Good news, I woke up at 7:45 this morning and got right out of bed. It didn’t take force of will, I was just fully awake. Maybe this really is just about sleep apnea. When we get on the other side of COVID-19 I’ll final see a doctor about it. For now, every pulmonologist is busy saving lives. I’m not jumping to front of that line.
I finally bit the bullet and applied to teach online for Outschool. One of my friends teaches for them and another uses it with her children. I’ll be making up my own curricula which means deciding what to teach. First thing will be SAT prep. That’s easy and in demand. I’d have more fun teaching younger kids things that amuse me. While I’ve always been the tough teacher, I’ve also always been the fun and silly teacher. Who would have guessed that I’d be silly? I’m usually so dour. I didn’t know it until I got to near the end of the application that I’d have to record a 30-90 second video. They said it was just to get my personality across, I could talk about myself, tell a joke, or teach a lesson. I went for teach a lesson I could fit in 90 seconds. I’ll teach it to you now. Sorry you don’t get to see my gesticulations or facial expressions. Those of you that know me well can imagine them.
Everybody has heard of Pythagoras, the Pythagorean theorem guy; you know the one, the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse [eye roll]. But do you know what his job was? No, he was not a teacher. Nope, not a mathematician or philosopher. He wasn’t a writer. He was a religious cult leader. He and his followers were Greek, but they live in caves in the mountains of Italy because all good cults live in caves. His religion was based on numbers, in particular that everything in the universe I based on the ratio of small whole numbers. That’s why he’s known as a mathematician. He did more than come up with his famous theorem. He discovered the major chord. If the ratio of the lengths of three strings is 4:5:6 it sounds pleasant to the human ear. This is the foundation of western music. We owe it all to Pythagoras and his followers. You can see how they’d see that as evidence that they were right. Then one day a member of the cult proved that the square root of 2 was not rational, it can’t be expressed as a ratio of small whole numbers; it can’t be expressed as a ratio of whole numbers of any size. This is the only time in history a religion was proved invalid by mathematics. There were two things the cult could do when this happened. The first is seeing that they were wrong, gone home and gotten real jobs. Of course, they didn’t do that, people hate admitting they are wrong. Instead they swore the entire cult to secrecy because if this ever got out everyone would point and laugh at them. A secret held by more than two people is common knowledge, so it got out. What did they do with the person that exposed the secret? They killed him. People took math seriously in those days.
That’s pretty much what I said, it includes one oversimplification. We don’t know for sure that the killed the whistle blower. They might have just excommunicated him and held a funeral as if he had died. I prefer the version I gave in the talk, it’s the romantic in me.
Yesterday’s phone call was with Lena. Yesterday’s exciting dinner was jerk boneless chicken breast. I’m going to marry the air fryer. This is another dish that’s better in that than any way I’ve made it before. It is ridiculously tender and moist. I prefer it in the air fryer than in a skillet or stovetop grill.
I have more streaming concerts today than I can listen to. Here are some of today’s choices. Go to Social Distancing Streaming Concerts for the details. All times are EDT (New York) Time.
5 PM
Lara Ewen
Mya Byrne
6 PM
Melissa Etheridge
6:30 PM
Carla Ulbrich
7 PM
No Place For Hate webcast featuring Cry Matthews, ilyAIMY, et al
8 PM
Stay the Folk Home presents Nora Brown
8:30 PM
Shawna Caspi FemFolk Concert
Obviously I can’t watch all of these, but I’d like to know that some of My Gentle Readers will watch each of them. They all have the official Wise Madness Seal of Approval™
Wise Madness 