something that annoys me

..."Dr." in front of the name of anybody but a medical doctor, veterinarian, or dentist.

The rest of us just don't deserve to be called "doctor" and it's laughably pompous for academics to insist the we be called such.

That is all.

Diamond notes (8)

Won 10-0 on Thursday night in Benton Harbor. 1-4 with my 6th homer of the season. Next game Tuesday night. Tournament in Frankenmuth--home of the most ridiculously overpriced hotels in the state of Michigan--next weekend. Luckily, I'll be driving in from Port Huron and not staying in a hotel.

what I wish I could have learned in science classes in high school and college

My approach to education would be like my approach to everything else. I’d change the standard. I would make the standard that of community health rather than the career of the student. You see, if you make the standard the health of the community, that would change everything. Once you begin to ask what would be the best thing for our community, what’s the best thing that we can do here for our community, you can’t rule out any kind of knowledge. You need to know everything you possibly can know. So, once you raise that standard of the health of the community, all the departmental walls fall down, because you can no longer feel that it’s safe not to know something. And then you begin to see that these supposedly discreet and separate disciplines, these “specializations,” aren’t separate at all, but are connected. And of course our mistakes, over and over again, show us what the connections are, or show us that connections exist.

- Wendell Berry

1. Basic animal husbandry
2. Composting
3. Gardening/farming
4. Canning and freezing
5. How to change the oil and tune up my car

it must be a duppy or a gunman

summer reading group #4

Monday, July 25 @ 7:00 p.m.
Prenkert's house

We will be discussing Mark Richard's fantastic memoir, House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home. Don't miss this one!!

NOTE: I started reading this, and it was so good I just had to pass it on. I know this strays from the earlier plan (Maxwell and Nabokov) and takes us into "non-fiction", but it'll be worth it.

Papa San (song of the day)

Diamond Notes (8)

My "pick-up" team and I went 3-0 in pool play on Saturday, in what was most likely the hottest day on which I've played three games of softball. The heat index was 101 when we started our game at 11:00 a.m. I didn't check it after that. Suffice it to say, it was brutally hot.

We lost a heartbreaker in the bottom of the 7th 4-3 in the first game on Sunday, ending our tournament. I played shortstop the whole weekend and went 8-13 (.453) with two triples and a couple walks. Not bad.

My team plays Wednesday and Thursday this week.