Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Sorted by date Results 1330 - 1354 of 1862
To the Editor: Reading the August 4, 1988 history, I saw the name Stanley Wrasper and it brought back memories of me playing a gig with him and with Richard Totusek on piano. This was in the summer of 1959 while I was working on the Ott ranch. I was given the oldest set of drums that I had ever seen in my 55 years of playing. The set had to be from the very early 1900s. We played at a place in Wilson Creek. What I remember is Stanley and Richard whistling in harmony all the way from Irby to the gig. Not one song but one...
When our special needs son was in school, he always rode the school bus for handicapped children. God blessed us with great school bus drivers and you have to be very special yourself for this job. In my husband’s church office, he had intercoms that led to his secretary due to the long distance between offices. There were days that Tom would pick up truck drivers speaking on CBs to other truck drivers. Tom would stop his work occasionally and try to catch a few words between drivers. Tom said it never distracted him from h...
In Part 7, we saw Common Core curriculum being used with second-graders in New York. For K-12, the standards, readings, and suggested curriculum remain about the same – developmentally inappropriate for learners, especially in elementary school. How did it come to this? According to the 2010 U.S. Census and the National Center for Education Statistics, 13,604 school districts oversee the more than 100,000 public schools serving about 50 million students. I understand that about 100 high-poverty school districts formed the bas...
What are the odds? That was my thought when I read recent pieces about a very special fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota. Here’s some background: if you saw the movie Jurassic Park, you may think that Tyrannosaurus rex was the biggest predator of all time. That’s certainly the way the movie portrays the 40-foot-long dinosaur that could weigh seven tons. But there’s actually been a long debate in scientific circles about whether T. rex was a predator chasing d...
To the Editor: I certainly empathize with the people who have been hazed by the Obama I.R.S. I discovered the hard way that they do keep lists of people they don’t like. I sued the I.R.S. in 1974. I won and have been a target ever since. My sibling, who was my father’s executor, died in 1979 and he and his lawyer hadn’t been completely honest. I reluctantly agreed to close dad’s estate and 21 years later it was closed. Even though there was only a very small amount of money involved, the I.R.S. sent a lawyer from Washing...
National standards are nothing new; they have been in place at least since the 1950s. However, what the Common Core standards are doing to curriculum can best be explained by Nancy Carlsson-Paige of New York in an email to Susan Ohanion: “What is so fundamentally wrong with this Engage New York approach . . . is the focus on content and having facts and correct answers, a focus that requires a fact-based, didactic pedagogy for success. One where kids passively sit while teachers direct-teach content that is irrelevant to t...
Recently, someone asked me to address (in this column) the issue of bringing more visitors to Odessa to shop in our retail establishments. Believe me, it’s not a topic foreign to me. Or to anyone else who belongs to the Chamber of Commerce. Or to anyone who owns or works in any of those aforementioned retail establishments. And I'’m including our restaurants in that category. The Chamber of Commerce, love ‘em or hate ‘em, has done a pretty good job of bringing people to town...
The House of Representatives and House Republican leadership recently took a bold step to separate the Farm Bill into farm policy and feeding programs (aka food stamps). When asked for a reaction, the most common answer in my farm community is “it’s about time.” We have allowed Congress to fall into a pattern of mega-bills too large for anyone but full time lobbyists to read and understand. Focusing on issues separately allows for more transparency, better debate, and less opportunity for brokered back scratching. The Suppl...
(StatePoint) An epidemic is sweeping the nation. Girls are at a disadvantage when it comes to success in math and science, and the future does not look bright if parents don’t act now. In the next ten years, 80 percent of all jobs will require technical skills, according to Labor Department statistics. And jobs in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields are expected to grow twice as fast as all jobs. But currently, the ratio of boys to girls enrolled in STEM courses is a staggering six to one, putting g...
I recently pulled some weeds in my yard. Sometimes I’m glad to have a little simple work where I can see progress, even if the effects of my labor are only temporary. I can only do a little bit at a time, having to take it slow due to arthritic knees. But one thing about pulling weeds in August stands out even when taken in small doses; it’s hot work. With the sun beating down on us, warming the whole nation, it’s easy to wonder if solar power will some day replace fossil fuels as our mainstay energy resource. That could...
To the Editor: We have a problem in the U.S. regarding medical care that was partially caused by Obamacare but also caused by the cost of going to medical school. Our government estimate of being 90,000 physicians short in the year 2020 is not very accurate. They are not considering how much the cost of medical school and the cost of malpractice insurance is causing the possible candidates to change their minds. Becoming a physician assistant takes from four to eight years less time and the median salary in 2010 was $86,000....
Ireland enjoys a mild and stable climate. But even in Ireland there are years that stand out as unusual. Recently a team of researchers led by Harvard's Francis Ludlow announced results of a study of Ireland's climate based on the Irish Annals, a body of writings containing more than 40,000 entries. The Annals record events from 431 A.D. to 1649 A.D. During the Medieval period they were written by monks. From the 1200s onwards some entries were written by historians of the...
Zucchini plants growing in Odessa gardens are beginning to produce the annual over abundance of this versatile vegetable. There is no end to the number and variety of recipes devised to use up the abundance of fruit produced by this prolific plant. Cakes, breads, cookies, casseroles and salads, the recipes keep coming. Several years ago Cindi Bell, formerly of Odessa, gave me copies of a stack of zucchini recipes that she had collected and developed to incorporate zucchini...
This past Sunday, I spent much of the day outdoors, trying to reclaim what little there is of a vegetable garden. Which got me to thinking about how much trouble I have managing my time. Which, in turn, got me to thinking about how fast we all seem to think we need to go. Mind you, there was probably not a direct line between those two concepts. It’s just the way my thinking goes. At any rate, by the time I was done spending some quality time with my hoe, I had decided that I...
Wheat markets, along with corn and beans, continued their downtrends last week. Speculative funds hold a record short position in Chicago wheat futures and a sizeable position in the corn futures, and there has been nothing lately to make them want to cover these short positions. The weather in July in the cornbelt has been favorable, with most areas receiving timely rains with moderate temperatures. Forecasts call for more of the same. As a result, there has been active cash movement in the corn market from the farm and...
To the Editor: One thing that was not mentioned [in the article in the July 25, 2013 issue of The Record] is that Eddy [Kern] is the last living member of the Odessa Eagles, Aerie 3069 Fraternal Order of Eagles. We had the opportunity to visit with Eddy many years ago. He was the Aerie secretary for many years until they consolidated with Aerie 2, Spokane Eagles. When we get back from the International Convention in Reno, Nev., I will send a picture of the original charter from October 1, 1950. This will list all the members...
Many teachers are concerned about the Common Core State Standards. Compounding their anxieties, Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, has noted that the CCSS establishes national standards for the country, as though they had never existed before. However, we have had national standards for a long time. Since World War 2, textbook publishers have competed with each other for the school textbook market. As a result, many texts from different publishers were barely distinguishable from one another. That is still the case...
I have watched closely how the number of people on various government assistance programs has expanded at an almost unbelievable rate. I have a friend who lost his job and applied for unemployment. Almost immediatley, he started getting applications for food stamps, free cell phone, SNAP, etc. He had not applied for the programs and he was surprised to basically have these things offered again and again when he didn't apply. He had too much pride to accept even one program. I understand that human nature being what it is, mos...
Marianne Iksic and I realized that though the state standards were superior, the new national standards were here to stay. About 90-95% of our English program matched the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). At Common Core English workshops, we both have heard teachers’ concerns, the major one being that the CCSS would dictate the books that teachers were to teach and students to read. When teachers saw, for example, that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or William Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury were marked at the 4th grade...
We live in a time in which most animals are relatively small. If you think back to your exposure to the Ice Age, perhaps in elementary school, you may remember big mammals like the mastodon and the saber tooth tiger. Less famous but equally big was a deer the size of a modern elk and a beaver the size of a black bear. In sum, our ancestors – the people alive in the Ice Age – were small compared to a number of the animals around them. Dinosaurs are also famously large. How dinosaurs grew to be as large as they did has alw...
I think I’ll poke a little fun at the editor this week. Really, I’m poking fun at myself, but I’m disguising it. Every once in a while, I forget to write my own headline for this column. That’s the first mistake. Then I read what the editor supplied. That’s the second mistake. It’s not the editor’s fault, you know. If I could just remember to go back to the top of the page before that final save and the email to The Record. If I could just figure out what the heck I was wr...
Some of the interesting features of certain caves are stalactites and stalagmites, the column-like features that hang down from the ceiling and are built up from the floor. Humans have known of their existence since time immemorial, but it’s only in recent years we’ve realized they have a story about climate to tell us. As reported recently in Science Express, researchers led by a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology studied four stalagmites from Borneo. The stalagmites are made of calcite, a relatively soft min...
To the Editor: I keep wondering how desperate the Obama people will get to try and get more people to believe that Obamacare will solve our nation’s health care problems. We have problems with health care, but a lot of them are caused by government problems that go back many years. We have expenses that are out of control because of a lack of control and poor monitoring of expenses. This latest proposal to try and get the professional N.F.L. teams to advertise and basically endorse Obamacare was rejected. I think he might t...
American Columnist We’ve seen religious fighting too often on television. From Egypt we’ve heard about the power of the Muslim brotherhood and from Afghanistan the fighting between the Sunnis and Shias. We have enough problems in our country and the average American is not interested in religious violence. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...” Article VI specifies “that no religious...
So, I'm sitting around this morning, feeling all glum and gloomy, because I hate summer. That’s right, you read it right. Lise hates summer. Lise has ALWAYS hated summer. I’m pretty sure that if you went back to approximately a year ago, you’d find a very similar column. Because I hate summer. I hate summer so much that I pretty much can’t stop thinking that I hate summer ALL summer. There are a lot of people around here who have SAD, or “Seasonal Affective Disorder....
