I’ve had to take on a lot of tutoring students over the past few months to pay for the multiple rounds of oral surgery I have required thanks to my dental resorption woes.  Other than a handful of grad students, my roster has been split about 50/50 between high school and middle school.  You know the #1 difference between eleventh-graders and sixth-graders where online tutoring is concerned?  The sixth-graders can’t seem to stop scraping their microphones!  I have no idea what the deal is.  Somehow nearly all the sixth-graders have been unable to make the slightest move or even take a breath without a deafening SSKKKHHHHRRR sound blasting through my speakers… whereas on the flip side, virtually none of the eleventh-graders have had any such audio issues.  Is there like a “how not to scrape your microphone” elective offered in ninth grade these days or something?

Perhaps more interesting where cognitive development is concerned: another ability eleventh-graders generally do demonstrate that sixth-graders often lack is that they tend to answer the questions that are actually being asked.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve put a math question up on the screen and asked a sixth-grader, “So, what’s my first step?” and had the kid answer, “C.”  Or “What strategy do we use here?” “5.”  I wonder whether the issue is that the sixth-graders’ minds can only operate on one track at a time, so as soon as a question is placed before them, they shut out audio input until they’re done.  Or perhaps it is that the eleventh-graders can recognize that problems can be presented to illustrate new concepts, not just to evaluate whether the student can already get the answer by hook or by crook.

One of the big stories of the past while has been the rapid decline of Twitter since Elon Musk took control of the company.  There are many terrible things about Twitter these days, but here’s one I haven’t seen mentioned.  I have been very impressed by the way that, in a few short years, Youtube’s closed captioning has gone from “a useful but rough approximation of what is being said” to “virtually perfect every time I have turned it on lately”.  Twitter’s, by contrast, leaves a little something to be desired:

Elsewhere in the political media⁠—I hate to stoop to mutter­ing that “they all look alike to me”, but I was watching a video on fivethirtyeight.com and, I mean… aren’t these all basically the same guy?

I went to Amazon and on the front page were recommended deals for me.  Here they are:

Now, okay⁠—I have bought audio equipment on Amazon before, so the top left item makes sense.  I have bought cooking equipment on Amazon before, so the top right item makes sense.  I have bought bass guitar strings on Amazon before, so the bottom left item makes sense.  But the bottom right item… like, I don’t even know what that is!  Is it an interocitor?  Did someone finally go ahead and invent the interocitor?  Sigh.  I have lived too long.

I saw that Canada is issuing a new set of $2 coins, with a black band for mourning:

I see that the mint has chosen to simultaneously com­memorate both the death of the queen and the looming extinction of polar bears.

And while we’re in the obituary section: in reading articles about Kirstie Alley’s death this month, I thought “!” upon discovering that, by a wild coincidence, her father and her first husband had the same first and last name as each other.

In the fall my town posts haikus written by local residents along the main shopping street.  This practice was put on pause during the first couple of years of the pandemic, but it has resumed.  Here is one from this year:

Mosquito lands on
My cheek.  I try to slap her
But I just slap me.

That’s pretty good, but I think this one from 2018, which does indeed capture some local color, is still my favorite:

Turkeys block the road
Honk honk honk honk honk honk honk
Those birds do not care

It looks like a grand total of one song from 2022 will make it into the next edition of my Hot 100.  Or maybe none will!  Not because I have any doubts about the song⁠—it is guaranteed to make my top ten, and it won’t be #10⁠—but because it may not qualify as a 2022 song.  It was never officially released, but was leaked to the Internet.  Perhaps the artist will decide to include it on her next album, making it officially a 2023 song.  And, yeah, no prizes for guessing who that artist might be:

The thing is, after hearing this, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it reminded me ever so slightly of another piece of music I already loved.  And then it clicked.  What did that wall of distorted guitar under the “I can’t control it” section remind me of?  And the dark, dissonant wobble of the harmonies on the second “trying to improve” section?  Why, it reminded me of this!

Which I guess brings us back to Elon.  After all, the Druuge also expected their employees to be “extremely hardcore”!