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Jesse Ventura has endorsed Bernie Sanders.  Ronda Rousey has endorsed Bernie Sanders.  Apparently, Bernie’s getting the badass vote.

Today, I had my Gymnasium classes and I thought I had a great lesson plan worked out.  I always like to emphasize the five w’s and an h, i.e. who, what, when, where, why and how and I thought it would be fun to have the students try to solve some of humanity’s greatest mysteries.  So, I started off the first class by writing on the board: The Fortingall Yew, The Vojnich Manuscript, and The Marie Celeste.

Then asked them to use those 6 questions to find out what the stories are all about.  Personally, I thought conversation about the Fortingall Yew would occupy the class for a whole hour with a conversation on sex changes, even if it descended into crudeness.  But, no.  First, they didn’t really understand the assignment, then they whined about it (and they are not usually a whiny class), then they stumbled through it, but in the end they totally took it for granted that trees change sex, and didn’t think it was particularly surprising or interesting that a 240 page manuscript was in a language nobody  knows, and were ready to sign off on the notion that all passengers and crew on the Marie Celeste went for a pleasant mid-Atlantic swim one afternoon, and were all eaten  by a fierce shoal of predatory sharks, without much questioning at all.

I spared the next class the game, it hadn’t worked very well and there are a couple in that class who are serious beginners in English and wouldn’t have gotten it at all, but I went back to it in my last two classes, because I didn’t have anything else planned,  with similar results.

After school, I was thinking “Well, I’ll never do that again,” but by the time I reached home, I was thinking it.  It’s a good  lesson plan, the students  just didn’t get it.  I need to tweak this a little bit.  Because it’s important.  Not just for English.  They need to learn how to get information by asking questions, and not just looking them up and memorizing facts to pass tests.

One student actually asked me “If you know, why don’t  you just tell us?”

Old crazy eyes, Michele Bachmann, is back in the news.  She doesn’t hold any political office, she is no longer influential in  any way, but she  sure is quotable and that’s enough to keep her in the newspapers.

Michele Bachmann

She thinks it’s time to get busy converting all the Jews because Jesus is coming soon.  Now, I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt here and say that she’s just crazy and not actually malicious.  I’m sure she sincerely believes that converting all the Jews to Christianity would be doing the Jews a favor, even though Jewish people are unlikely to see things the same way.  Somewhat analogous to her husband’s totally fraudulent conversion therapy, except that Judaism actually is a choice – well, sort of, then you get into the whole race v. religion question, descendants of Abraham, and…well, it’s complicated.

But, then, there’s the whole “Jesus is coming soon” business.  Jesus, according to Bachmann’s bible thumping brethren down the ages, has been coming soon for a long time, at least as long as I’ve been alive and I’m sure a hell of a lot longer.  Probably the first obnoxious, sign bearing psycho to make that prediction popped up within weeks of the crucifixion.

He didn’t show up for the black death or the Spanish  Inquisition.  He ignored the slaughter of the American  Indians, the total genocide of the Tasmanians, the slave trade, lynchings, the flu epidemic of 1919, the holocaust, Cambodia and Rwanda.  So, why should he  show up now?

Or perhaps it’s because of our debauched lifestyle, all the fornicating and drug taking and cussing in rock songs and twerking and stuff.  I’m also kind of skeptical about that because people have been fornicating and taking drugs and using bad language for a long time, too.

So, bottom line, I’m not holding my breath.

Here’s a wild thought, though.  Maybe she’s angling for the VP nomination on a Carson ticket?  Now, that would be a hoot.

Time will tell, it could happen soon, but I don’t think so.  Despite Ben Carson being caught lying about his offered scholarship to West Point, and caught lying about getting a medal for honesty (bonus points for that one), and caught lying about

Dr. Ben Carson

trying to stab that kid (seriously, Dr. Carson, you’ve got it all backwards.  That’s the kind of stuff you’re expected to lie about if you DID it, not if you didn’t), he hasn’t announced that he’s dropping out of the race.

Despite that ridiculous comment about how the Pyramids were used to store grain (This is what is referred to as an unforced error. Nobody asked him about the pyramids.  Their purpose is completely irrelevant to American politics.), I haven’t heard about his popularity dropping.

Despite his whiny outrage at being asked questions (“I don’t remember Barack Obama getting this kind of scrutiny.”  Yes, he really said that.), I have a Republican friend or two on facebook who defend him.

Basically, when you ask the question: how low will the Republicans have to go before people realize they are completely nuts?, it’s like asking if there is intelligent life on other planets.  Theoretically, there must be.  But, we haven’t found it yet.  There seems to be no bottom to the well of stupid.

We often complain about how dumb kids are today.  They don’t read books.  They can’t write cursive.  And so on.

Dobble

Probably the same things our parents’ generation said about us, but a bit more extreme.  After all, we are, with the advent of the computer age, at the cutting edge of history and no generation is as different from the previous generation as the next generation, and that’s just going to get more extreme with each generation from here on out.

But, they’re not stupid.  There are a couple of games my  daughter seriously likes.  One is called Duch (Ghost) and the  other is called Dobble, which I presume is Dobble in English, too.

Duch is weird.  There are like 6 or 7 tokens, a white ghost, a gray mouse, a red chair, a blue (I think) bottle, etc…  All of the tokens are in the middle of the table.  A card, with a picture on it, is played, and it will have 3 or 4 things on it, say for instance a red ghost sitting in  a blue chair and a gray mouse on the floor.  So, whoever grabs the gray mouse token quickest takes the card.  If there is no exact match on the card, it’s whichever of the tokens doesn’t match the card AT ALL.  For instance, if the  card has a red ghost sitting in a gray chair and holding a white book, then you would need to look for the token that wasn’t represented at all, either by color or by object.  Isabel spots it while I’m still trying to take in the scene.

Adults don’t stand a chance.

Same with Dobble, which is a card game that I am even amazed by the premise, this should not be mathematically possible.  There’s a deck of cards, I’d say about 60 or 70 of them, and each of them has 8 or 9 pictures on them.  There’s a ghost, an igloo, sunglasses, an anchor, a Yin-Yang symbol, a cartoon bomb, a spider, a spider web, a car, a question mark, a shamrock, a drop of water, a bird, etc…Each card has precisely one picture in common with every other card in the deck but only one.  Whoever spots it first wins the card.  Again, she thrashes me every time.

I thought she was maybe some sort of prodigy but we were baby sitting our niece and nephew last night, and this morning our niece, who is 6, also kicked my butt at Dobble.  Several times in a row.

Reflexes like lightning, these young kids.  Instant pattern recognition.  Maybe it’s age.  But, I seriously think their intelligence is differently prioritized than our own.  It’s  evolution.  Right in front of our eyes.

So far, the 2016 American presidential election, the political version of Superstar, is shaping up as a repeat of the 2012 election on the Republican side, and a repeat of 2008 on the Democratic side.

Donald Trump is probably most analogous to Michele Bachmann:  brash, outspoken, and crazy narcissistic.  If I recall correctly, she was leading in the polls at this point as well, but she totally lost in Iowa and she was out.  I expect that to happen to Trump as well.  At least I hope so.

Bush is Mitt Romney, although I think his campaign is in even worse shape than Romney’s was at this point.  Maybe Rubio is Mitt, but I suspect Bush still gets the backing of the oligarchs, because he is one of them.  If this really does play out to be a replay of 2012, Bush will get the nomination after every single one of the other candidates flames out spectacularly.

Ben Carson, of course, is Herman Cain, both for being the token black guy and for being nuts.  I think the pyramid thing is even funnier than Cain’s ‘You becky becky beckystan’.

John Kasich is John Huntsman.  Although I seriously doubt that he is as smart as Huntsman, he is still too sane and intelligent to be considered seriously as a Republican candidate.

Rand Paul, of course, is this year’s Ron Paul.

Chris Christie is Newt Gingrich, and not only because they are both fat.  Well, partly because they’re both fat.  But Christie is definitely in a class of his own on that score.

On the Democratic side, Martin O’Malley is this year’s John Edwards.  So, check for mistresses.

Hillary Clinton, of course, is reprising her role as Hillary Clinton.

Which makes Bernie Sanders this year’s Barack Obama.  May it be so.