Thursday, December 14, 2006

Did he just say that?

Yes, yes he did. He is 8 years old and he just asked me if I was going to Google his mother.


I work at an elementary school for kids with ADHD and related behavior and learning problems, including Autism. One of our 3rd graders has been complaining to his teacher of a stomach ache this morning. Complaints of ailments are not uncommon among our kids who often try to get out of their responsibilities by feigning illness. But, for this particular student, complaints are out of the ordinary, so we call his mother. She asks us to pull him from the classroom and call her back so that she can talk to him. We bring him into the office and he stands in front of my desk waiting as we find his mother's cell phone number. I'm opening up the contact information file on my computer and he says to me, "Are you going to Google her?"


I was in the middle of one of those moments where you become paralyzed by the "Did he just say that?" shock. I look at his teacher and he looks back at me, jaws dropped. Then I say, to the student, "That's a really good idea of how to find out about something you don't know about. Thanks for the suggestion. I'm actually just opening a file where I already have your mom's cell phone number stored from when she gave it to me in case we needed to call her for something like this."


End of Story

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Thanks CNN!

For the touching story of a "simple man," I thank you, CNN. ECK!

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Deporten a La Migra

Wow! I cannot believe the online response to the breaking news of the ICE multi-state raid of meat packing plants across the Mid and Southwest. I was going to wait to post until I had a more developed argument, but I have to get something about this on Technorati that is not racist and not in support of the raids (the two worst ones were these, top on the search results for "ICE" & "raid" & "meat", Act Georgia and Texas Freds). And then there's Google's (former) headline news article from the Des Moines Register. The article isn't bad, but the comments sure are.


Not having a developed argument, I decided to go with a inciting title, "Deporten a La Migra," which basically translates into "Deport ICE." I decided to Google "la migra" and was appalled by what came up as the top results, the Urban Dictionary entry and The American Resistance Foundation Store. Unbelievable! Next, I Google "deporten a la migra" and got this from Liberation Ink. Nice!

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Open Access Anthropology Blog Post on HASTAC

On Sunday I posted to HASTAC about Open Access Anthropology. Check it out.