Before and After

Well, I am clearly WAY too hooked in by the Simpsons Movie advertising, because this is now my second post this summer dedicated to it. This comes courtesy Burger King this time. You download a photo of yourself and they animate you as you might appear in Springfield. I plan on using this as my new alter ego with my poor Godinez students this coming year. In fact, you can see me already running with the gimmick at the new blog for my class, http://ghardaenglish.blogspot.com. I have also saved images of the Simpsonized Nicole in front of Springfield Elementary School, inside the Springfield Nuclear Plant, on stage at a Krusty Show, and in Marge's kitchen for use in grammar Power Points where I will need silly sentences and images as examples for teaching students parts of speech, clauses, etc.

Weirdest of all, though: this image generator seems to actually be very sophisticated. With two different photos and the same exact settings, I got two very different creatures. The green-shirted gal comes from a more recent photo of myself. You can alter outfits and hairstyles, but the basic hair color and facial structure is not subject to alteration. That's right-- apparently the animated Nicole of this year is much hotter than the animated Nicole of last year, although I think I appreciate the wardrobe of last year's Nicole Simpson (D'oh!) more. The real-life Nicole has a brand new haircut and has lost 6.5 pounds in the past two weeks, so maybe that has something to do with it. Somehow I doubt it... Get a life, man, as Bart would say.

Another important improvement in my life, besides a new job and the beginnings of a new body is a new car. That's right: Gilbert the Golf finally went to his final resting place and I traded him in for a silver Sophie Rabbit. She's a beauty... most important, she has an iPod station in the center arm rest that charges her while Claire (de Lune) the iPod plays through the CD player. I didn't get to nab a snapshot of dinged up Gilbert or his melting engine before I traded him in, but I'll take a shot of Sophie when I get a chance.

Life is looking up; karma coming back my way... Thank heavens!

1996 Fortune Cookie

"In telling of Watergate, textbooks blame Richard Nixon, as they should. But they go no deeper. Faced with this undeniable instance of governmental wrongdoing, they manage to retain their uniformly rosy view of government...As Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, 'the problem will not go away with the departure of Richard Nixon,' because it is structural, stemming from the vastly increased power of the federal executive bureaucracy...Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal foreign and domestic policies" (Lies My Teacher Told Me, 229).