Lehane didn’t say that David “created” authentic speech, simply that, as far as Lehane can tell, David gets it right, is closer to the source and is therefore less likely to commit the cringe-worthy errors we’ve all heard.

Lighten up? I can’t remember the stat, but a staggering number of black men are unemployed in Baltimore, at least thirty percent. And, in a city of just over 600,000, someone is killed every eighteen hours. It’s hard to lighten up. At least, it should be. Some folks are doing just fine.

By the way, I was the last poverty reporter at the Baltimore Sun. When I left the beat in 1994, it was eliminated because it was just too much of a downer, writing about all those poor people. Instead, the beat was shifted to “non-profits” — stories about the good-hearted middle-class people who helped the poor. The Sun also hasn’t had a decent housing reporter for years, even as the city has torn down the high-rises and failed to create new housing, in part because it doesn’t want to deal with outraged neighborhoods that don’t want scattered site low-income housing and the feds now take a dim view of forcing all the public housing into poor, minority neighborhoods.

(By the way, in another section of the story, the editors say the made it better, and use the yardstick of Pulitzers to support this claim. From 1979-1989, the Sun and Evening Sun won three Pulitzers, and that was without an activist member on the Pulitzer board. From 1991-2003, which encompasses the Carroll-Marimow era at the Sun, the paper won . . . three Pulitzers.)

So, feud or no feud, there is an argument to be made that the local newspaper hasn’t been particulary vigilant in covering problems that are affecting the quality of life in this city. Hey, maybe that’s unique to Baltimore. But I doubt it.

STEIN Dick Stein, of Columbus, passed away Friday, August 24, 2007. He was 91. Mr. Stein’s band (”Dick Stein, Music So Fine”) played in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s at countless social events, weddings and bar mitzvahs in the Columbus area. He was known for his love of jazz, his velvet singing voice, good looks, and interludes on the clarinet and saxophone; also, for his frequent sexual quips. (”Gettin’ any?”) He and his wife Shirley were very active at Temple Israel where he sang in the choir and,..

When I was teaching at U of Idaho, we were ’strongly encouraged’ by HP, the leading employer of our grads, to teach a certain programming language, which was used by HP. Forget the fact that another language would have helped them better understand how to think algorithmically, this was all about filling slots.

I interviewed at the U of Nevada Reno, and they used a particular proprietary programming environment. Why? Because that was what was used in slot machines, which a donor so benevolently provided.

What I wouldn’t give for an entire class who was schooled in critical thinking.

Nobody? Or not as many as once larnt to think? Or not as many more as we might wish? That’s a discussion worth having, not “why are schools today filled with so many disruptive kids,” which is the one i get my ear bent about.

I do think “No Test Left Behind” is blunting the critical, creative edge of education as we’ve had it for college-bound populations for the last fifty years. The relentless focus on how to keep the lowest achieving third in the building and not acting out is taking major energy from physics, life science, and comp & term paper type classwork. Those last three are slowly dropping from schools that just got them in the last twenty years, and we’ll regret it sooner than later.

But we don’t write off the kids in wheelchairs, the kids with cognitive disabilities, or the ones who don’t have parents in the home the way we did not that long ago, too, and that’s a victory i don’t want to throw back in order to get Latin back in the curriculum. I’d like my Little Guy to take a year of Latin, but i lost it so two other kids actually get an education, which is a fair trade; he can learn Latin from cornerstones and watching his dad badly translate ‘em.

Jeff: So it used to be that 50% of the kids dropped out to take blue collar jobs. Now, the schools are training them to do the blue collar jobs. Hell, the colleges are, too. Now, everybody is getting ‘an education’, but nobody is learning how to think.

Note: stay off bumpy roads!

(and when boating, watch out for ‘huge waves’)

What would the obit header be? ‘Bicylist killed in climactic accident’?