• From the New York Post: “Notified of the botched road sign Sunday, red-faced New York City DOT officials said the gaffe would be fixed “immediately.” That’s the real problem: they had to be “notified” of the problem.
• The sign, which hangs at Myrtle Avenue and Forest Park Drive in Queens, speaks eloquently of so much that is wrong in American society…and especially New York…that it should be allowed to remain, as Paul Newman says of the smoldering ruin at the end of “The Towering Inferno,” as “kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.”

Reactions of locals covered most of the bases, as Jackie might say:

• Quana Martin, 32, said,  “How do you not know how to spell his name? He’s a well-known figure.” Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Quana. Cultural literacy is on the wane. In fact, all forms of literacy are…

• Queens teen JP Ward: “It’s fucking stupid. I wouldn’t say it’s disrespectful, but it’s definitely stupid.” Indeed. Hence the designation of our tiles as “The Great Stupid’!

•  City Councilman Robert Holden:  “You don’t have a few eyes looking at these signs? DOT is a mess.” It is not only the New York Department of Transportation that operates like this, though. How many people saw this sign, shrugged, and decided it wasn’t their problem even if they noticed the spelling mistake? This is the work ethic, or lack of it, suffocating American productivity and lowering the quality of life. How many of those in the chain of custody had “quietly quit”?
• “That’s just government,” Queens waitress Aurora Terranova said. “Most of the time shit just goes wrong because of stupidity or oversightedness.” Bingo! Now ask Aurora what party she routinely votes for, and why she thinks government can and should solve  her problems.

And all these years, I’ve been embarrassed by the “Wafle House” sign a few blocks from our house…

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Pointer: JutGory

In her post about how US. World and News Report is accusing law schools opting out of its yearly rankings of de-emphasizing test scores and grades to prepare for an end-around the likely SCOTUS ban on affirmative action, retired law professor and usually Smart Person Ann Althouse writes,

“If law schools can’t directly take race into account, why would they make an adjustment that puts less emphasis on test scores and grades?”

Huh. That’s a real puzzler!

I haven’t read the comments, but I assume they enlighten her about this impenetrable mystery.

I’m seriously thinking about developing a cell phone users code of ethics. If so, I’ll need some help. I have a file on the topic, but I don’t use a smartphone or cell phone myself at all if I’m not traveling, so I’m sure there are many obnoxious practices that haven’t occurred to me.

Yesterday it was raining icy drops in Alexandria, and I had to run a quick—well, it should have been quick–errand. The 7-11 parking lot was packed, and three cars came into the lot right behind me, waiting for someone to leave. A patron of the convenience store came out and got in his SUV almost immediately, his tail lights came on, and…nothing. All of us waited, and waited. He wouldn’t pull out and vacate the space. I knew what he was doing: staring at a little lighted screen. (I confirmed it later when another car finally left the lot and I could park.) Asshole.

1. Only six years too late. Hallelujah! Kellyanne Conway and her mega-jerk husband George are finally getting divorced. A spouse who not only interferes with his partner’s job as George Conway did but also uses his connection to his partner to gain publicity and influence while attacking her employer is contemptible. I still don’t understand why President Trump allowed it, and Kellyanne was irresponsible, disloyal and incompetent for not putting a stop to it.

2. A harbinger of things to come. Austin, Texas has over 300 vacancies looming in the police department, with 77 officers expected to retire before the end of March to go with 264 existing vacancies, according to the Austin Police Association. The reason should be apparent to all: the outright hostility toward police emanating from Austin’s overwhelmingly woke wesidents, sorry, residents. The Austin Police Department is so understaffed, 911 calls are being redirected to the 311 non-emergency number “If you come home and find your home burglarized, calls like that are now going to 311,” said police union president Thomas Villarreal. “You’re not getting a police response to many property crimes if it’s not a violent crime that is currently ongoing.”

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“Yes, all you intrusive government-lovers out there in TV Land, it’s time for the game show sweeping America: “Guess What Party!” It’s the exciting contest where our competitors try to guess the party affiliation of the state or national legislators by the nature of the bills they have introduced.

“It’s not as easy as you might think! For example, Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur filed legislation (SB 1316) mandating that bloggers writing about the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Cabinet or Legislature to register with the state. Bloggers daring to comment on such elected officials must also report any compensation they receive or may receive. Registration would be required within five days of any blog mentioning an elected state official, and thereafter, bloggers would have to file monthly reports on what posts mention those officials.

Can you say “Chilling free speech”? How about “undue burden”? Sure you can! Sen. Brodeur must be a Democrat, right? After all, that’s the party that is now actively hostile to the First Amendment (among others) and slowly but surely moving toward a totalitarian system in which thoughts, words, and personal liberties would be tightly controlled “for the greater good” and to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion. But if you buzzed in with that answer, you’d lose the round of ‘Guess What Party!’

You would have forgotten how incredibly ignorant and stupid that bill is! The bill is unconstitutional on its face, and if we had a competent education system, any 6th grader would know it. Brodeur is a member of the Republican Party—you know, the party so bone-headed that it somehow managed to almost get wiped out in the mid-term elections even in the middle of epic inflation under an incompetent Democratic administration that makes Jimmy Carter seem like Franklin Roosevelt. Brodeur is a GOP deep thinker in the great GOP tradition of George Santos, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Herschel Walker and Michael Steele. You better not leap to conclusions on “Guess What Party!”

Now here’s today’s challenge, panel….

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In “Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?,” Suzy Weiss writes as if students taking advantage of loose standards and professorial sloth to cheat is a recent phenomenon. I can assure her (and her readers) that it’s not. The example she begins with brought back nasty memories for me.

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

The online wrinkle is obviously an addition to the mix, but I encountered this exact scenaio at Georgetown Law Center. My Constitutional Law professor, Nathan Lewin, gave the class a take-home, open-book, self-timed mid-term exam. We were to complete the multi-question essay test in a single session of three hours precisely, which is exactly what I did, dropping my pen mid-way through the last question. After I turned the exam in, I was informed by several classmates that I was a sucker. Continue reading →