It’s coming up on my 3 year anniversary of embracing the world of blogging and the truth is, I’ve been considering “tossin’ in the ol’ towel”.

Until this year’s trip to NCTE that is.

I was a bit surprised by the amount of people who told me how much they enjoyed “my humor”. (Of course, as they said this I silently thought to myself, “I wasn’t kidding about any of that crap.” Oh well, such is my curse.)

So good news, the mildly smile-inducing swipes at cartoonish policy makers, mystifying administrators and society’s “you did what?” befuddlers will continue. There’s not really a grand plan to all this, mind you. Not much of an agenda outside of knowing that by continuing to write, I get to 1) have fun, 2) have a voice (or at least the feeling that I have a voice which is probably all one really needs anyway; which is more critical, perception or reality?) and 3) keep the mental muscles in shape that feed my ever-evolving book writing career (where I write YA titles about things like nerds, gang-bangers, hoops, hip-hop, illegal immigrants, and 8^th grade boys with erections. Of course, if I am ever going to compose a literary masterpiece, it will have to be a tome which incorporates all of these elements into one novel, sort of a Vonnegut meets Douglass Adams with a splash of Hunter Thompson, Christopher Buckley and Oprah Winfrey in the mix. Why Oprah Winfrey. Hey, can’t hurt.)

Like a pro athlete, ya gotta stay in shape year round which means that as a pro writer, ya gotta bang on the keyboard continuously. Since this I believe I will venture on, blabbing and blah-ing and spouting off on things about which I am quite ill-informed. (Trust me, I’m not the only one and some folks making quite a good living at it. No names mentioned, Mr. Perry.

D’oh!)

So enjoy your day and know that yes, zee infinitesimally significant (and that’s probably over-stating the matter) blog will roll on into 2012.

May peace be with you this holiday season.

As a writer, one of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Douglass Adams. He says: “I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.”

Too funny, right?

Well, it seems as if George Dubya Bush, once again, has a preposterous amount of egg on his face. Why? Because he set forth a ridiculous deadline that no one in the field of education (no one worth their salt, I should say) ever though would possibly be made and poof! now the Obama administration is left with cleaning up more of George Dubya Bush’s mess.

Seems that the “mandate” that all school children reach 100% academic proficiency by the year 2014 is gonna get yanked. (Read here for more.)

And why? Because this deadline was never anything more than a political platitude that Bush used to try and trump up goodwill for his political tenure anyway — crafted into policy at the expense of reality, of course. A reality, BTW, that he knew he’d never be on the hook for because his term in office would have long since been finished. (A few years too late on that front, if you ask me, but that’s fodder for another blog post.)

Yes, the aims of “closing the achievement gap” and “raising academic proficiency” are still going to stick around… but the deadline to do so is gonna be ka-boshed.

Still in Iraq, pulling the plug on NCLB’s proficiency deadline, financially reeling from deregulating the credit markets to the point of implosion while hunting for WMD’s that were trumped up to begin with… The guy makes Nixon look like Lincoln.

Whoosh! Ka-BOOM!

The sound of a deadline colliding with reality.