Alexander

I'd fit them in along with recent Nick Cave, Dirty Three et al. I remember my ears being perked upon hearing one of their records about a decade ago. I'm a Nick Cave fan as well. I got "Dig Lazurus Dig" when it came out in the spring. I only have a couple of his albums at the moment, but I'd love to hear more. I'm also thinking about David Johanssen and the Harry Smiths (bit of a non-sequiter, there. My train of thought is that both Cave and Johanssen were involved in the Anthology of American Folk music tribute album...).

can't believe i am not the only fan here (guess nobody has figured out my avatar so far)... i am not promising i will still treasure this in 10 years, but don't miss the libertines albums and the libertines demos that are available for download in several places (legally)... edit: i mean especially the leg ii sesion: http://djmonstermo.blogspot.com/2005/02/li...ines-demos.html hope the links work The Libertines were a great group, if incredibly short lived. They were one of those amazingly gifted bands that flared up and burned out just as quickly. I remember when Babyshambles started releasing material, I was a little skeptical. I honestly didn't expect Doherty to live long enough to record much of anything post-Libertines. I was surprised and delighted that Babyshambles is as good as it is. I still don't expect Doherty to live very long, but maybe he'll turn out to be like Keith Richards (my theory is that Keith actually died back in the late 60s, but that he just kept on showing up to work, so Mick and the boys never got around to telling him). I'm also quite fond of Barât's Dirty Pretty Things. Here's another artist I forgot to mention: Damon Albarn. Blur may have been a fan fav for some, but they always came off like a poor man's Oasis to me. Albarn's post-Blur career has been something quite else. I enjoyed both Gorillaz albums and Albarn's recent project, The Good, The Bad, and The Queen (produced by Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, who also did the second Gorillaz album). Any album that includes both DM AND Tony Allen (of Fela Kuti fame) is worth hearing!

I can't believe I forgot the Black Keys! "Attack and Release" is a MONSTER.

There you go, Tim - its not the Welfare people declaring that the word of a psychic doesn't constitute evidence. Its the Board of Ed saying it. The Teacher and the Administration should have never acted. Period. End of discussion. But the teacher and the administration should not be punished for this. Whatever else may have happened, whatever shaky grounds there were for suspicion in the first place, they WERE only acting in the child's best interests. As Tim has said, if this had been a case of abuse where the teacher and the TA had turned a blind eye, people would be (rightly) calling for their heads. It was a Catch-22 situation. The teacher and the administration did what they believed was right and ultmately, there was no lasting harm done.

Some good contemporary rock: The White Stripes - As far as I'm concerned, Jack White is top of his particular heap. Every Stripes album has been great. I also highly recommend Jack's side-project, "The Raconteurs." Both albums are wonderful, "Consolers of the Lonely" being the most recent release. Tokyo Police Club The Fratellis - some people hate them...I think they're great fun. Beatleseque pop licks with Kinks-like lyrics and churning guitars. Babyshambles (when they get around to actually recording something) Gnarls Barkely - it's a little bit hip hop, a little bit soul, and a lot of psychadelia. The Apples in Stereo The Flaming Lips - around for a while, but every new album is an event. Beck - he's been around for a long time, but he's still making significant music. John Mayer - I know he's been marketed as a pop idol, but the guy can play the freakin' guitar. Check out "Try!" and "Continuum.' Wilco - Again, a group that's been around for a while, but they just keep on getting better. Don't forget their alternate universe counterparts, Son Volt. My Morning Jacket - One of my favorite current groups. Their most recent album, "Evil Urges," is pretty damn great. The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs - Karen O is a great vocalist. Green Day - They started out as fake punks and turned into the real thing somewhere along the line. "American Idiot" is a great album. They just put out an album under the name Foxborough Hot Tubs which is in the tradition of sixties garage bands (think early Kinks). The Last of the Shadow Puppets - technically a side project of the Arctic Monkeys, but I actually like them better... How could I forget RADIOHEAD?

Dan, you've failed to answer one of my questions: Do you think that the girl's sexualized behavior, while not evidence of abuse, might merit an investigation? I've worked in Special Ed myself, and I've seen some pretty hairy stuff. I once saw an 11-year-old hearing-impared girl perform a move in the presence of other students that a STRIPPER might perform (she did a back-bridge and ran her hand between her legs, to be specific). Is that proof of abuse? Of course not. But I played it safe and reported the incident to the teacher. While the teacher didn't report that specific incident to CPS, she did document it and report it to HER superior, just in case. Do you think that sexualized behavior in a student merits a closer look into her home life? Leave the psychic out of it. What would your friend say, do you think?

Indeed! I had similar feeling when Fastball's first single hit.

I just checked. This song is by a group called Fastball. I remember them having a few hits (don't think I ever heard this one) back in the late 90s and the lead singer DID sound uncannily like EC.

But it's not the word of the psychic. It's really the behavior of the girl. You're friend has it right: "Sexualized behavior by an autistic child is not necessarily supportive of a sex abuse claim, particularly when that child has been mainlined and has exposure to "normal" kids." It is not necessarily supportive of a sex-abuse claim, but it is not grounds for absolute dismissal either. What if the TA had simply noticed a pattern in the kid's behavior? What if we take the psychic out of the case for a moment? The behavior might not support the claim, but it is surely grounds for an investigation, no?

And 99% of the time there would be no problem. You and the TA would move on and that would be the end of it. But in that 1% case where the kid really was being abused, psychic or no psychic, you're the one who would be hung out to dry. Because it is ALWAYS the teacher who pays in the end. My very first teaching job was a massive failure. I was teaching four English classes (all tenth grade). Three out of the four were going great. No problems whatsoever. The fourth class was a disaster area. I made the mistake of snapping at them the first day, and that was it: I lost them and never got them back. As the semester dragged on, things went from bad to worse. No matter what I tried to regain control, it failed. It didn't help that I had a brand new supervisor in my department and that the advice she gave me turned out to be horribly wrong. I have since learned that you NEVER raise your voice. Never try to talk over a noisy class. Just stop talking. Eventually, they get the idea and shut up. But I didn't know that. They didn't cover this in grad school. The problem never arose in my student teaching (where the classes were well established by the teacher by the time I showed up). The end result was that I was a successful teacher in three out of four classes, but I had to fight that fourth class the whole way (it didn't help that the fourth class was my largest class (31 students) and had the largest number of low ability kids and behavior problems). I have also since learned that no matter what your students do, you never relinquish control. But my supervisor thought it would be helpful to give me a more experienced teacher to "pinch hit" when things got rough. I never should have taken her up on that. After the first time I turned to the other teacher, I really lost that class. They saw I couldn't handle them alone and it just made them worse. Again and again I asked the administration for help. They promised me the moon: We'll remove the trouble makers. We'll split the class into two more managable sections. Send the troublemakers to the office everytime they misbehave, even if you have to send the whole class down. The administration never delivered on any of their promises, and when I did send the kids down to the office, the office staff started to hate me (again, NEVER send a kid out of the room unless he's threatening to hurt someone). It was a mess. By the time November came, I was at the end of my rope. I would come home from work and cry, that's how bad it got. The adminstration was threatening me now, telling me that if I couldn't get my class under control, they would fire me. Then all hell broke loose. One of my students threw a pen at me and hit me in the back of the head. In that moment, I could see exactly how to handle the situation. Turn around, tell them that such behavior was unacceptable and that the perpetrator would be punished, and go back to the lesson. But I snapped. I turned around an screamed, "Who threw that?" Nobody spoke (of course they didn't...I had united them against me). Then I said, "When I found out the little prick who threw that, there's going to be big trouble!" That was it. I was gone after that. It doesn't matter how it went down. It doesn't matter that the administration reversed it's position 180 degrees (from "You made a mistake. You're human." to "This is the worst thing I've ever seen in thirty years of teaching. Get out." in three meetings), that my supervisor who gave me the horrible advice that backfired in my face lied to the administration ("I tried to stop him! I never told him to do any of those things!"), or that they had put a new teacher in a class that nobody else wanted to teach in the first place. What matters is that by this point parents were up in arms ("He said the word "prick" in front of our fifteen year old child! They've certainly never heard that word before HE said it.") and I was a new teacher and therefore expendable. When the shit comes down and the school district is looking down the barrel of an outraged parent or an outraged state agency, the first tactic is to throw the teacher under the bus. And why not? It looks like decisive action. "Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so, we've solved the problem. The bad teacher who said "prick" is gone. Now your out-of-control child will be fine." Well, it wasn't fine. A couple of my former students stayed in touch with me. Seems that the teacher that they hired to replace me was gone within a month or so. I'm not saying that no one could teach these kids, but that putting them all together in one room was probably not the best idea they'd ever had. Today, I teach kids who are WORSE than the kids at my first job (I teach the drop-outs, push-outs, and felons), yet I have no problems. A lot of it has to do with class size (I rarely have a class bigger than ten) but a lot of it has to do with what I learned in that first job. I learned how NOT to start off the year. I learned how not to react to noisy kids. I learned how not to react to misbehavior. That first job really made me the teacher I am today. But it also taught me never to trust a department head or an administrator, because they will shit-can you in a second if it means saving their own asses. And that's what this whole psychic business is really about.

Well, yeah, Dan. We're teachers, not lawyers. It is not our job to interpret the law, simply to carry it out. Back when *I* was working as a TA, I had to report things to the teacher that my student said (I was a one-to-one). One day he came in to school and told me that he had been in a fight at a party over the weekend (this is a middle school student). His uncle was throwing the party. There was booze. The guy my student fought with was an adult and drunk. His mom broke up the fight and there was no harm done. That said, my student BEGGED me not to tell the teacher what had happened. I told him that I have no choice: If he didn't want the teacher to know about it, he shouldn't have told me about it. As a mandated reporter, teachers and TAs are no different than cops: We just enforce the letter of the law and let the laywers and judges work on what the law meant. If we let something slide, even something as seemingly irrelevant as my student's story (or the word of a psychic), it can come back to bite us in the ass. So yes, we are trying to protect ourselves AS WELL as the children. That's just how the system works. Put yourself in the teacher's shoes, Dan. Do YOU want to be the one the state comes looking for if it DOES turn out that the girl was abused? Because I will tell you one thing, Dan: They honestly will not care about your INTERPRETATION of the word "reasonable." They will fire you, fine you, and possibly even imprison you. I don't want to go to jail (I WORK in a jail. I have no desire to become a perminent resident). Not even in the name of being right.

No, but the girl was non-verbal autistic AND she was displaying sexualized behavior. If she WAS being abused, she couldn't name her abuser AND she would engage in the described behavior. If a two year old girl comes up to you and starts tugging on the front of your pants like she wants to get your belt off, that's reason enough to be suspicious of abuse. It doesn't matter that she ISN'T being abused and just liked your belt buckle. As a mandated reporter, you have to report it. And, yes, it sucks when innocent people are investigated for things they didn't do. Allegations of this kind can ruin a person's life. It can lead to the loss of a job, it can lead to divorce, it can even lead to suicide. It sucks, but protecting the kids who ARE being abused is really more important to the state than protecting the few innocents who get caught in the net. All we can do is trust that the system of due process will eventually clear the person of suspicion (but by then the damage is often already done. God help you if you're a teacher accused of abusing a student. It doesn't matter if the charges are disproven: You'll never teach again). Honestly, as screwed up as this situation was, the fact is that the TA DID have reason to suspect abuse (based on the girl's behavior, not the psychic's prediction). Imagine the same situation in which the TA was talking to a friend who says, "I just read a story about an autistic girl who was abused and did the following things..." The TA might well say, "Gee, I have a girl in my class who does the same things." At that point, she would have to report. I don't know what was going on in the TA's head, but it might well have been the case that if Victoria was NOT displaying sexualized behavior, she wouldn't have bothered to say anything. In that case, it's not that the psychic SAID " this girl is being abused," but rather that what the psychic said triggered a chain of thought that lead to the TA to conclude, "My God. Victoria is being abused."

Quite true. Educators are "mandated reporters." If we have ANY reason to suspect abuse, we have to report it. I agree that this story is absurd, but I think it's a mistake to blame the principal and other adminstrators. Here's the thing: If someone reports that they suspect a child is being abused and the teacher, the principal, and the district don't act on it, they can be sued if it turns out that the allegations are true. If a kid comes in with suspicious looking bruises, I have to report it, even if it turns out that the kid took a bad spill on his bike. It sucks, but if I don't report it, I can lose my job.

Woody Shaw's "The Blackstone Legacy" would be a good place to go. Maybe check out Herbie Hancock's "Headhunters," The Mahavishnu Orchestra's "The Inner Mounting Flame," and Lifetime's "Emergency."

My wife got me tickets to both days of the Freihoffer Jazz Fest! I had a great time last year and am looking forward to going again. Congrats on the Parlan box, Al! It is, indeed, a great set. I'll need to listen to mine sometime soon (in your honor, of course)!

I like it. But then, I like Radiohead and Emmylou Harris...

Yeah, silly lyric, but the recording by Os Mutantes is great!

One of my favorite SpongeBob episodes involves Patrick (the starfish. SpongeBob's best friend) writing a song that's so horrible that it kills the musicians who record it and causes everyone who hears it to riot. Here are the lyrics: Twinkle twinkle Patrick Star I made myself a sandwhich my mommy named it Fred it tastes like beans and bacon and smells like its been dead Writing stuff is so hard so i use a pointy pencil pointy, pointy, pointy, pointy, pointy, point. P.U whats that horrible smell? Drum solo! (drum solo) I have a head. It ends in a point a pointy, pointy, pointy, pointy, pointy, point this song is over except for this line you win this round Broccoli This song is better than "Seasons in the Sun."

I couldn't in good conscience list "Season in the Sun" among the worst lyrics of all time simply because EVERYTHING about that song is horrible. The lyrics, yes, but also the tune, the instrumental peformance, and the vocal performance. Eveything about that song is just bad, bad, BAD. I work in a JAIL, and I don't think they could get away with playing that song in there (violates the inmates' constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment). At least with some of these songs, there's SOMETHING to recommend them. If you don't pay any attention to lyrics, I can see how you would like "I Don't Want to Wait" by Paula Cole. But there is NOTHING good about "Seasons in the Sun." And yet there are people who actually call radio stations and REQUEST it! I know there's no accounting for taste, but this is ridiculous!

Here's another one: "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate. It's not so much the lyrical content of this song that bugs me (although it's certainly not one of Shakespeare's sonnets) as the picture I get in my head of this guy screaming "touch me baby! You sexy thing!" I always imagine a fat, sweaty guy with a Jheri Curl... I believe in miracles Where you from You sexy thing I believe in miracles Since you came along You sexy thing Miracles right before my eyes You sexy thing got me hypnotised Don't stop what ya' doing What ya' doing to me My angel from above lying next to me How did ya' know that I'd be the one Been a long time coming only just begun Doing all the things that makes my heart sing Keep doing what you're doing you sexy thing How did ya' know I needed you so badly How did ya' know I gave my heart gladly Yesterday I was one of a lonely people Now you're lying next to me Making love to me I believe in miracles Where you from You sexy thing You sexy thing I believe in miracles Since you came along You sexy thing Only yesterday I was on my own Just another day later my mind was blown You sexy thing come into my life Forever and a day it feels so right How did ya' know that I'd be the one Been a long time coming only just begun Doing all the things that makes my heart sing Keep doing what you're doing you sexy thing How did ya' know I needed you so badly How did ya' know I gave my heart gladly Yesterday I was one of a lonely people Now you're lying next to me Making love to me I believe in miracles Where you from You sexy thing You sexy thing I believe in miracles Since you came along You sexy thing Kiss me baby You sexy thing You sexy thing Touch me baby You sexy thing You sexy thing Kiss me baby You sexy thing You sexy thing Touch me baby You sexy thing You sexy thing Kiss me baby You sexy thing You sexy thing Touch me baby You sexy thing You sexy thing Kiss me baby You sexy thing You sexy thing Touch me baby You sexy thing You sexy thing You sexy thing

Another song I have long hated is "Dance Hall Days" by Wang Chung (a poor man's Bowie if there ever was one). Take your baby by the hand And make her do a high hand stand Take your baby by the heel And do the next thing that you feel Chorus: We were so in phase In our dance hall days We were cool on craze When I, you, and everyone we knew Could believe, do, and share in what was true Oh, I said Take your baby by the hair And pull her close and there there there Take your baby by the ears And play upon her darkest fears Repeat chorus So take your baby by the wrist And in her mouth an amethyst And in her eyes two sapphires blue And you need her and she needs you And you need her and she needs you This guy isn't dancing with his baby. He's beating her senseless! "Take your baby by the hair and pull her closer, there, there, there..." "Take your baby by the ears and play upon her darkest fears..." My favorite is "Take your baby by the wrist and in her mouth an amethyst." Not only is it a bad idea to keep semi-precious stones in your mouth while you dance (choking hazard), but it's REALLY a bad idea when your dance partner is grabbing your hair and your ears. Not sure I'd want to dance with this guy... Paul McCartney and Ray Davies both treated the dance hall thing much better in "Ballroom Dancing" and "Come Dancing," respectively...

He's clearly talking about the Christmas season which begins on December 25th and ends on January 6th (the feast of the Epiphany, also known as Old Christmas). Duh! I actually always liked that lyric. Far, far better than McCartney's Christmas song... "Simply having a wonderful Christmas time..." If there were ever lyrics that perfectly captured the difference between John and Paul...

One o'those Neils. Speaking of Neils, Neil Diamond is responsible for some pretty repellant lyrics. The worst is "I am I Said"... LA's fine, sunshine most of the time The feeling is laid back Palm trees grow and the rents are low But you know I keep thinking about Making my way back Well, I'm New York City born and raised But nowadays, I'm lost between two shores LA's fine, but it ain't home New York's home but it ain't mine no more I am, I said To no one there And no one heard at all Not even the chair I am, I cried I am, said I And I am lost, and I can't even say why Leavin' me lonely still Did you ever read about a frog who dreamed of being a king And then became one Well, except for the names and a few other changes If you talk about me, the story's the same one But I got an emptiness deep inside And I've tried but it won't let me go And I'm not a man who likes to swear But I've never cared for the sound of being alone I am, I said To no one there And no one heard at all Not even the chair I am, I cried I am, said I And I am lost, and I can't even say why I am, I said I am, I cried I am... I think I can say why you're lost, Neil. You're expecting a response from the goddamn chair, that's your problem!

Congratulations! Just ten more years, and I'll be right there with you!

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