Happy belated Ordinance Factories Day! Also inside: Collect your own industrial elephant! [Mowgli]

I completely missed Ordinance Factories Day, which was Saturday. I hope you enjoyed it.

Now forklifts are all well and good, but when you really need to do some heavy lifting, who ya gonna call? Sometimes the old equipment just works better:

cheating [amy]

Instead of posting a legitimate post (which I haven't done in months), I'm going to link to a comment I left on Lou's blog and have it do double duty. Please read what Lou wrote first because he actually updates with real content. And it never, never includes chuck norris. Ever.

THE OCTAGON!

brains..... [amy]

Jen just reminded me of this, and Liam showed an interest in it:

Zombie Simulator

(link thanks to Lou)

Ed U Kay Shun [Mowgli]

Yesterday was my 10th graders' final exam - in India the 10th grade national exams are very important, so they were stressing about it a lot. Fortunately, the actual test was considerably easier than most of the practice tests and they all felt pretty good about it.

Now, on to slandering my co-teacher. Before, I felt I should reserve judgement on him until I got to know him better. Now I do.

Basically, there are three of us that work with my classes, although usually not all together. There's the current main teacher, a lady named Saritha, there's the man who will replace her next year, Santosh, and there's me. Saritha is a very good teacher, knows the material well and teaches it effectively. She's going to have a baby during the coming April vacation though, and won't be teaching next term. She'll be replaced by Santosh, who is currently the physics teacher. The first thing that bugged me about Santosh was that he refused to lead the class. Ever. Even when it was something right up his alley, like a review of the unit conversions they'd done in his physics class, and I gave him a direct invitation to lead the class, he'd give me the chalk and go off to help some kid one-on-one, leaving everyone else to me. I didn't really mind, since I'd usually lead anyway, but since he's going to have to take over completely after I leave I thought he'd want to take a little more responsibility. Not a big thing, but annoying.

The 8th graders tease a lot, and one of their favorite ways to do so is propose marriages among each other, make predictions about the number of children the couple will have, and so on. Pretty tame stuff, but quite scandalous here. Anyway, I was sitting with the other two teachers, and they were talking about how that sort of thing never happened in their day. Then Santosh says, quite seriously, "You know what I think the problem is? Genetics." Wow. WOW. I mean, wow. This guy is supposed to be a science teacher. Wow.

Speaking of supposed to be a science teacher... while the kids were in their exam, we teachers went over it so we could answer questions after they came out, and then settled down to wait. The school library has a nice backlog of National Geographic magazines, so I read an article from the mid 90's on the former USSR, then came back to see what the situation was. Santosh was sitting in the math room, looking a paper. It was mostly in Malayalam, but had a number of metric units in English so I assumed it was something to do with teaching unit conversions. Turns out it was, as he asked me the conversion ratio for cubic centimeters to liters. Ok, he should know this, but maybe he just wants to be sure, so I give it to him. Then he floors me. He looks at the next line on the paper, and asks me how to convert cubic centimeters in kilograms. After I do a doubletake, I tell him they aren't the same kind of unit, so you can't. He looks a bit surprised and worried, then decides to make a change in the question. After writing something on the paper, he turns back to me and asks "How do you convert cubic centimeters into kilometers?"

How he got a job, I don't know. What will happen to the kids next year, I don't know. Wow.

napoleonic complexes [Lester]

in every decent sized men's room, there are urinals lined up shoulder to shoulder against the wall. they typically come in two sizes, short (intended for short men or boys) or tall (intended for normal sized men).

tall men piss in the short urinals because the added distance looking down makes them feel tall.

short men piss in the tall urinals because they are also a "big boy" and pee where the men pee. this too, makes them feel tall.

men's rooms and the urinals not found in womens restrooms are a symbol of masculinity and corresponding height. this is in addition to the fact that men pee standing up, seemingly on to walls.

now for the splatter shoe, hand splash back issues associated with streaming piss onto porcelain, that is a different matter speaking to our actual intelligence.

fraternal [Lester]

Let's say a woman has two eggs in position during one cycle, then has a three-way with two men. One egg is fertilized by one man, the other egg by the other man.

something to chew on.