There is a new starbucks opening down the road from my library. They brought us some coffee and such to the library to engender goodwill/drum up business. It doesn't matter, I'm just thrilled to have the coffee. Yay for free coffee! And the quote on my coffee cup:

"The humble improve." -Wynton Marsalis, Jazz Musician

I now know why the United States so consistently rates low in education. It's because the children never go to school. The kids around here have the day off, which has tripled how busy we are during the day. No longer just preschoolers, but now kids of all ages. It's fun, but we don't have more staff to deal with the more kids. They've had the last three Fridays off for various reasons. Amazing. I believe that the children should go nation-wide to year round schooling. You get a two week fall break, a 2-4 week winter break (usually around three weeks), a two week spring break, and a 4-6 week summer break. There is sitll vacation time, but you end up with more school days. Being off three months is ridiculous, it is based off the agrarian schedule and the vast majority of the country is no longer adhering to that schedule out of necessity. We don't need kids off to work harvest in the fields. Study after study has shown that having that much time off causes the children to forget too much and spend the first month of the next school year reviewing. There is my two cents.

Also, I was watching CNN headline news this morning as is my habit. Today they are celebrating Jerusalem Day in Iran where they support Palestine and condemn Israel, to put it nicely. Well, the president of Iran marched in the streets chanting "Death to Israel, Death to America." And he also said that Israel should be "wiped off the face of the earth". Then as the CNN anchor went on to say, his aides/spokesmen "clarified" his response to mean that the president was trying to say that Palestinians should have free and open elections. I nearly fell off my chair I was laughing so hard. That is not so much a clarification of a statement as it is a total message change. Those statements bear no resemblance to each other. Nice try though. I've been reading these children's/teen books set in Jerusalem during the time of the Crusades (12th century) when the "Infidels" are recapturing Jerusalem from the Knights Templar. Fun and fascinating books. The first in the series is Pagan's Crusade by Catherine Jinks. It is interesting to read those and watch the news and realized that we haven't shifted the debate in the last thousand years, we've just sharpened the weapons. And weapons can be the rhetoric we employ and the means by which we disperse our message. The internet and worldwide media complex has certainly helped that.