A Hobson’s choice is a free choice in which only one option is offered. As a person may refuse to take that option the choice is therefore between taking the option or not; “take it or leave it”. The phrase is said to originate from Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery stable owner at Cambridge, England. […]

After the Big Branch Mine disaster earlier this month,  I was reflecting on something I remember a college professor telling me about unions in coal mining. Her take was that European Miners Unions for a variety of reasons, were able to concentrate their efforts on improving working conditions, and the overall safety in the mines, […]

The title comes from a trope of jokes about the hilarity that results from dissimilar groupings of people (usually a rabbi, a priest, and a minister). Sometimes the joke is how alike they all are and sometimes, the dis-congruity of groupings makes that joke. That’s how I like to think about comparisons between the U.S. […]

A whole month without a post about what I’ve seen around the Internet. Actually, it’s been longer than that, but since I wasn’t doing a lot of reading, there wasn’t a lot to write about. I’ve just gotten back into the habit of reading and commenting on blogs, so here it goes… Lots of talk […]

The question comes froma  recent tweet, and shows the tenor of the times as we in California grapple with the disaster that is our state budget… In my very first contract teaching position in the year 2000, we had a computer lab, and my classroom had Oracle Internet workstations, that seemed so limited at the […]