Lesson of the Day

Be careful what you say around a needy Special Ed kid.  They never forget anything, and you don’t know what’s going to come out of their mouths. 

WooHOO!!

It’s official! I can blog from work!!!

I wasn’t sure whether the internet here was going to allow access to blogger.com, but apparently, we’re good. 

Sweet.

Lesson Learned?

The first thing I want to talk about today is the incident that happened here in Boston over the weekend. 

In case there happens to be anyone reading this from other parts of the world, here’s a link to catch you up:

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/23337764/detail.html

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

 

 

Back now? Good.

Anyway, I honestly didn’t mind the inconvenience of not being able to brush my teeth with tap water.  I also didn’t much mind not being able to get coffee from Dunks in the morning.  What bothers me is a very simple question no one has been able to answer for me.

If you look at this map showing the whole MWRA system, you should see that big black line that indicates the pipe taking water from the treatment plant into the Boston area. 

The ONE pipe.

Why is there only one pipe?

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not a plumber, nor am I an urban planner or an engineer.  It just seems to me that if you can have one giant pipe carrying 8 million gallons of water an hour, you can probably have two slightly less giant pipes carrying 4 million gallons each.  Yes, it would probably cost more, and it would be twice the work to maintain, but in the event of a catastrophic failure of one of the pipes, you won’t have 2 million people without water for almost three days. 

Moral of the story: sometimes, redundancy is your friend. 

Really.

Intro Post

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the blog written by a high school history teacher. Before the two people who might have stumbled across this blog go running away in total disinterest, let me assure you  I won’t be talking curriculum or lesson planning here.  At worst, I’m likely to blog about the latest and greatest stunt one of my kids pulled in the classroom.  Rest assured, it’s a laugh (okay, maybe a bemused sigh) a minute!

If I’m not blogging about that, I’ll probably be commenting about some news item or other that interests, confuses or annoys me.  I take endless pleasure in pointing out stupidity wherever I see it, so that’ll be a running theme here.  (By the way, I’ll personally award 10,o00 internets to anyone who sends me an appropriately absurd story I can talk about and link to!)

Oh, one other thing.  I’m getting married in October, so it’s possible some wedding stuff might sneak its way into this blog.  I’ll try very hard to avoid ranting about flowers and place settings though.