The Great Leap Forward

On HGRNJ tonight.

Tune in tonight (click on "Listen Live") - starting a little early (10:30 p.m. EST). On until about 1 a.m.

The Plimsouls - The Plimsouls...plus - Tracks 7 and 8.

7. The Plimsouls - I want what you got

8. The Plimsouls - Nickels and dimes

All Over The Place 31.

AOTP 31 [55 min 15 sec]

No time to talk about it. Surprise yourself.

NYC teacher job fair.

Went to my first one last night. What a cattle call. 200 schools there (none from Staten Island, the closest borough to me) - most in hard-to-reach areas. I ended up talking to 8 schools. Got one demo lesson scheduled, and maybe I'll get a few callbacks. Very hit or miss. Still wondering if there really is a teacher shortage.

David Brooks, moron.

NYT columnist David Brooks recently attempted a takedown of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos, the only political website you really need. Brooks seems to have a habit of getting things wrong in his (unfortunately) widely-read column. Constantly. And you have to pay to read his drivel online, so I can't lino to it. (Not worth the money - I still subscribe to NYT.)

dKos diarist mcjoan sums the Brooks ouevre up for you in one easy-to-read column.

This Modern World provides a hilarious comic along the same lines.

Creepy: Ghosts at Mystic Seaport.

I usually don't buy into this kind of thing, but if I saw what these people saw, I'd be pretty freaked out.

Mystic Seaport

Rain drummed on the deck of the 19th-century whaling ship Charles W. Morgan late Saturday night, as below deck, in the cramped and stuffy captain's quarters, a group of men and women armed with flashlights and digital cameras took their positions.

They were ghost hunters, members of the Rhode Island Paranormal Research Group, who had come to Mystic Seaport, the museum that houses the Morgan, to investigate reports of strange happenings on board the ship. Leaders of the respected maritime museum had agreed to let them roam the 165-year-old vessel, the centerpiece of the collection, for a simple reason: The recent talk of ghosts aboard the Morgan has been a much-needed boon to business.

``Whether they find anything or not, people like that they're looking," said Michael O'Farrell, the publicist for the museum. ``We're not promoting the Charles W. Morgan as a ghost ship -- it's up to you to decide -- but we know people are coming because of [the investigation]."

The paranormal research group became interested in the Charles W. Morgan last fall, after it received e-mails from three people who described similar experiences while visiting the ship on different days last year. All three visitors said they were below deck, in the room where the crew once stripped blubber from whales, when they saw a man dressed in period clothing sitting on a pile of rope and smoking a pipe, said Andrew Laird, the group's director.

The tourists assumed that the man was an actor working for the museum, and were later stunned to learn that there are no such guides on the Morgan.

``That was the weird part about it -- the letters were the same, almost verbatim," said Laird, 48, of Glocester,  R.I.

The Dresden Dolls.

Maybe I'll make this a regular feature - gathering up videos found on YouTube.

Here are three from Boston favorites The Dresden Dolls.

"Coin operated boy":

"Girl anachronism":

"Sing":

No HGRNJ tonight.

With Kyle in and Kim just back from Prague, there won't be any AOTP tonight. It returns next week.

Bad week.

Kyle's visit notwithstanding, it's been a bad week. I got turned down by one of the high schools I interviewed at (Marist HS, Bayonne, NJ). The only good thing going on in that area is that I got an invite to NYC's teacher job fair next week. I hope I don't end up dead on the streets of Brooklyn. On top of that, my unemployment claim has been discontinued because one of the districts where I worked notified the state that I quit my job. (Shit, we moved 60 miles away!) More on that one later. A lot more. Anyway, no more unemployment. I'm going to have to take a shit job to pay the bills. Three college degrees and I haven't grossed $35,000 since 2001. Jeezus.

(Hope none of those schools found this blog.)

The wrong kind of slugger.

Phillies pitcher Brett Myers hit his wife on a Boston street. What a class act.