OK, this is absolutely absurd. Rediculous. Idiocy at it’s worst. And it’s a prime example of why my kids don’t attend public school.

This whole “political correctness” deal has taken a severe left-hand turn and left the map. Reality is so far behind it can’t be seen in the rear-view mirror. Houston, we’ve left the planet.

Just scan through that article. Here’s the skinny: California is rewriting school textbooks to remove references to historical things such as the Founding Fathers (they’re now Framers, like they were building a house). And Native Americans now will not be depicted in rural settings with braided hair. Forget the fact that that’s how they lived. No, no, no! Truth and historical fact has no place in the land of the “sensitive.” And, after all, that’s what school is all about… making our little children “feel good.” That’s why we don’t keep score any more. O, wait, we don’t do sports as a school function at all anymore, much less keep score.

I’m sorry, but what the public school system is raising is a generation of non-individuals that won’t have the first clue how to function in the real world. If you don’t think that we keep score out here in the Real World^tm, then you’re probably in that group that lives off of my tax dollars anyway. But that’s a subject for another rant.

They’re eliminating Snow Men (they’re now Snow Persons). They’re eliminating Hot Dogs, Cakes, Butter, etc. because it’s been deemed non-nutritious. They’re eliminating Mount Rushmore because it might be racially offensive to some small group of people. GIVE ME A BREAK! You can’t eliminate the fact that the mountain exists! Wait, this is California we’re talking about here; maybe you can…

I realize there are some sane people in the public school system who are trying to make a difference in the lives of the kids they teach. My mom is a teacher. But, this “sensitive” movement is a load of crap. There’s just no other way to put it… I call it like I see it.

Get over it all, people. Come back down to Earth.

I still haven’t gotten around to buying anything from the new Apple Music Store, but I’m intrigued by the execution… heavy integration as a web service into the iTunes music player. Very nice job.

I did browse around, though, and noticed that a couple of the disks I just bought on Saturday were available, and were cheaper than what I paid at Best Buy.

I’m curious about one point. I’ve got three macs at the house that I’d like to share music around with (no problem so far). But, one of my next purchases is likely going to be a series 2 TiVo, with the home media option. This would allow me to stream music from one of the macs (the iMac, most likely) to the TiVo to play anything from my entire collection on the stereo in the living room. With MP3s that I’ve ripped from my CDs, all is well, but the TiVo currently doesn’t know what AAC is. I’m hoping TiVo will upgrade their software to take this into account, but how will that fit with my “3 macs only” thing?

Since the music is supposedly streamed, it shouldn’t matter. If I was to copy the AAC file to the TiVo, I could see the 3 machine limit coming into play. Hey–I wonder if I’ll be able to buy stuff from the Apple Music Store on my TiVo? Since it’s a web service and they’re porting iTunes to Windows by the end of the year, would it be such a stretch to thing that wouldn’t happen?

This could be very cool… I just hope they continue to keep the customer in mind, not the record companies… So far they’ve done a pretty good job.

The trailer for Owning Mahowny is back up at the Apple Quicktime site. Wonder why it was gone for a couple of weeks?

iTunes 4
iTunes Music Store
new iPods
Quicktime 6.2

Just so you know.

Anxiously awaiting Apple’s “music to your ears” announcements at noon today (CST)… lots of rumors swirling around what they’re going to release… should be interesting.

MacNN is Reporting this morning that Griffin Technology has begun shipping it’s iTrip iPod FM transmitter. I preordered one a few weeks ago, so I should be receiving mine shortly. I’ll post a review once I get it and have a few days to play with it.

I know what I’ll be doing on Fridays for the next few months:
5/2 – X2
5/15 – Matrix Reloaded
5/30 – Finding Nemo
6/20 – The Hulk
6/27 – Charlie’s Angles: Full Throttle
7/2 – T3: Rise of the Machines
7/11 – The League of Extrordinary Gentlemen
7/18 – Johnny English
8/8 – S.W.A.T.
10/10 – Kill Bill
11/7 – Matrix Revolutions
11/28 – Timeline
12/19 – Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Things that look pretty good, but might have to wait for DVD:
5/2 – Owning Mahoney (wow, Apple removed the trailer for this one from their site)
5/16 – Bruce Almighty
6/13 – Hollywood Homicide
6/27 – 28 Days Later

I know it’s making the rounds on the ‘net, but this is extremely cool (warning–bandwidth intensive link). Completely real, shot in one take, but it took something like 606 tries to get it all to work.

Trained all day at a customer’s site. Makes the day go fast, but wears you out in the process.

Word on the street is Apple is planning on making announcements in a special event next Monday, April 28. Announced with the line “music to your ears” the speculation is that the new music servce/iPod update will be the topic of the day. In addition, perhaps the announcement of the purchase of Universal’s Music Group (last week’s rumor du jour), although admittedly I haven’t figured that one out yet…