The thrill of victory after the agony of defeat

Celebrating our first Upward basketball victory today, 26-22!  We may be 1-3, but we won't be winless this season!

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

Ripped from the pages of today's Star-Telegram is the latest example of how following the rules gets you nothing.  Fort Worth ISD wants to reduce truancy so they have decided to issue bribes to achieve that goal.  From the lede, I was wondering how they were planning to afford to give "skullcaps, IPods, and hoodies" to every kid who meets their attendance goals, but it turns out that the prizes only go to those who improve their attendance, i.e., those who haven't been following the rules.  The kids and families who have been living up to the standard all along receive absolutely nothing.  Even the school district appreciates a bad boy more than a nice guy.

Clearly, the intelligent student will immediately begin skipping school in the spring so as to reap the benefits by showing up slightly more often in the fall; those who are the most shrewd ought to be able to keep the gravy train rolling for years by alternating their attendance patterns.

I like how the administrators go out of their way to emphasize that truants are not to be seen as in the wrong but merely as "dealing with complicated social issues" which make them so much more valuable and worthy of attention than the kids who do the right thing.  Of course, there's no social issue so complicated that it can't be solved by the generous application of skullcaps, IPods, and hoodies.

And skullcaps and hoodies?  Really?  I mean, I get the appeal of shiny new electronics, but why skullcaps and hoodies?  "Hey, attending school doesn't have to make you look like any less of a thug than your buddies who skip classes!"

This year's best Super Bowl ad

No one puts Baby in a corner.

Birthday girl

Today Faith turned 15.

Book review: The Carols of Christmas by Andrew Gant

The sixth book I read in 2018 was The Carols of Christmas: A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs by Andrew Gant.

There is a definite British slant to this book, which is understandable, given that the author is a church musician in Oxford.  While only "Personent hodie" was absolutely unfamiliar to me as an American, my supposition is that "Good King Wenceslas" and "Here We Come a-Wassailing" are more familiar in the UK than on this side of the Atlantic.  On the flip side, however, you can't get much more American than "I Wonder as I Wander" and "Jingle Bells," which are also included. 

Are the stories really "surprising?"  Well, I suppose the revelation that the term "carol" wasn't originally synonymous with Christmas but referred to non-religious songs that were too lively or ribald to be sung within church walls counts.  (At which point, I cock a doubtful eyebrow at "Personent hodie.")  And "I Wonder as I Wander" was a fragment of an Appalachian folk melody sung at the price of twenty-five cents per performance by the teenage daughter of a family of vagrant evangelists for a folk-music researcher.  Apart from that, there's nothing very unexpected about the backgrounds of these songs, but I suppose Surprising Stories make for better cover copy than just Stories.

Gant's accounts are rather technical to a musical neophyte; he uses unfamiliar terms and quotes French and Latin without offering a translation.  I'd wager he is used to conversing with scholars at Oxford and breezes over points which he doesn't realize he has to explain to the layman.  The book was mildly enjoyable, however, and I did learn some things I didn't know about various carols.