Via the NCTE Inbox comes the news that Chicago students who withdraw from high school must href="http://www.detnews.com/2004/schools/0407/15/a02-213493.htm">sign a waiver first:

In an effort to curtail truancies and drop-outs, Chicago public schools will require students who want to quit to sign a waiver stating that doing so will be hazardous to their futures.


Parents must also sign the waiver, which warns that dropping out of school often leads to unemployment, jail and other troubles.


Officials in the country’s third-largest school district say that the move is intended to send a wake-up call to at-risk kids in Cook County.

Okay, I know Chicago has good intentions here, but I don't know about this. I've known a lot of people who dropped out of high school, and the motivations are sometimes very complex--not all the time, I realize, but sometimes. I've known people who had to quit school and go to work to help support the family, because several minimum-wage jobs add up to a living wage. I've also known plenty of people who dropped out of high school because they were severely bullied or suffering from depression, most of whom went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees. They should at least, if they're not already doing so, decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not to use this waiver.

I know I talked about sampling recently, but I have to bring it up one more time for Lil' Flip. Today I was in the car and heard this hip hop song using samples from Pac-Man, and it made my ears very happy, so I blasted it. The song is called "Game Over," and you can watch the video here. If I remember correctly, it uses the basic sound Pac-Man makes when he eats regular pellets (not power pellets), and I believe I caught the noise of ghosts' eating Pac-Man too.

Thanks to Jeff's recent post about Freecycle, I joined the Twin Cities Freecycle Yahoo! group. I've already figured out that I'll use it more for giving stuff away than for scoring stuff; I responded quickly to a woman who was giving away a bunch of dishes, cups, glasses, pots, and pans, but someone had beaten me to it (the Twin Cities group has 2236 members, so it was bound to happen). Still, like Jeff, I'm fascinated with the random things people are giving away. On the Twin Cities list:

• Fisher Price Little People Farm (barn only, no little people or little animals)
• The Hunt for Red October board game
• Electric Cat Litter Box, with most of a 40-lb. bucket of clumping litter, self-feeding and watering dishes, several plastic trays for litter box, and an unopened bag of Iams Active Maturity/Hairball Prevention cat food (there's a sad story behind this, I'm sure :-( )
• Empty wine jug, once contained Carlo Rossi wine
• Two van seats, from a 1997 GMC van (useful, perhaps, for a child's fort, the giver suggests)

Another one to add to the blog dream series. This one's a recurring dream in times of stress, and I suspect this latest flare-up is related to my imminent preliminary exams. For context: In Drupal admin mode, I can see what people search for in my archives, and in my referrer logs, I can see which Google queries lead to my blog. Well, in the dream, mysterious people send me threatening messages this way. I go to "administer," and I see searches for "I want to kill you" and all kinds of other horrible stuff. Then I go to my referrer logs, and there are all these Google searches for stuff like "Clancy must die," etc.

All right, now I've sufficiently creeped you out. :-) I didn't mean to, as one of my students says, harsh your mellow. Now I'm expecting some facetious archive search queries, such as "You need help."

You're not a dog at all! You're a CAT! Aloof and
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Via Palmer. :)

Being an advocate of free culture generally, I support what Larry Lessig has called the "slicing and dicing" of culture--pastiche, sampling, etc. That being said, sometimes I'm not too impressed with the product of such practices.

For example, I hate the song "Through the Wire" by Kanye West, which uses a sample from Chaka Khan's "Through the Fire." Perhaps it's because I enjoy Chaka Khan's music so much that I'd almost place her in the holy trinity of Joni Mitchell, Sade, and Diana Krall, but then it wouldn't be a trinity anymore. Or maybe it's because, in "Through the Wire," they speed up the song so that it sounds like the Chipmunks! What were they thinking? When I'm in the car, I mostly keep my radio on B-96, but when that song comes on, I'm all over the dial.

I also dislike Mase's "Welcome Back", which uses the theme song from Welcome Back, Kotter. The original song was lackluster, and so is this.

But, when I hear "Got It Twisted" by Mobb Deep, I turn the volume up as high as it will go and then car-dance. It uses a s-l-o-w-e-d d-o-w-n sample of Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science," and it is sick. You can listen to part of the song on the MTV.com article I linked.

Recently, I was interviewed for an article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on parents' weblogs. The story was published today if you'd like to read it. Free registration is required, but here's my info:
Email: abstractgroove@lycos.com (my $p@/\/\ dump, by the way)
Password: citysong (one of the songs on this morning's dance playlist)

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm having big problems with my hosting company. My blog and email will be down for hours, then back up for a minute, then down again. Maybe THIS time it's back up for good, but in case not, please know I'm not doing a Chun. I'm most likely going to change hosting services once I use up my time (I'm paid out for the next few months).