Martial arts and illuminated manuscripts

This morning was the judo test. This would be the first martial arts "test" I have had that was actually a test, and not primarily an exhibition. It is a bizarre experience.

There was a written test. It calmed my nerves before the skills demonstration to have something as comfortable and familiar as a written test to tackle. Testing is a skill I haven't been able to use in a long time, not really since high school. I was a bit frustrated to have lost sleep memorizing "seriyoku zenyo" when the test did not turn out to be quite so demanding.

After my testing was done, but while the higher belts were still going, I witnessed an amusing exchange. A woman with a tiny toddlerette on her knee was encouraging the child to "watch Daddy test."

Whump went Daddy's partner onto the mat.

"Oooh," said the little girl, "he's in big trouble."

I'm being coy about the result of the testing because I didn't find out for certain, although if you offered me even money I would put a substantial sum on my having passed.

Tonight I watched The Secret of Kells, which is a beautiful movie. You should see it. With your eyes. I wish (and wished) I had taken the opportunity to see it on a big screen in Seattle. Ever since, I had been putting off seeing it until I could pay attention.

It did cause me to exclaim, at one point, "What is this movie rated?" Girlfriend replied that it wasn't. I'm inclined to think that there is something bold in that. The movie contains vikings, and consequently it depicts them viking. Not that there is "graphic" violence in the strictest sense. Because nobody apparently pushed to get the movie rated G on the basis that all its disturbing elements happen just off screen, I respect it in much the same way that I was irked by The Dark Knight for getting a PG-13 rating instead of an R using the same trick.

Hopefully my respect will offset the sting of taking in less than $1 million at the box office. Failing that, a much-deserved nomination for best animated feature may have done some good. I hope that more money might have flowed to the creators since then.

Speaking of best animated features, I ought to watch Up all the way through, it being what took the Oscar the year The Secret of Kells was nominated. But I can't attempt it today. I think I have been ruined for computer animation until the memory has faded somewhat.

Another scary pineapple story

The judo club is ramping up for belt testing in a week, and I decided to go up for promotion. The sudden change in the tenor of practice ("I know this is what works, but this is what they'll look for on the test.") put me in a foul mood about standardized testing, generally. Hence, I was poised to be outraged by the news coming out of New York about their 8th-grade English test. As it turns out, its complicated. Complicated and frustrating.

The other day there was a flap in New York about a bizarre reading followed by some vague questions on the state standardized English test. The reading was a sort of postmodern fable about a race between a pineapple and a hare. While the hare won the race, most of the spectator animals assumed that the pineapple had something up its sleeve. The moral of the story: "Pineapples don't have sleeves." The passage is attributed to Daniel Pinkwater, though it hardly resembles what he turns out to have actually written.* For one thing, his story was about a rabbit and an eggplant.

Here's the story at the New York Daily News. It's worth pointing out that that is not where I read about it first. I saw this first on Gawker, where writer Max Read seems to have made some judicious edits to the reading and questions to make everything even less explicable. At any rate, the quoted material in the two articles doesn't match up. More on that later.

First of all, I find the story itself amusing. I "get" it. I'm not upset that something silly, or even a bit nonsensical, made it onto the standardized test. The questions are the problem.

About those questions. They're different, depending on where you read about it. According to the people begging Mr. Pinkwater for guidance,** the questionable questions are "Which animal was the wisest?" and "Why did the animals eat the pineapple?" Now, even for a perfectly logical reading, these are subjective judgments that aren't suited for multiple choice questions. Asked of a nonsense story, they are a bad joke. On a standardized test, on which hangs children's futures and teachers' careers, they are an affront. But.

But, those aren't the questions as reported by the New York Daily News. They quote the questions as (emphasis mine) "Which animal spoke the wisest words?" and "The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were..." These aren't great questions, but they're better. They should be cause for indignation, but as standardized English tests go they are apparently par for the course.

Now I read the question has been discounted from students' grades. Oh, and if you were wondering, the animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were annoyed. Now, assuming that the questions are as the News related them, and not as Gawker did (and I hope I can trust a newspaper in this matter), if this brings shame on the testing regime the irony will be that there was nothing especially bad about the questions. It just took a truly absurd story to make people notice.

New York paid Pearson VUE $32 million dollars for this test, and forgive me if I get the impression that Pearson didn't try very hard.

The saddest thing, to me, was the News's quote from Tyree Furman, one of the kids taking the test. "I thought it was a little strange, but I just answered it as best as I could. You just have to give it your best answer. These are important tests."

* There's no permalink to the post in question, as far as I can tell. If it's not on the first page by the time you read this, go to April 17, 2012. Or just buy his novel, Borgel. Having read it, you'll know more about this mess than I do.

** They more or less match the questions on Gawker, but the versions there are even more vague, and because of a change to the reading, the right answer to one is almost certainly different. Apparently this reading has shown up on tests in other states before; maybe this is an older version. The worse, then, for those other states.

A taxing situation (har, har)

I don't think I'm someone who gets stressed out easily. Maybe people who know me will contradict this, but I think they'll agree. I tend to be--I try to be--I prefer to be--the calm one, even to the point that it seems to make other people more stressed out.

But dah-hamn, did taxes do it to me yesterday. Or maybe it wasn't taxes so much as the software I was trying to use. My taxes weren't even very complicated, even though I'm paying state income tax again for the first time in a few years, but somewhere around the third time I tried to get the pdfs to open so I could print them, by brain just seized up. I would have liked to open a crack in my head and shoot burning steam at my incompetent computer, to boil the internet and with it all the cumbersome tax programs and not-obviously-necessary Javascripts. Overall and in an objective sense, this might have been my least stressful tax season since college.

Maybe not though. I also had the opportunity, as an independent contractor, to figure out quarterly estimated tax payments. It turns out I am not enough of an optimist to pay any estimated income tax this quarter. We will see what the future brings.

Quantum ecclesiastics

A certain law of nature was pointed out to me today, after I experienced it. Simply: when you visit a church, it is always "doing something different." It's a Heisenbergian thing. You have to go to a church regularly before they'll let you see a regular service.

Case in point: the church I visited today devoted its service to saying goodbye to its associate pastor. The church building was also undergoing renovation, meaning that the church was at a different church.

But it is a nice church, despite its essential unknowability.

Holiday crafts, oviparous rabbit edition

Happy Easter, everyone! I think for most of my readers it actually is Easter as I post this. For the rest of you, wait for it...

There. It's been a crafty couple of weeks. First, congratulations are due to certain friends who made a daughter this week. Certainly it is more of an accomplishment than anything I had a hand in creating this week, but that's for them to brag and post pictures about on their own.

Girlfriend and I collaborated on a stuffed owl to bestow upon the child, and got it to the parents just ahead of the baby's arrival. Here's a picture of it (the owl, not the baby) and of the person who did all of the work:

I love how surprised it looks in this picture.

But today being the day before Easter, it was time to dye eggs. I don't remember when exactly we decided to make this a "thing,"  but now it's a "thing" and we do it, rather experimentally sometimes.

 Ready for serious art.

Last year, and I think the year before as well, we used food coloring for dye and were able to use the droppers and concentrated dyes to make some Jackson-Pollack-esque patterns. This year we used the dissolving pellets instead, so we couldn't do that, but we did some things I think are neat anyway.

Two things here. First, on the left, yes, I'm continuing my theme of incongruous jack-o'-lanterns*. You don't have to think that's the cleverest thing ever. As for the one on the right, I'm pleased with it largely because it represents a way to use eggs that get botched. I spent a good long time getting an egg an even shade of red, and then managed to break it. I might have thrown it out, but now my otherwise relatively unadorned "eye egg" is wearing it! In this picture the shell is just wrapped around the egg, but I went back and stuck it on with egg white so that it will survive transport.

Nothing too original** here. I am kind of pleased with my bucolic egg on the left. On the right, another egg salvaged using the remains of a less lucky one.

 If this were local news I'd say something about "sunny side up" here and my co-host would laugh.

This was the first egg where we discovered something that's maybe obvious to everyone else, but Girlfriend and I discovered at age 27. You know those clear crayons that come with the dye? Well obviously you can use them to keep part of an egg white--I knew that already--but you can also use it on top of one layer of dye to preserve it through a second layer of dye. This is a trick we'll tuck away for the future, like the shell-wrapping thing. If we keep doing this this way every year, we are going to end up a couple of old people who are awesome at Easter eggs. That is not something I saw for myself, but I'll take it.

Okay. Because we're crazy, were going to drive to Philadelphia now. Bye.

* I went back to look up my "pineappolantern" post, to make sure I spelled "jack-o'-lantern" consistently. I thought it might be easier to just search for "pineappolantern" on Google than to go through the blog archives. You know what's humbling? Finding out you don't come up on the first page of search results for a word you invented.

** First, I wrote "origingal." In a better world, that would mean something.

Pixel Quest would be a cool name for a retro game, I think

Oh, Google. Just when I had thought I had nothing to say this week, you went and did something interesting.

It's April Fool's Day, after all. If you have the same nostalgia centers that I do, you should probably check out their new joke. For those of you who don't have time, it's Google Maps compatible with the NES.

Why am I posting about this? Because I got caught on the heavily pixelated street view for about an hour, collecting pictures of places I recognized. And they were cool enough that I thought I would share them with the Internet. Like this:

It's just a filter, of course, yet it makes everything just strange enough to produce the aha! of decoding something familiar. It also coats everything you see in nostalgia like a thick crust of cinnamon-sugar. My first aha! was poking around my old neighborhood on Long Island, not recognizing anything in the blown-out pixelscape until I came to this:

A car wash, of course. As far as I know, it has always looked like that. Not with the pixels, I mean, but otherwise.

Then I decided to take a tour of Seattle.

Why the Space Needle is wobbly like that I really don't know.

 The Hedgehog House, back when hedgehogs lived there.

 Take a bus to the Ave.

 Find my favorite bubble tea place in Seattle.

Last of all, I decided to take a look at Baltimore, since I'd been there so recently.

Yup, that's the Washington Orthanc Monument in Baltimore. But where's George? One can only assume that he was borne away on the back of the Lord of Eagles.