Summer is at its peak. Everything that grows is coming to its maturity. It is the time for sunflowers and Queen Anne’s Lace. I had several sunflowers come up where the birds had dropped seeds.
The cicadas are loud and the lightning bugs are making the tall trees light up at night. Bats are flying low, gobbling up insects. Spiders are building fortress webs that will catch you in the face when you walk out your door.
Farmers markets thrive as people attempt to capture all that is good about fresh produce. Corn and tomatoes seem to be favorites.
Homemade green beans just don’t taste as good as they used to. Watermelon also has changed its flavor. It just isn’t as good as it used to be. I don’t think it is me. I think it is watermelon.
What is the best corn to buy this summer? How about the peaches? One week they are great. The next week I couldn’t give them to my dogs.
What are the readers finding good out there?
Looks like the c.v. of Principal Robin Toogood at Jennie Dean Elementary School was simply too good to be true. It took from 2009 until now and a potential school transfer to find this out?
If someone is doing a good job, why would the false information be detected? The state board of education is who issues his Virginia certifications. I guess it happens more than we think.
I heard of someone who others said was teaching on her dead sister’s teaching certificate. I don’t know if it was true or not. She was a horrible teacher.
I don’t know if he was a wonderful human being or not but he was great in Dead Poets Society. O Captain My Captain…
But every account I ever heard he was a gentle, thoughtful guy who was nice to everyone around him. And helped people to do things, like to get movies made that wouldn’t have otherwise been made.
If you want to like Robin Williams, I’d say listen to his interview with Marc Maron which has been reposted to the WTF podcast this week, at http://www.wtfpod.com . Which was nice of him to do in the first place, and helped Maron to get his now-great podcast off the ground.
@Rick Bentley
Guess I’m not with it or out of it, because I’ve never heard of Marc Maron.
Maron was a standup comedian, not particularly famous. He was on the Air America radio network for a while in the previous decade. Towards the end of that decade, when he found himself out of work, he took what he had, invested it in a garage studio, and started a podcast, WTF, where he interviews other comedians generally.
It’s a great podcast. Maron has a lot of the same gifts Howard Stern does – an ability to make his own psyche interesting, and ability to do a great interview. Though where Stern aims to be lowbrow and coarse, Maron aims to be literate and sensitive. It’s generally great. The show with Robin Williams is a fine example of that.
And the happy ending is that Maron has found his niche by investing in himself, doing what he wanted to do out of his garage, and is a hotter property now. In fact he has a comedy show on IFC, playing himself, which is pretty funny.
Podcasts are wonderful. Free entertainment. You grab it for free, can play it in your car (I play mine off a USB memory stick), play it while you exercise.
My experience with gpodder as a mechanism to discover and subscribe to podcasts has been excellent. It’s free, of course.
I listen each week to :
WTF – again, it’s something like Howard Stern but brainier.
Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson – funny, entertaining science show.
The Bugle – John Oliver’s HBO show is awful, but this podcast he does with a very funny countryman is strong world events satire.
Grantland Sports Jalen and Jacoby – great sports show about the NBA; Jalen Rose is the new Charles Barkley.
and some technical shows about web coding and programming tools.
And now, fabulous Lauren Bacall has checked out, as it were.
Wonder whether she’ll get as much attention as Williams?
Well, she was 89 years old, so you wouldn’t think so.
She will on TCM. Thank goodness.
I assume she’ll be the September star of the month.
I find it interesting that her deep voice was an affect, done to appear sexier. And then she stuck with it. Wonder if Scarlet Johansson and Emma Stone’s voices are naturally deep.
get them to smoke.
@Moon-howler
And here I thought that was your natural Southern voice, honeychild.
Smoking does rasp things up a bit. When you stop though it goes back to normal.
She stopped smoking in 1988 according to her bio.
One would think that, when a person is being considered for a leadership or teaching position in a school system, the personnel office would pick up a phone or send an email to verify the degrees and other academic honors claimed. First simple step in verification of a resume. It is far too easy to forge papers these days. Looks to me like PWC schools are making the changes now to avoid a repeat of this and to reduce dependence on the bureaucrats in Richmond. I hope Loudoun is watching.
It was City of Manassas, not PWC.
The licensing comes from the State. No way to side step that. The state is actually very strict about various classes. If they have lightened up, it has been very recently.
See latest post.
Stupidity and Tragic at the same time. Shoot first, ask questions later were his motto.
http://www.insidenova.com/news/loudoun/report-loudoun-deputy-shoots-daughter-mistaken-for-intruder/article_a3ab335e-d1bd-58b6-abeb-6adec434cf08.html
He obviously doesn’t do well under pressure. He shoots his daughter and then nearly kills her in a wreck?
I don’t do well under pressure either. I also am not a sheriff’s deputy.
This Rick Perry indictment looks like an insane abuse of power. (Not on Perry’s part, on the prosecutor’s). He’s being persecuted for stating out loud to his constituents that he wasn’t going to fund something headed by a drunk.
The entire thing sounds stupid. He might end up a hero after all this.
“Texans for Public Justice government watchdog group filed an ethics complaint accusing the governor of coercion because he threatened to use his veto before actually doing so in an attempt to pressure Lehmberg to quit”.
Perry couldn’t have manufactured something like this if he tried. He’s being honest and standing up for common-sense, and a shrill liberal (Austin-based) minority indicts him for it.
Let’s talk about when the local Republican Party is going to stop allowing local bloggers who claim to be big time Republican shoot the entire party in the foot with outrageously religiously prejudiced posts.
You can’t do that. If someone is simply too ignorant to know the difference between our local Muslim community members and a terrorist sect of a religion half way around the world, Then that person really should be forced to give up the “Republican” identifier.
I hear all sorts of howling and gnashing of teeth over Mr. FitzSimmonds over his Facebook remarks. Yes, his appointment should be recalled, in my opinion. He does not represent the party well if he is going to make religiously prejudiced remarks that leave a blight on the Party. However, I see little difference in what he wrote and what a local blogger wrote other than Mr. FitzS. was just a little more tasteful.
I left the party several decades ago because of this kind of stupidity. It looks like I made the right decision. UFB
So … who here thinks that this child should be forced to live as a boy? http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/15/transgendered-teen-told-she-cant-come-to-school-as-girl/14151795/
As the election season gets into full swing, I was curious to determine which party benefits more from large corporate donors and labor unions. It turns out that the vast majority of the donations from the top 20 largest donors go to Democrats and liberals. Koch Industries, constantly demonized by the Left, is ranked only #36, which is well behind the National Education Association at #6 with 97% of its donations to Dems. The City of New York is a huge donor also.
http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/toporgs.php
Somehow the entire story isn’t being told there.
Unions vs the Koch brothers?
YFT update … http://www.pwcgov.org/News/Pages/YFTUpdate.aspx