There’s a revelation by CLA, that’s College Learning Assessment, an outfit that gauges how well students have learned higher order thinking. If you don’t know what that is, tough. They confirm the shallowness of graduates since 1985, so you aren’t imagining today’s students are a stupid lot. It turns out no contemporary courses require more than 40 pages of reading per week. About what I read in a half hour every day. And these people are going to be running this country in another ten years.
I doubt that most college grads today could go back and pass their own exams. The whole idea is to get through, not to learn anything. I was once turned down for an accounting position because I did not have document saying I’d taken a certain spreadsheet course. It made no difference that I was the author of that course, all that mattered was the document.
So how’s my on-line dating going? It isn’t but I’ve learned plenty. One trend I see is that women are using the service not as a filter, but as a supplement to their regular questionable dating habits. The computer becomes one more way to meet the next sucker. It doesn’t work great but it doesn’t have to. I’ve made it a point to hit on the very prettiest women, the models. That’s how I do it in real life. I get turned down by the best and laugh at the rest. The lone feature I can’t stomach in a woman is ordinariness, but nor is that a ticket to be bizarre-creepy like the last one.
Here’s one for you. Being rained in all day gave me time to scroll the dating ads, and who do I see but the lady I sold my car to back in 2005. Reading her profile tells me she has made immense progress in the past few years. Know what I’m sayin’? She’s kind of the self-appointed site Ann Landers, dispensing all kinds of homey advice, the stuff that never works. I’m also impressed by how much taller than average the good-looking women are, seeming to come it around 5 foot 9 to 5 foot 10. Really amazing, that.
The average “new job” in America pays a maximum (not an average) of $13 per hour. The average unemployed person today entered the job market in 1980. In 1980 I was making $18.88 per hour and taking home $700 real dollars per week. Today that wage would be $52.00 per hour, but I’m not some old codger insinuating that I worked harder and deserved it. The cause is inflation, and that is why I spent the majority of my earnings on things that could not be taken away. Good education, sound experience, world travel.
Do those things do me any good today? Well, a lot more good than those people who slaved away their lives away for nothing. It depends on how much of your life you spent with some delusion of getting rich. Such people ain’t any richer than I am right now. I wouldn’t have to sell or borrow anything to come up with some real cash by tomorrow. And in five years, real cash will be at a premium because there will be no privacy. Here’s a thought, “Permit me anonymity in a nation and I care not who makes its laws.”
They also have a chat room and I’ve already made an enemy. I like really dumb enemies, it is so much fun to yank their chains. Was it Freud that said men will always bond as long as there are other men upon whom they can direct their aggression? Well, I got this klutz from North Carolina that considers himself an expert on the Alberta tar sands, a topic I happen to know. So I baited him along until he clued in. Then he tried a different tack, stating that people from cold climates were smarter than those from hot places. He explained without the benefit of capitals or punctuation that when it is hot, the brain cools down so it won’t become even hotter by thinking, thereby making the thinker less smart. Classic Canadiana. I got twenty bucks says the guy is really from Edmonton.
The premise here was that this site said their clientele were “professional”. That’s a disappointment at best. There are not as many professionals in the county as on that single dating site. Ray-B adds the music lists are equally off by using the same word—what exactly is a professional guitar player? I saw an ad in Guitar Center for “advanced” bass lessons. Like what? Slap it, spank it, pluck it, thumb it, shove the thing up your nostrils, anything but play the damn thing? When the audience knows what tune you play withing a few notes, then I’ll call you advanced. No, not the whacko Jaco stuff, the average tune. I do it all the time.
But we had an enlightening conversation about regular guitar lessons. The fact is unless you become a soloist, as in flamenco, the majority of onstage guitar work is fairly boring. We concluded this explains why when you go to a party in your teens, there is some guy there who knows the intro to ten songs but can’t play any all the way through. He never learned to strum, or more precisely, never learned to play rhythm. This fact has proved frustrating beyond belief in my adult life. My own lessons are confined to strumming and are coming along well.
Last, Ray-B was on the Broadwalk recently and saw Johnny D back in town. Remind me find out where, I’d like to jam with the guy again. I still have his song list. Trust me, it hasn’t changed.
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