Hawaii is going to begin issuing "standards-based" report cards for its elementary students, which will replace the familiar letter grades with ME (meets with excellence), MP (meets proficiency), N (approaches) and U (well below), along with four pages of details parents are sure not to understand. It seems like progress to some people. It sounds like edubabble to me.

Back in July, I wrote about turf, letters to the editor purporting to be original thought on political matters but in reality group-think that is cut and pasted from a form letter. Now there's apparently an editorial version of turf making the rounds, with editors offering seemingly original editorials that are, in fact, cut and pasted from an editorial in one newspaper in a group into the editorial spaces of other newspapers in the group.

I've known too many people who quit work -- especially those who "retired early" -- and then died within a year not to think there's something to this:

In a prospective cohort study of thousands of employees who worked at Shell Oil, the investigators found that embarking on the Golden Years at age 55 doubled the risk for death before reaching age 65, compared with those who toiled beyond age 60.

I haven't read enough about NASA's Michael Griffin to make a definitive judgment, but I like what I know about him, and he seems to be the right person for the right job at the right time. For those disheartened about what the roving band of generic managers has done to American business, this alone is encouraging:

Fort Wayne Observed wonders if this really is about doing what's best for students. I've wondered the same thing. No matter what we say we're doing "for the kids" at the high school level, we send them off to a college campus at which the athletic tail wags the academic dog. And we still let them believe the big lie that most of them can succeed at the pro level. Not much moral clarity there.

Be honest. You, too, went here. Right? Yes, we all did. (Links via blogometer)

I'm as much an admirer of Larry Bird as the next person, but this seems a bit much. Too bad for him he isn't a fan of Wilt Chamberlain (No. 13).

If you were planning on heading to Australia while it was still a wild frontier of individualists, free from the entrapments of civilization, you may have waited too long:

A SACKED insurance broker who repeatedly came to work drunk - and even urinated in a wastepaper bin - has been awarded $10,000 compensation after claiming discrimination against his attention deficit disorder.

When I was a kid, I had such a sheltered life that I thought "oral sex" meant "talking about it." Did get quite a reputation after frequently saying, "Know about it? I'm an expert at it."