Apparently at one point in Fahrenheit 9/11 when a newspaper headline is shown, the "headline" was heavily edited by the filmmakers. Quelle surprise. Story at Pantagraph.com, the offended newspaper.
Alberta teachers went on strike in 2002 because of large class sizes, poor working conditions, and oh yeah, they wanted an 11% pay raise. The strike lasted three weeks and was settled by an arbitration panel which gave the teachers a 14% pay raise over two years.
I found someone writing in unequivocal support of the 2002 teachers' strike. But it was marxist.com so maybe it's not really mainstream.
Alberta teachers and school boards were recently in negotiations on a ten-year contract which would include indexed pay increases and (surprisingly) an offer by the provincial government to pay the unfunded liability of the teachers' pension fund (about $1.8 billion). The talks fell through on July 5, with no particular reason given.
According to this CBC article, the unions claim that mediation fell through. The school boards claim that the unions walked away. And Education Minister Lyle Oberg has apparently withdrawn the $1.8 billion offer.
So -- teachers' strike again this year? We'll see.
(An unintentional Vonnegut reference)
I haven't been hanging around here much, and I haven't been responding to e-mail much either. What have I been doing?
That last one might not sound very serious, but recently I've been needing over nine hours of sleep per night.
Anyway, I just finished off one long e-mail in response to an emailed comment about my strike posts. So if I owe you an e-mail, especially one about "why anyone who makes under a million a year would vote for Bush", I'm working on it.
In 1996, Bob Dole resigned his Senate seat to run against then-President Bill Clinton. He got creamed, which is what everyone expected.
Obviously, Dole was ready to retire from the Senate, and since then he's made a living as a talking head and as a commercial pitchman -- promoting, among others, Viagra, Pepsi, and Britney Spears. So it cost him little to resign from the senate in 1996 instead of '98 or '00 or whenever his term would have expired.
But I wonder if part of the reason he resigned was to give the Republican Party ammunition the next time a Democratic Senator ran for President. Certainly the Republicans have made much of the fact that John Kerry has missed over 80% of his Senate votes while campaigning, and it would have been harder to do that had Bob Dole not resigned his seat -- the Democrats would have thrown Dole back in their faces. As it is, they're throwing Bush.....
Kaija said "buh" the other day while Danielle was modeling pointing to a ball in a book and saying "ball". But she won't repeat it.
She's mostly stopped making signs. I'm not sure if this is because we haven't been diligent in modeling them to her, or if she's getting confused between spoken and sign language, or what.
Neal Whitman just started a weblog on linguistics, more or less. Here's a couple of his posts on his child's pronunciation of /l/ as [y] or [w]. It's something my nephew did for a while, and it drove my father-in-law crazy... Anyway, Whitman describes the pronunciation pattern and gets a possible explanation for the distribution of [y] vs. [w]. Interesting work!