By Sherman Dorn on August 21, 2021
Guano Point sits 75 miles north of Kingman, Arizona, on the southern lip of the Western Grand Canyon, and on it perches the remnants of a tramway system, a launching point for failed dreams and a missing 99,000 tons of guano.
We’ll return in a bit to the missing guano.
As Roger Smith tells the story in his book Batchit, Arizona, Harold Carpenter says he spotted a gap in the north canyon wall while boating down Granite Gorge in the Great Depression. Returning later, he spent several days climbing up to it.
Holy bat cave! Who spends three days getting to a literal hole in the wall? Apparently Mr. Carpenter, and he found a lot of … well, guano. That’s the term for what leaves the hind end of a bat.
Continue reading “The Guano Caucus”
Posted in Arizona, Politics
By Sherman Dorn on August 16, 2021
“The corporate communist globalist satanic Uniparty is the faction our founders warned us about,” Arizona Senator Wendy Rogers tweeted August 4.
It’s the type of unhinged comment we now expect from Sen. Rogers, but it would also make a great first sentence for a spy thriller— okay, a hilariously-awful one.
Or take the grandstanding of state Senate President Karen Fann, August 3: “Build the case, set the trap, and boom the Maricopa lies will come back to haunt them.”
Not exactly brimming with clarity or insight into her twilight struggle against the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but wow, you could imagine this spinning into the worst Philip Marlowe novel that Raymond Chandler never wrote.
Senators Rogers and Fann have an untapped skill as bad novelists, and I for one wish they’d entered these sentences into the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, that annual homage to “It was a dark and stormy night,” and which honors the worst first sentences of unwritten novels. Here’s the grand prize winner for 2021, from Stu Duval of New Zealand:
A lecherous sunrise flaunted itself over a flatulent sea, ripping the obsidian bodice of night asunder with its rapacious fingers of gold, thus exposing her dusky bosom to the dawn’s ogling stare.
Continue reading “Bulwer Lytton of the Caliche”
Posted in Arizona, Politics
By Sherman Dorn on June 12, 2021
How do you write a cover letter in applying for a full-time faculty job? This blog entry is a complement to my advice on crafting the curriculum vitae, and was originally a twitter thread in May 2021, responding to two colleagues from the University of North Carolina.
Like a vitae, a cover letter is purpose-built, and it has THREE purposes, two open purposes and one secret. But to get to the secret, you have to satisfy the open purposes.
Continue reading “Cover letter advice”
Posted in Higher education, The academic life
By Sherman Dorn on March 27, 2021
Why did the Biden administration deny the request by Georgia and South Carolina to waive federal requirements for achievement testing in schools this year? According to Aaron Pallas and many others, there is no discernible added information we can expect from state-level testing that is only for a summative judgment of schools, in a year when those judgments are suspended. But the federal government will still require that states conduct the tests, even when participation is likely to be far lower than before the pandemic.
Continue reading “The grammar of schooling and testing mandates in a pandemic”
Posted in Education policy
By Sherman Dorn on March 21, 2021
Five weeks ago, after the CDC released its first set of new school operations guidance under the Biden administration, I wrote in summary, “Remember: [these recommendations come] three and a half weeks into the new administration. In reality, that’s fast. There were bound to be omissions or emphases that are wrong in retrospect.”
Continue reading “March 2021 changes to CDC guidance on schools: brief comment”
Posted in Education policy