and that is LITERALLY THE ONLY IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THIS SYSTEM, fall to the bottom. They get boring teachers, they get no incentive or motivation, they drop out of the system, and they keep dropping.

Let me say again, I believe that Kentucky set up this system by accident in all innocence and with fairly reasonable logic. It’s not exactly their fault that this is the outcome of the system.

But this is undeniably the outcome of the system.

This is one of many, many reasons that I will not subject my daughter to the Kentucky educational system. Kentucky itself is another reason.

*and I know they don’t do things now the way they did then.

I hope by this point the story is good and scary.

Recently I had a working tape deck and box full of all the music I listened to in the 90s. I am more than a little surprised by my taste. I was a lot more into tango music than I thought I was.

Looking back on it, I can really see why ska did not get big. I like my Moon Ska compilations though.

If there is one band I truly regret listening to, it is the Pet Shop Boys.

It’s weird how much stuff I have on tapes that the internet will never provide. I cannot find Marc Blitzstein’s version of the Threepenny Opera anywhere but on this cassette tape that I made of a CD that I checked out of the Teaneck NJ public library in 1995. It’s the best version of it I ever heard.

I finally figured out what Stanley Kubrick was doing that made his movies so interesting, and it made me sad, because you can’t really do it in comics. What Kubrick did was figure out how to make deliberate continuity errors in order to tell a story. He would apparently move things around between takes, during the endless hundreds of takes, and even the crew wouldn’t notice. He got so good at this weird little game that he learned to tell stories with it. That’s what the whole “secret meaning” of the Shining is; he used set design to tell a story. Pretty cool.

But I’m not sure how that applies to comics.

Guess I’ll keep thinking on it.

You know who needed a gun? Trayvon Martin. When the NRA was silent about that I knew what was really up.