O.k. — I admit it… I love comic books. It’s an old love that goes back to my late middle school days. Somewhere in the basement of my parents’ house are about 700 or so comic from the mid 1980s. I don’t really collect anymore, but I’ve followed the special comics that folks have pointed out to me.

And I’ve watched as the movie industry has tried to figure out how to put this medium on-screen. There have been some successes, but overall, I don’t think that movies ever really figured it out.

Unti Sin City.

Kat and I went to see it today. Robert Rodriguez really is a genius. The movie captures the style and feel of the book and brings it to life in a way that was nothing short of brilliant. I was riveted the whole time. Brilliant direction, great action and a willingness to use dialogue that sounded straight from the comics without parody.

Amazing, amazing movie.

I was reading a story on the lack of funding for the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathmatics and Science Education on eSchool News, and I was appalled. For folks who haven’t heard of it, The ENC is one of those sites that was starting back in the early days of the internet and funded by the federal government. It has tons and tons of resources for science and math teacehrs of every level, and it is exactly the kind of thing that made folks like me so excited about the promise of the internet for teachers in the first place.

Heck, it was even first funded by the first President Bush.

But for the last three years, this administration has not been willing to spend $5 million to keep this site going — and understand, this isn’t just a list of links. The site researches state standards and ties the lessons to the state standards, as well as providing a free newsletter and lots of other nifty plusses for education. Now, for the past few years, Congress has funded it when the Department of Education would not, but this year, they have not.

Here’s the kicker, and it makes my blood boil. So the ENC is now becoming a subscription service. Districts can pay $329 a year — which granted, isn’t a lot — to have access to the ENC. But two things drive me nuts about that.

One, the beauty of a site like that was how it could help individual teachers find an amazing resource for their schools and classrooms. It didn’t have to be a school-sponsored resource. the ENC was exactly the kind of a site that an enterprising teacher who was looking for something interesting for their classroom would stumble upon and use to its fullest. Now, someone will have to have already found the site and deemed it worthy of an investment for a teacher to be able to use it.

Two, this is just one more example of how our society views everything as something to be bought and sold. Why not fund this project? Isn’t this — as the article points out — the exact kind of resource we want the federal government to make available in the days of No Child Left Behind? It’s a relatively small investment on the part of the federal government to provide a free and fantastic resource that makes teaching just that much better.

It’s one thing to claim you are for bettering education in this country — it’s another thing to put your money where your mouth is.

As life gets scarier… this is from today’s New York Times / AP Wire:

AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. (AP) — Less than two years after it was plunged into a rape scandal, the Air Force Academy is scrambling to address complaints that evangelical Christians wield so much influence at the school that anti-Semitism and other forms of religious harassment have become pervasive.

There have been 55 complaints of religious discrimination at the academy in the past four years, including cases in which a Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.

The article has more… and much of it is very scary. As a Jew, as a humanist, as an American, I don’t like this as all. There is, I fear, a growing theocratic movement in this country — as Ralph Reed runs for public office and such — and it is an anti-American movement. Don’t let anyone tell you different.