The dry spell we’ve had running for several weeks here without any substantial rain finally broke this week. We’ve only had about two inches of rain since early August, but we got that in one night this week. By the time I posted this, we had 4.3 inches of rain for the week, and we needed it.
Things are mostly fine at The Day Job. Right around the time I started, Diana applied for and got a new position at the school, taking her completely out of the department I was in. That left her secretary position open. On something of an encouraged whim, I applied for it.
I didn’t even get an interview, despite my department head really pushing for it.
Because her boss didn’t believe that married couples should work at the school.
Now, I get that lots of companies have rules about married couples or family members being in each other’s reporting chain. It makes a lot of sense to not supervise someone you’re related to. But we weren’t going to be in the same department. Heck, she wasn’t even going to be on campus more than a few minutes every day, because the new position has her traveling to local school districts.
At any rate, they hired a new person and she starts Monday. No word on how that’ll affect me yet, because all of the training records that I need to deal with are in that office. Overall, I like the work. I just don’t care for the drama or the politics. We’ll see what happens. On the brighter side, the school’s HR system actually emailed me that they’d filled the position. That’s rare in my experience.
Football
It was good to see Coach Harbaugh back on the sidelines. Michigan looked pretty good against Rutgers on Saturday. Sainristil’s 71-yeard Pick-6 was huge. Corum’s second effort on his second touchdown. JJ McCarthy had what I think was a career-high rushing game with 51 yards. UM’s defense looked okay overall, but Rutgers beat them several times on long passes and the Wolverines won’t be able to get away with that later in the season.
Rutgers used to have a reputation as something of a pushover, but Schiano is (again) slowly turning the team into something of a sleeper. This was their first loss this season, and I think teams underestimate them at their peril. And I give Gavin Wimsatt props for his work today. 180 passing yards ain’t shabby against Michigan, and he hung tough in the pocket.
Tulane hadn’t started by the time I posted this, but I think they’ll handle Nicholls pretty easily.
Reading
I’ve written before about how I’ve donated to Operation Underground Railroad, and how I’ve had concerns about the group. Some of those concerns may have been well-founded, though I didn’t consider anything close to what was apparently going on. Tim Ballard’s Departure From Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation.
Vice has been following Ballard and OUR for quite some time; they picked up on some of the common concerns years ago.
I cannot fathom how someone supposedly committed to fighting trafficking would do the things he’s been accused of. Maybe Nietzsche was right about fighting monsters.
The accusation against Sound of Freedom producer Paul Hutchinson is particularly egregious. How do you think it’s okay to grope an underage girl you’re supposedly trying to rescue? Hutchinson’s excuse was that she wasn’t actually underage. That’s not the flex you seem to think it is, dude.
I knew from my research during The Sad Girl that the situation I described in the book—a ring of traffickers kidnapping girls to order—was stupendously rare. It’s much more common for trafficking victims to get waylaid by someone on social media, or in response to a too-good-to-be-true job ad in some exotic foreign country. But apparently, it’s hard to convince people of that after they watch Sound of Freedom, because Trafficking Survivors and Advocates Are Being Harassed by ‘Sound of Freedom’ Fans.
This thought-provoking piece from 2019 popped up on my Twitter feed Tuesday. The Case Against Sermon-Centric Sundays. One of the things that stuck in my craw as I got more involved in the evangelical world (I was raised Lutheran) was how much time we spent in worship and how little time we spent fulfilling the rest of Jesus’ commands. From my reading, He wanted us to be actually serving others, going out in the community and feeding the hungry and visiting the sick and imprisoned, and there was and still is very little of that happening these days in the evangelical world, it seems. So while I agree with part of Jethani’s article, I think he’s still got slightly the wrong focus.
A few weeks ago, I shared on Facebook a WaPo story about a family that turned away from homeschooling. It was an enlightening article because the parents in question, from Loudon County, Virginia, were both homeschooled. I discovered an annotated version of the article from Nieman Storyboard, a site I’d never heard of. They interviewed the reporter about the article, then also annotated some questions throughout the piece. Peter Jamison did a great job with his original article. Trevor Pyle put together an excellent story at Nieman Storyboard with A revealing profile of a family that defied their faith’s edict on home schooling. I look forward to reading more articles there.
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