Karla loves the internet and drawing, it fits with her overall interest in the world around her. Naturally, when she noticed a young reporter using one of her illustrations for his story, you can imagine how excited and happy she became. The entire family received repeated emails about the event!
We gave Karla her own domain to post her drawings and she is catching on to the entire web design thing as well fairly quickly.
Congratulations Karla.
By the way, Karla’s big sister Karen (nick named by her ‘the poodle’) was an athlete at SC and previously Florida and drew lots of Trojans!
One of the many variety of Trojans Karla has drawn! ( Karen the fighting poodle?)
I have written about this before but it is worth repeating. Few if any movies that have won an Oscar or have rave reviews by esteemed movie critics are worthy of the ticket price.
Why is this always the case?
Each critic views potential movies through a filter of their own set of social and political values that seldom are in sync with the needs and wants of the viewing public. Looking back, who can remember the commercial flops so propped up by critics like ‘the English Patient” or “Brokeback Mountain”? As I remember it, even the first “Star Wars” was panned by movie critics Siskel & Ebert … They were so often wrong ,they became my bench mark of what NOT to see.
The obvious truth is simple. People want to be entertained ….and in troubling times, lighthearted, amusing films that produce admiration, a smile and a good belly laugh are wanted the most. You can witness this yourself at the box office as folks vote with their feet and their scarce cash.
So, as ‘Transformers’ sets new box office heights while universally panned by the critics… I have to ask, ” do these critics just have a job-for-life, because they need new blood and a different perspective.” So as a tribute to having a little fun, here’s a tongue-in-cheek look at the making of Transformers:
First, be careful how much news you watch , all news is designed to be depressing because bad news sells. So I think it is best to limit your exposure , especially if you want to keep your sanity. I am also reminded of the ‘sales truism’ that all people can be motivated by fear and/or greed and we have a lot of that going around. So, the moral is “if you want to be manipulated less, don’t read too much news.”
However, there is a truth about our troubling economy. Our nation is in a period of transition. Unemployment has nearly doubled in my county this past year and we are supposed to be one of the ‘lucky’ counties in California with economic recovery slated for sometime in 2012; however, with major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles viewed darkly until ‘2014 or beyond’ the impact will be here for longer than most will accept.
Obviously, the real secret to staying ahead of the big challenges is to have a job… and the best jobs are those that are likely to be in demand even in tough times. Some young people fall in love with smaller communities and fool themselves into believing they can stay by holding multiple ‘joe jobs’, but having two or three jobs is meaningless if all of them are equally vulnerable to elimination. The young need to go where the better jobs are. If I were to give unsolicited and unwanted advice to any young person, I would tell them:
1) They need to get the better skills needed to help them compete in our new world. This means they need to look honestly at what type of education will have value in the future marketplace.
2) I would caution them that if they didn’t have a great job, the cost of a good party might be beyond their reach. 😉
3) Lastly, I would suggest they look at careers and parts of the county and the world to start their life that they might not have considered before.
4) The world still is for those who can adjust to change and have the courage to move forward whether at 20 or 70.
Look honestly at the world, then you’ll know what to do.
Okay, the financial problems of the California State University system, in particular, look all too easy to address. As someone who has taught many places over many years, I feel it is safe to say that the CSU — Cal Poly in particular — has lost its way and forgotten it’s basic mission and pursued a program of questionable expansion that has put the universities at the brink of disaster.
If you take a look deeper, one can only wonder how the CSU administration’s most recent actions are consistent with their mission? Here are a couple of obvious conflicts:
1) ARE ALL JOBS EQUALLY RELEVANT IN TODAY’S ECONOMIC REALITIES?
Each of the three functional units (faculty, staff and administration) of a university are being treated as being equally central to the university mission but each area contributes differentially and some functions are clearly more central to the core objectives than others.
Observation:
A) Clearly, although every individual employee values their own job, not all jobs have an equal contribution to the university mission. To meet the budget, some jobs can be combined while others could be eliminated as a luxury of a previous era.
B) Currently, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has taken the approach by reducing the number of instructors as their quick and easy solution. However, this has caused some obviously unforeseen consequences resulting in the closing of classes, reduction in courses and delaying graduation. One Dean was quoted by a student as saying in desperation that they would sign anything (substitutions, et cetera) in order to get a student to graduation. Although this is admirable on one level, is this the was we should be doing business?
C) One work group has grown unchecked for almost three decades … and just since the 1980’s alone, Cal Poly’s administration has grown exponentially and one wonders what effect — if any — this dramatic increase in warm bodies has had on meeting the educational mission. There are titles and positions that didn’t exist just 20 years ago ( provosts, vice provosts, vice presidents, etc.) I can’t help but wonder if returning to the 1980 staffing levels would mitigate the entire budget deficit all by itself?
2) SHARE THE PAIN?
An across the board approach to cost savings is the strategy being employed by the CSU and Cal Poly in budget cuts. Before we look at this question, I have to ask: who is more needed than a professor in meeting the educational mission?
Observation:
In an other worlds, when costs seem out of bounds, the solution most often presented successfully is ‘consolidation’ first, elimination second. Here are a few ideas:
A) Couldn’t the administrative offices of a university run more than one university?
B) Shouldn’t university executives be writing their own emails and letters as happens in the rest of the university? Aren’t floors of secretaries a relic from a bygone era?
C) Shouldn’t University Executive perks (company cars, car allowances, expense reports, special health care benefits and junkets) be eliminated first?
D) Why shouldn’t every administrator ( many hold Ph.D.’s) be assigned one class to keep in touch with what is going on within the university setting? I have made this suggestion many times before. We need to get more value from the assets we already have and if we can’t, then they should go.
E) As an aside, many university presidents have been rightfully accused of pretending to be royalty… this sets a bad example… one wonders why any university president should have university employees over to his home to do any home improvement projects? Most would also question the educational purpose of a wine cellar, the President’s car allowance, and what many might call extravagant living. Here’s a small peek.
“ Carly Baker, the president’s wife, championed construction of a modern and pricey kitchen for the stadium boxes, including the president’s suite, so that his private chef can prepare gourmet meals during a portion of the six annual home games. Cost of the extreme kitchen? Between $300,000 and $400,000…”
As you can see, meeting the educational mission and making sensible cost reductions are not conceptually difficult… it’s not rocket science and — by the way — reductions starts at the top.
‘Lose weight or die more quickly and horribly’ would be a great slogan for a dieting commercial. For example, I love those shock commercials about smoking that show some older gent wheezing and , sympathetically, we listen to him warn us not to let this happen to us. Stop smoking, I get it. But if I were to take an educated guess, being overweight causes more physical harm and early death than almost anything we are doing to ourselves and it will only get worse.
I say get worse, because, it appears that the corpulent are moving into more sedentary years. I don’t think we have to worry about boomers taxing the social security program, a lot less of us may be around to collect anything. Now, the CDC had a quite beautiful color presentation of the trend in obesity rates in this country… but hard to understand… so I changed the colors and gray scaled it. Now, you can better see what’s going on. Arteries are choking in the heartland of America.
First, I know that the diversity of our commercial food offerings is part of what drives people to eat more and I wouldn’t give that up. I know that ‘super tasters’ like me have an additional challenge, but one doesn’t have to feast every day, drink everyday and give up walking.
By the way, strenuous exercise stimulates the appetite and initiates a chain of events leading to failure, dieting and walking is the key. When I was a young boy I had a favorite customer on my paper route, he was 103. He impressed me with his stories and finally I asked him — in my youthfully honest way — why he lasted so long? He told me that it was because he walked everyday to his coffee shop and such. Interestingly enough he did drive on occasion, but he impressed on me that walking was what kept his motor running. He noticed that the first things his friends stopped doing was to walk places, then came the chair , the bed and then death. He said that at a certain age, once you stop walking the ability to start walking again becomes nearly impossible. He also enjoyed eating fabulously on Sunday, drank his ‘Old Fashions’ and brandies, but he was lean the rest of the week.
Just watch what you eat, walk every day ( pick a fun destination , say a coffee shop) and allow yourself to enjoy 1 fabulous meal a week and you’ll lose weight… which makes most people healthier… if not happier.
Roger
PS. I am working on my one extravagant meal of the week… for Saturday!
