A comedy skit I wrote:

Did I tell you that I’m going to be staying in North Virginia this summer? Every time I go there, my mother KILLS me! She says I don’t visit enough.

Oh, you mean North Virginia as in *North* Virginia?

SOUTHERN North Virginia.

Do you really mean to tell me, that, that you’ll be staying in SOUTHERN North Virginia?

Well yeah, of course. Why is that such a surprise to you?

And, and your mother will be staying there too?

I hope so.

Why would you wish such a thing on her?

It’s where she lives! What are you stupid? All the great Smiths retire to Southern North Virginia. A few of them even like it better in South Virginia.

South Virginia? No way! I hear it’s too hot there.

It ain’t that bad, try Florida if you want hot.

I had no idea that, that you and your family were such bad people.

Now why would you say a thing like that about my family?

Most of the good people I know… well, they go to North Virginia.

Some of the really good ones go to NORTH North Virginia.

I knew a bank robber once, and he went to South Virginia.

Another guy was a rapist, and he went to SOUTH South Virginia.

Well what does that have to do with anything?

I just thought, you see, that you were a good family man… and you went to church every Sunday… and you were on the mission for four years… yet now I find out it all means nothing. What kind of game are you playing with me? Is your life all a lie?

Listen, I’m only going to South North Virginia because my mother couldn’t afford to move further North. She wanted to be near the rest of the family.

NEAR the rest of the family? Why would she want to suffer through that?

Now your …

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Especially in the last decade colleges have become biased toward giving higher grades for poorer results. For a trigonometry test several semesters back, I ended up with 30 bonus points for acing the advance quizzes. While I got a modest 84 on the test, this turned into a mighty 114 with the extras. Mind you, my grade was not capped at 100, but the 14 overage would apply to other sub-par test scores. The net effect was an easy A in the class. The standard for a good grade is steadily creeping downward.

The standard maximum GPA was a 4.0, but now with honors classes, which are supposedly harder than their traditional counterparts, GPAs can soar to 4.5 and beyond. These classes do not compare to the college-level English and arithmetic taught to the students of Lincoln’s day. No–it was in those days that the condescending moniker, “higher education,” truly lived up to its name. It was not uncommon for half of a pre-graduate class to miserably fail.

Nevertheless, test scores are plummeting–it seems the more bonuses and concessions we pile on, the WORSE students do. All of the sudden mediocrity is excellence and is awarded A’s. A new standard for success emerges, one far more base than that of yesterday’s scholars.

Some teachers find students skipping vital tests or even finals. This is due to a new practice where the lowest score for any test in the class is dropped, as if the failure never took place. Often, if the test score on the final exam is higher than the lowest score on the junior tests, the final counts for both, erasing the lowest test grade. All of the sudden, a final that counted for 20% of the class grade gets a boost to 30%. This allows for amazing comebacks gradewise, at …

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Hello folks. I haven’t been doing much of anything recently. I’ve been working on a summer course in computer programming and doing photography on and off.

My spring project was an open-source integrated library system (ILS) in PHP called Bookley. It allows you to manage patrons, items, check-ins and check-outs, renewals, fines, records, cover scans, and more. Try it out if you want to set up your own public or private library. It’s over 4000 lines of code and took 120 hours to program.

Th8.us has been going down a lot lately, but I fixed this today by removing lists of URLs and hit counters (resource hogs). This site and Th8.us will be rock-solid now.

I will be blogging, Twittering, commenting, and posting photos regularly again. In fact, I think I have more than ever to blog about.

If you haven’t heard, there is a lot of evidence that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built by aliens. Mainly, it consists of two million stones weighing 5000 pounds each quarried five miles away. The theory is they rolled them on logs to transport them, but the logs would be worn after each stone and would likely get bogged down in the sand. This means new logs would be needed for each of the two million stones, which is unlikely because Egypt is a desert with few trees. If it was built in 13 years, this means one stone was added every three minutes and thirty-five seconds, which I find implausible. If they stopped working at nights, that means an even faster pace. Aliens built it before they were here. Egyptians kept no records of the construction of the Pyramids.