Steve Ersinghaus

Susan Gibb sends along this report on principals and cupcakes. But I wonder about the reportage. There’s a huge hole in the middle:
The controversy began when Frank Carbino delivered the goodies to the school May 6, intending to bring them to his daughter’s class for her birthday. He said he got as far as [...]

Reportage from the Second Curcuit Court of Appeals is coming in on the Avery Doninger case, an item often in the post space here. This case is about relationships. These relationships should not be overcomplicated.
It calls for a rethinking by school administrators of their role in public discourse. It’s not about whether [...]

I get tough questions this semester, which is excellent and refreshing. I run off to find an answer or a solution, but when I figure it I can only give back a hint:
. . . if no better place,
Thank him who puts me loath to this revenge
On you who wrong me not for him [...]

Collective nouns for animals are interesting. For example, tigers ambush and rhinos bust things up, therefore, we have an ambush of tigers or a crash of rhinos. We have lots of bird feeders, thus we have drays of squirrels in the yard, dray referring the nests they build, although I’m not quite sure of the [...]

Since we’re on the subject of reality, here’s a way of putting it together. From Juan Cole:
I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, [...]

I’m an advocate of open borders. I’d like to see gates and walls come down and any plan to maintain and build structures along the US Mexico border cease. This is, of course, a position of hypothesis that asks: what would happen if border gates, walls, and barriers were removed? And why would a particular [...]

From Reuters
Students in England could be banned from wearing full-face Muslim veils for security or educational reasons under government guidelines to be published on Tuesday, officials said.
The guidance paper from the Department for Education and Skills (DFES) would leave it up to individual head teachers to decide what pupils should and should not be allowed [...]

In the United States we now have a concrete star chamber. It’s all about trust, right. The press, in mind, hasn’t done enough to inform and evaluate citizens about the language of 3929. If this can be said
SEC. 106. HABEAS CORPUS MATTERS.
(a) In General- Section 2241 of [...]

I’m throwing out S.3929 which can be found via search of Thomas. Citizens should read this sort of thing and learn how to read legislation, in my opinion. But we need better disentanglers. The bill is made for hypertext and is almost impossible to read on paper because links are literalized. No habeas corpus here.

The streets in the neighborhood aren’t very wide. I’m not sure even if street is the right word. Maybe road.
A friend of mine many years ago told me stories about moving from Toledo to the southwest where the big travel roads are called freeways. Where she came from they were called highways. These aren’t the [...]

The authorities say
“The officers made a good faith, but mistaken, effort to enforce an old unwritten interpretation of the prohibitions about demonstrating in the Capitol. The policy and procedures were too vague,” Gainer said. “The failure to adequately prepare the officers is mine.”
This is a con and a misuse of the language, just like the [...]

In the recent issue of Time magazine, Richard Corliss clumsily frames Bob Dylan as classic and mythical hero.
But it was his gift for synthesizing that sent him into the depths of the forest and allowed him to bring it all back home in teeming poetry set to ancient lays.

Today the Supreme Court ruled on the pressing New London eminent domain case in support of the Connecticut Supreme Court, a decision that I find misguided and dangerous. I can’t say that I like agreeing with either Justice Thomas or O’Connor, who dissented, but in this case their arguments are to my mind reasonable and [...]

So all the grades have been submitted and there are a few things to note about this difficult semester, difficult for many reasons.
First semester composition in college teaches people a few things: to articulate ideas to a rational audience in Standard written English (pattern oriented), to evaluate ideas, and to assess their progress given [...]

Just thought I’d drop this in. From George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language:
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of [...]