The Grammar and Spelling Police are on duty again this week. That oft-mentioned electronic message board on Mills keeps committing errors. Here’s how:

An Albuquerque TV station, reporting on the much-understated “hazing” incident involving members of the Robertson High School football team, showed in the background the animated sign which carried the message, among other things, “The drama is begining.”

It’s not the drama that’s beginning (note the three n’s), it’s the typos. Remember, some of these repeated messages remain for days. Continue reading →

For years I’ve looked for ways of saving time. And paper, and even effort.

Reluctantly entering the computer-acquisition crowd, I got my first computer — not for me personally but for the office where I worked — on the advice of a Highlands colleague, Ron Maestas.

Maestas was light years ahead of me, his having delved into the then-new invention when the first models arrived. Some were Radio Shack TRS-80 models, lacking a hard drive and surrendering all the data once the machine was unplugged. Continue reading →

In Sunday School back in the Dark Ages, my co-teacher and I asked our students what turns them on. “What do you really like to do?” we asked each one.

The responses ranged from celebrating a birthday to winning a football game to kicking around with friends to being with family. Then my colleague turned the camera on me: And what do you like to do, Art?

I fidgeted, stumbled and stammered, not having expected the question. Well, aside from being with people, especially family and friends, I mentioned that I enjoyed long walks with my whippets, Moosa and Watsita, which coincidentally had been given me by my co-teacher’s daughter that year.

I admit it. I love most dogs. I loved throwing a ball as far as I could in order for Moosa to retrieve it and “hand” it back, somewhat gooey. Or riding my bike as fast as I could and watching the dogs overtake me, even though my speedometer showed 35 mph, which equals 245 mph in dog miles. I loved those animals, both now dead. Watsita died of a bronchial infection; Moosa died shortly after being mauled by a neighbor’s dog that slipped out of his chain and collar. Continue reading →

A high school play, “The Perfect Idiot,” deals with an extremely bright senior who misses all 100 items on a true-false test.

How’d he manage that? Statistical probability dictates that anyone who simply checks off every answer as “true” or every one as “false” is bound to score around 50 percent. In order to earn a perfect zero (or perfect hundred), the student obviously needed to know all the answers.

But does anybody have all the answers? Or, perhaps more appropriately, “Does anyone even know the questions?”

I refer to the just-released results that show which area schools achieved “Adequate Yearly Progress,” or AYP, as part of the No Child Left Behind act, also known as NCLB, and sometimes called “Nickelbee.”

The results show that of West Las Vegas’s nine schools, four of them, Don Cecilio Elementary, Rio Gallinas charter school, Union Elementary and Valley Elementary met the AYP standard. Continue reading →