250 Days and Counting

I call them the human raccoons. Twice yearly the city declares large trash day, and twice yearly strangers in pick-up trucks troll through the neighborhoods scanning for stuff on the curb that looks good or good enough to sell. Free is free, I suppose, or most profitable. I don't get it--or I've never seen anything worth getting--but the schoolhouse equivalent is largely how I've furnished my classroom. It's how I came by a brand new bulletin board, now half covered in calendars and policies and schedules, and half covered in stuff that says "me": Packer ticket stubs, photos from prom and vacation and commencement, postcards from New York. The item that draws the most comment, however, is a black and white bumper sticker: "01/20/09. The end of an error".

"What is that?" The perplexed queries have come from both teachers and kids. But when I explain to those who wouldn't know or gently point out, "inauguration day" (the "duh" is implied) to those who should, every single person gets a very satisfied smile. Tempered, of course, by the realization that we still have to wait that long, but AT LEAST we're almost to the end of this kind of appalling, pathetic nonsense:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’“