Stuff
Tropical Depression Ten is still around, but not doing anything interesting.
The BBC reports that Nick Helm has won an award for the best joke of the Edinburgh Fringe: “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”
Actually, his Dad wrote the joke and sent it to him.
The outer bands from Irene are already hitting South Carolina. It is going to be a long, nervous weekend on the Atlantic coast.
Update: I wanted to comment on the picture that Rick Perry is using in his campaign literature. It shows him standing on a ladder on the side of an aircraft. That is a bit disingenuous for people who don’t know much about the Air Force.
The picture is a standard thing for student pilots in the Air Force. The aircraft is a T-38 Talon training aircraft [if you look closely you will see the second canopy that is raised.] Perry actually flew C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft, and if he was competent he would have been the pilot for the last two years of his tour. There is nothing wrong with being a flying truck driver, cargo aircraft are vital to the mission of the US military, but the fact that he chooses to use a training photo, instead of a photo with the aircraft he actually commanded, would indicate that he doesn’t want people to know what he really did.
Perry attend Texas A&M, a land-grant school, and apparently had the Air Force pick up the tab, which is why he committed to a six-tour enlistment. He did nothing with the training and experience he received in the military, so claiming that it makes him more competent than Zero, is silly. The Shrubbery was an Air National Guard fighter pilot and he let Osama bin Laden jerk him around for seven years. Perry needs to move on and forget about claiming to be strong on ‘national defense’, because the Shrubbery pretty much destroyed that Repub talking point.
4 comments
I had forgotten Perry is an Aggie. I can’t resist telling one of my favorite Aggie jokes with Perry as the protagonist; I know you’ve heard it, but perhaps some of your international readers haven’t:
Rick Perry walks into an ice cream shop. The server greets him and says “What’ll you have?”
Perry: I want a gallon of strawberry, a gallon of vanilla and a gallon of chocolate.
Clerk: We’re out of chocolate.
Perry: OK, then I want a quart of strawberry, a quart of vanilla and a quart of chocolate.
Clerk: Sorry, sir; we’re out of chocolate.
Perry: OK, then I’ll have a pint of strawberry, a pint of vanilla and a pint of chocolate.
Clerk: (Sighs.) You look like a bright Aggie. Can you spell the “straw” in “strawberry”?
Perry: (with some hesitation…) “S-T-R-A-W”!
Clerk: That’s a GOOD Aggie! Now can you spell the “van” in “vanilla”?
Perry: (promptly this time) “V-A-N”!
Clerk: Excellent! You’re really a bright Aggie indeed! Now, can you spell the “fuck” in “chocolate”?
Perry: There ain’t no “fuck” in “chocolate”!
Clerk: THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU!!
You have to be a masochist to attend Texas A&M and then stay in Texas. The jokes never stop.
Of course, judging from his grades, it isn’t like he had a lot of choices.
Texas A&M turns out respectable engineers. Their knowledge base may or may not be deep, but it is current at the time of their graduation, something my own alma mater sacrifices for the sake of depth and background. Employers facing strict deadlines prefer Aggie engineering graduates; they need very little additional training to be productive on a project right away. Then again, I’ve never, ever heard of a Rice engineer who was not offered a job by his or her last year of school. In my day, IBM regularly hired the top one or two EE’s from every graduating class… damn, those guys/gals were good, and I say that as one not ashamed of his own record. Things may be different these days; I don’t know.
Steve, I was just speaking of what happens to Aggies in Texas. They don’t have the problem in other states, because other states don’t have the history of the intrastate rivalry.
The community college system in New York state was tied into local industries and served as the corporate training system in technical areas. The industries supplied most of the equipment used in the classes and people were ready to go to work the week after graduation. It was a great system for everyone, so I assume it has been destroyed by ‘the need to make higher profits this quarter’, as opposed to ‘having a profitable business forever’.
In general, every school has good and bad degree programs, and that is determined by funding, facilities, and faculty, not the name on the entrance.