Jul 292014
 

One of our missions here at COC is to help our readers bring out the cantankerosity hidden within.  To wash away the filters and restrictions imposed by society on our daily exchanges.  Because of the disapproval of any honest disagreement or disapproval in our modern and civil times. it is difficult to even comprehend a cantankerous frame of mind.    From time to time we will bring the best examples from film to COC in our zeal to foster the inner cantankerosity of our readers.

Jack Nicholson has certainly earned a place here at COC. You can expect to see more of Jack’s exquisite rants over time but today we want to start with this scene from As Good As It Gets where Jack is the eccentric writer in an apartment building.   In this scene, he demonstrates the controlled rant.  No wild hysterics.  No shouting. But he makes it very clear that he does not want to be disturbed.  He pulls no punches.  He shows not an ounce of sensitivity or compassion.  This is a quality rant.  Enjoy and take good notes.  There will be a test later.  BTW do you think the sensitive neighbor is a mollycoddle?

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Jul 292014
 

Babysitter-001

No this isn’t another post about crap….per se.  This is about being a decent neighbor.  We have lived in this house now for a little over a year and in that time we have gotten very tired of our neighbors.  Well one set that lives next door.  They don’t bother us very much as far as direct interaction but, they are a pain in the proverbial ass.

What is that smell???  Oh yea, the old meat wrappers on the side of the BBQ grill that are marinating in the 100 degree heat.

What is that?  a 2 year old girl running naked in the front yard?  Oh, a naked 5 year old boy following?  Ummmm Parents?  Babysitter?  Oh there she is smoking on the front porch talking on the phone.  Oh the older kids are home from school, let the screaming, profanity laden put downs begin!

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Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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Jul 292014
 
Women at work on bomber, Douglas Aircraft Comp...

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

It’s unconscionable!

I just heard the clerk for the Casey Anthony trial read the verdict. It’s an outrage. I’m livid. It’s hard to get control of my emotions. It’s a travesty- willful and shameless sabotage of something vital and important to American life. It sticks in my craw and gives me pains in my gut. I just plain can’t get over it.

It’s not what you think. I have an opinion about Casey- who doesn’t after all these years of emotional and highly biased coverage. I have to confess that I was surprised at the verdict because Nancy Grace and the legal pundits had tried and convicted Casey many times over the last few years. That’s the American courts system for you.  Experts don’t count!  The people have the last word.  Experts don’t determine the verdicts. It’s real people. No other aspect of American governance is so down to earth.

We don’t even get real people to represent us in government these days. Everybody has to be a professional to even make the ballot and that means that representing real people is their number two or maybe three priority. But I digress. I was surprised at the verdict but that wasn’t what made me outraged. Casey in jail or Casey writing a book about her travails, life will go on. I don’t think she will be making a career of getting pregnant and killing the resulting children. My outrage is from something else entirely. What’s got me outraged today is the willful destruction of the English language by political correctness. If I hear the word foreperson one more time, I may go postal.

Who’s protecting our language?

Foreman is a time honored word in the English language. It means, very simply, the person in charge. Yes, it’s true that in the past, most of the time the people in charge were men. Then came the feminist revolution and white became black and night became day. I don’t want to give those looney women a bit of credit for changing the world for the better. Long before I ever heard of Germain Greer or any of those other bad tempered, ugly and talentless women, real women of talent were changing American life by using their talents and abilities to occupy positions of power and influence. Those ugly, unloved and talentless feminists merely followed their ascent and claimed credit creating a lot of collateral damage along the way.  And men were too embarrassed for them (and a bit cowed at their crude, shrill attacks) to point it out. Sometimes, chivalry may be misplaced.

Real women of talent didn’t need artifice and manipulation to make their way. They could cope with generic pronouns which as I have discussed elsewhere hurt men far more than they hurt women. They understand that a foreman can be of either sex, just like a congressman, assemblyman or councilman. But ugly, talentless and unloved woman have campaigned tirelessly for the ridiculous depersonification of pronouns that made me so outraged today. I can’t count the number of times today my ears were stabbed with that terrible made-up word, foreperson. I need my ears washed out to remove the irritation.

Protect the endangered pronouns!

How anybody can believe that the destruction of the English language is in anyway justified is beyond my understanding. It is meaningless manipulation, touchy feely  rather than substantial. And it is all because ugly, talentless and unlovable women with nothing else to justify their existence invented feminism and wrecked this societal damage on modern life.

There isn’t much I can do to repair this damage which has driven the sexes apart and destroyed the harmony of family life but there is one small thing I can do. I will never let the word foreperson escape my mouth. Feminists have done great damage to society. They have been given credit for doing good which I believe is competely unjustified. Time will probably correct their ego inflicted stupidity as people return to what works instead of what they would like to think works. Language, however,  doesn’t recover so easily from disaster. The damage to our pronouns may not so easily be corrected . Please join me.  Take up my cause and vow that you will never use politically correct pronouns. Make foreperson a four letter work in your household.

 

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Jul 292014
 

George Carlin was an inconvenient nudge. Never constrained by conventional wisdom and most often delightfully sane in a crazy world. We need a truthteller like George who died in 2008. Here is his take on the environment and the planet.

” The planet is just fine- the people are f*****.”

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Jul 292014
 
Wisconsin Statehouse

Image by DoubleSpeak Media via Flickr

To Teach or Not To Teach: That is the Question.

This all started with two teachers; well, to be precise, one teacher and a group of teachers but lets just pretend that all the teachers at the State House in Wisconsin are one guy. The other, of course is the Pennsylvania teacher who blogged about her teaching experiences and got suspended. The jury is out on both these teachers. Some people support the ‘right’ of public employees to abandon their battle stations and picket the government. Some people say it is an outrage. Some people think that the Pennsylvania teacher was out of line to suggest that her students were not motivated. Some people think it’s about time that somebody says that kids should be responsible.

Sue and Wesley

Lets call our surrogate Wisconsin teacher, Wesley and the Pennsylvania teacher Sue just for discussion and forget the complication that Wesley is part of a pack and Sue is the lone ranger. Lets just talk about how crazy things have gotten here in the old USA that these are big news stories.

Let’s start with Sue

Let’s start with Sue, merely because her story started first. Sue is a young, pregnant, energetic and engaged teacher. From what I can read, she seems to be exactly the kind of person I would like to have teaching my kids. In the midst of her busy and challenging life she starts a blog. The reason is probably as a way of organizing her thinking, chronicling her progress and perhaps some venting. I wasn’t following her blog until the big blowup- and then of course it went down. As I understand, she did not mention names or indicate her school or location but someone noticed. Her honest and anonymous comments tagged her as a liability for the school and she found her extremely pregnant self escorted off the premises and into limbo.

Moving along to Wesley

Now, how about Wesley? Wesley wakes up to discover that the state government is planing to require teachers to contribute more toward pension and health benefits to balance a budget strapped by a bad economy.

“They can’t do this to me!” , Wesley says as he checks an email from his Teacher’s Union. “No school today.”

So Wesley and hundreds of Wisconsin teachers drive to Madison to protest and attempt to prevent this action. Hundreds of classrooms are abandoned all over Wisconsin. Thousands of children get no instruction.

The impact is the same. Both Wesley and Sue leave their classrooms abandoned. Wesley from his choice and Sue from her Principal’s choice. Is either one of them right? Does Sue have the right to expect a pass when she criticizes her students? Do Wesley’s concerns for his income trump his responsibility to his community?  Since they are both public employees, what does the public actually think about this?

Starting with this Coot

This Coots has some strong opinions that come from my career as a unionized public employee and now a blogger. I began my employment back before government workers were forced to join unions. In those days, you accepted that government work would pay less than working for a private company but that the job security and benefits were a partial compensation along with the satisfaction from serving your community. In those days, citizens saw government workers as necessary expenses and were accepting of paying reasonable wages. That was long ago and far away. There are now so many government workers doing things that were never needed before (and perhaps not needed now?) and at such outrageous salaries that the public can only see the government as a parasite sucking them dry.

Wow! That came out a bit strong, didn’t it.

Anyway the good public servants doing necessary jobs in responsible ways get lumped in with the leeches. The good ones never confuse their interests with their responsibilities. They show up and expect to be appreciated for their service. The leeches? They show up at the Statehouse.

Am I saying Wesley is a leech?

Not on your life. I’m a blogger, too.

Now what about Sue?

I really feel for Sue. She is exactly the kind of our person I hope our country can still produce. She cares. She is committed to her job. She thinks.

Still was it right to point our that some of her students expect the world on a platter? Probably not.

Should she have been escorted off the school grounds by goons? I don’t think so.

Should she return to her job? That’s the big question and the answer says a lot about whether our culture is declining or holding.

So, what about consequences?

However the circus in Wisconsin plays out, the worst thing to happen to Wesley is that he may be docked for the days of school he missed. Life will go on. Wisconsin will either cust costs in response to the voters or go bankrupt in response to the unions. Whatever, Wesley will still have his job.

Or that Sue should get a pass?

Sue may get her job back but it all depends on the nervous Nelly administrators that fear lawsuits and the parents in her school district. She is a liability; great teacher though she may be. She will be a target for any whining student who thinks he deserves a better grade or indulging parents who want to get their daughter into Yale. My money says they won’t take the risk.

Warning: Soapbox ahead

The cause of all this is the government monopoly on education. We all contribute to educating the youth of the country but instead of allowing parents to control where that money goes, the government decides.  And lately, you may have noticed, the government doesn’t seem to care what the masses think.  Since government schools don’t have to worry about attracting customers, they sell out to their employees. And since students don’t have any choice either, their only recourse is to sue when they aren’t treated right.

What’s your take on Wesley and Sue? Government workers? Unions? School Districts?

Freedom of speech in the classroom

Can a teacher blog?

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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