One of my favorite science fiction authors -- up there with Douglas Adams and Ray Bradbury, though I have not read as large a percentage of her work -- is Octavia Butler, who died suddenly on Friday at the age of 58. Very sad and premature. She fell and hit her head in front of her house, but also reportedly suffered from other health problems that didn't help. I saw her speak a year or two ago in LA, and looking back on it, the mere act of speaking and reading did seem to take a lot out of her, physically.

She has nice tributes from The Seattle Times and The Seattle P-I, which makes sense because she lived in Seattle. She does, however, seem to have been completely snubbed by the LA Times, despite growing up and attending college in the LA area. I hope this is incompetence or tardiness and not intentional neglect. Gosh, imagine that Los Angeles had no respect for writers, or for African-Americans, or for middle-aged, non-beautiful women. I'd be shocked, shocked!

I'd recommend her novel "Kindred" for those who enjoy time travel, slave narratives or history in general, and "Parable of the Sower " if you like dystopias or politics.

LA's tiny little subway system is considering turnstiles. The article mentions other cities on the honor system, like San Jose and Houston, but fails to mention the entire rest of the world. The German subways I experienced were on the honor system, and I'm sure it's standard in many other counties, too. But if we looked to other countries when discussing public transit, I suppose it would just be embarrassing for us.

The article does mention that LA has the most fare-evaders of any US subway on the honor system. Well, duh. If you ride public transit in LA, you are one of five things:
1) A hippie environmentalist
2) An urban planning wonk
3) Afraid of driving
4) Too broke to have a car
5) Too young to drive (or, I suppose, too old)
The vast majority of Angelenos riding public transit are poor. That's why they're hopping on the subway without a ticket, and many of them will simply jump the turnstiles if turnstiles are installed.

In Germany, labor laws and social services are structured such that you shouldn't have to be too poor to pay for the subway. Sure, people dodged the fares there, too, but I can't imagine it was prevalent. The little poverty I saw in Hamburg seemed closely tied to drug addiction -- there is no such thing as "the working poor" in Europe as far as I know. If you work, you therefore shouldn't be poor, ja? Then again, this is a country where plenty of adults didn't have credit cards, or the consumer hunger that keeps some of America's poor just as poor in savings/assets/education no matter how hard they work.

The US in general, and LA in particular, can try as many quick fixes as they want, but none of them will get to the real root of the problem.

In honor of my last day tutoring in the 7-Week Stand and Deliver Algebra 2AB Experence, here's a math joke, told yesterday by one of our top students:

Q. What does a mathematician do when he's constipated?
A. Works it out with a pencil.

*groan*

The latest in the Village Voice's "Generation Debt" series:

"A new law in New Jersey will make parents' [health insurance] coverage available to offspring as old as 30...These are people who are well past the age of majority and often finished with their education, who should be self-sufficient by now. That so many of them can't find employer-based coverage on their own would seem to indicate a larger problem than a stopgap program like this can fix."

But c'mon, the clinic is such fun.

Has it really been almost a year since I was in San Francisco, noshing on a cole-slaw-and-french-fry sandwich? Unbelievably, yes.

My most recent Bay Area odyssey was courtesy of my beer brewing club, which has been named the California homebrew club of the year by Anchor Brewing. I am already a distance runner, and this weekend, I became a distance drinker: slowly trotting/drinking along, always trying to save some energy for the end of the race. A good plan when the first beers got cracked open in the parking lot at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, while waiting for our chartered bus.

You don't want to know what type of (non-sexual) trouble these guys can get into at rest stops.

Long story short, San Francisco is full of good food, good drink, good public transit, good walks, and good friends of mine, and while I don't mind exploring the mad third-world morass of LA for another couple of years, I'm a little jealous every time I visit northern California. Not that I can afford to live there, but if I could, it'd rock.

Speaking of meme bandwagons, I just did the Johari window for two of my oldest friends. It was hard - how do you describe someone, anyone, in 5 or 6 words, let alone people you really like?

I realized that these two friends, despite being very different on the surface, have many of the Johari adjectives in common. I considered many of the same ones for both of them. I guess need my closest friends to be smart (Johari'd as intelligent/knowledgeable/wise), interesting (adjective is missing here - "complex" just sounds a little wrong, though I did choose it for one friend), dependable, etc but I think most of them also have a certain amount of chutzpah for grabbing life by the horns (Johari'd as bold/brave/powerful, I guess) and the ability to cut loose and laugh a little (which I had to Johari as "silly." To me, this word has positive connotations of humor and fun, but I realized later it may not have come off that way to the people in question.)

Anyway, it's too early in the morning and I'm writing run-on sentances like an LAUSD middle schooler, but with more parentheses. But that's the only time those damn Johari windows aren't overloaded!

As another side note, I'm finding myself with very little interest in having others sum me up in 6 words. It's not that I don't value my friends' and acquaintances' opinions, I'm just finding something weird and imprecise about this particular execise.

Tag, I'm it!

Four Jobs I've Had
* Wage slave, Kenny Rogers Roasters, 1993
* Library shelfreader, 1993
* Secretary, 1994
* Bastard operator helpdesk consultant from hell, 1995-7

Four movies I can watch over and over
In no particular order:
* Fight Club
* The Big Lebowski
* Airplane
* Pi

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
this probably means ones currently on TV, eh?
* South Park
* Daily Show
* Colbert Report
* Aqua Teen Hunger Force
not that I'm ever up late enough for most of them...

Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation
how about four particularly obscure ones?
* Horse Cave, Kentucky
* Groningen, Netherlands
* Leuven, Belgium (it was an accident)
* Reading, PA

Four Favorite Dishes
just four?
* good pad Thai (sadly lacking from my LA experience so far)
* doener kebap (bastardized German schwarma/gyro)
* the yummy puerco pibil (yummy Mexican pork) Rick has been perfecting since we moved here
* big, disgusting plates of nachos

Four Websites I Visit Daily
* bloglines.com
* mail.englishmajor.com
* gmail.com
* latimes.com

Four Places I’d Rather Be
* sitting around a campfire in the desert
* sitting at the neighborhood bar that no longer exists, or Klekolo circa 1994
* at least 1000 miles north of here
* most major European cities

Four [fiction] Books I Recommend
again, just four? argh. well, four recent ones...
* East of Eden, John Steinbeck
* Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
* Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk
* Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Leather, David Sedaris (this is technically nonfiction, but I think he fibs, so...)

Four Bloggers I’m Tagging
take it if you want it

I am clueless when it comes to recognizing celebrities, even though I live in LA. Rick's the one who spotted Elijah Wood.

But today, less than a block from my always-eventful after-school job, there was Tony Cox getting into his car. A celebrity apparently need be African-American and unusually short for me to notice, because I've also seen Gary Coleman.

The question is what anyone with any money, even a character actor, would be doing in that neighborhood. There's a dry-cleaner on that corner. Maybe it's a really GOOD dry-cleaner.

I hate to rub it in, but I can't resist noting that it's 85 degrees right now.

Driving to an SAT lesson yesterday, I couldn't see any street numbers, but felt like I was within a block or two. I called my student to ask her for cross streets and landmarks, and also where I should park.

She told me I should look for the [name omitted] Fancy Hotel and pull up in front. There, I should drop her name to someone, and the valet would park my car.

Mmmkay...

I did so, then walked -- underdressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap -- through the lobby that contained people in eveningwear. I went up to the 15th floor, where I looked at the number I'd initially assumed to be an apartment number, and couldn't locate it.

I called again. She said I'd be looking for the unnumbered white door at the end of the hall.

Inside, she led me to her suite: a living room, bedroom, and bathroom off a larger apartment where her parents live.

I've had students with maids before, but this is ridiculous ;)

This post is mostly just a shout into the Google Void.

Why can't I find any teacher bloggers in LA? Plenty in NY and the Bay Area, and many of the issues are the same. But surely some inner city teacher in LA county has a blog. Surely I'm not as good as it gets. Anyone?

As if the Pixies reunion wasn't enough to warm my fogey 90s heart, now the Fugees are back. The first single (listen here) is a bit overproduced for my taste, but for a bunch of 30-something who hate each other -- including a mother of four -- they sound decent.

I'm not making this up, and presumably, neither is the New York Times.

President Bush told the nation's students on Friday that if they studied math and science they would not be joining the "nerd patrol" but helping their own futures and the economic health of the United States.

"You know, a lot of people probably think math and science isn't meant for me — it kind of seems a little hard, algebra," Mr. Bush said at a panel discussion, organized by the White House, outside Albuquerque at the Intel Corporation's largest chip-making plant. "I can understand that, frankly."

But Mr. Bush urged people to heed the story of a high school senior on the panel, Nicole Lopez, who told the assembled crowd that she had joined gangs in her freshman year and was on the wrong road until two teachers, now her mentors, helped steer her toward math and science. Ms. Lopez said she would attend the University of New Mexico and planned to major in civil engineering.

"I hope people listening and hear Nicole's story take a look at math and science," Mr. Bush said.

The president also said, "I'm looking for a mentor, by the way, both in math and English."

This algebra 2 book has the occasional throwaway section on "problem-solving stragegies," which are not really all that strategic. Anyway, one of them contains this question:

9. If you had one bill from each type of bill from the game Monopoly®, how much play money would you have?"

Product placement? Cultural bias? Both?

One of my favorite students asked me what Groundhogs Day is. It's only her second one in the country, so the question is very forgivable.

I explained that it's silly American holiday where we watch a little animal come out of a hole in Pennsylvania and blah blah blah.

I was reminded of another student's comment on the holiday:
"Stupid groundhog. How long did it take Martin Luther King to get a holiday, and the stupid groundhog already had one?"

This from a middle-schooler reading far below grade level. When I related this story to the kid's mother -- more than a year later, drinking Colt 45 on their porch on the 4th of July -- she said he'd always been prematurely political. He said something equally ripe at the age of four, but I don't remember the story, because it began "Back when we lived in the shelter..." and frankly, I found that revalation distracting.

Anyway, they'll be asking me much harder questions tomorrow, about graphing functions and not silly holidays, so back to the books for me.