Alaskan Bulgarian

Doves and DVDs

First off, congratulations to Bulgaria for officially entering NATO. Watching the ceremony today and the subsequent highlights and analysis on CNN made the EU in 2007 seem a little more likely. Bulgaria has finally gotten a bit of a reputation as an international player. I think I've seen Solomon Passy, Bulgaria's foreign minister, more times today than any of the others at the ceremony, and not just because he shed a couple of tears as the Bulgarian flag went up. He had great things to say about terrorism prevention.

With the recent and justified panic in London, Madrid, and other, more western cities, there has been an ever increasing build-up defending the heart of the larger European cities. Passy seems to want to stop terrorists before they get to the big cities, which would probably mean a large NATO presence in Bulgaria to close off routes through Turkey. Good for Bulgaria, I suppose, and a good reminder that there are things to do other than fortify city centers and live in fear of another attack we hope never comes.

Anyway. Lazy day yesterday, and today for that matter, so I couldn't really find the necessary energy to pull together a solid post. It was a long week as everybody was anxious for next week's spring vacation. Noisy kids every day, pretty much, but I was expecting it, and was able to keep things reasonable.

In a bit of sad-ish news, the doves I mentioned a couple of days ago have moved. I'm not sure I've heard of something like it happening, but I woke up Wednesday to find the nest outside my window empty except for the two eggs in it. I waited for the mother to come back until I had to head off for school. When I got back from teaching, an egg was gone. Later that day the other egg disappeared. I have no idea what happened, why the doves left, or where they've gone. I've never seen either of them come back to the nest, but it's still there in the tree. Empty, but still there. In a way, I'm kind of relieved. I was worried I would have two eggs sitting in a nest outside of my window all spring until I did something to get rid of them. They're gone now, and the mystery of their disappearance seems a little better than the prospect of having two abortions sitting outside my window for a few weeks.

And lastly, DVDs. Last Wednesday, I had promised my 12th graders a movie day for this Wednesday, the last before vacation. They've been pretty good kids. So I brought my protable DVD player to class, prepared to show them the second Austin Powers movie. When I gave them my suggestion, they looked as if I'd socked them all in the stomach. "Is that the one with Beyonce?" one of them asked. I told them that this was the one with Heather Graham. They all promptly moaned and told me they'd seen it already.

Prepared for such an eventuality (I could bring in a bootleg of Spiderman 2 and they'd all complain because they'd already seen the first one), I offered that they look through my little collection and find a movie that they hadn't seen and that would fit into the time we had to watch the thing. So happens that they chose Too Young to Die?. A pip of an after-school special starring Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis. My parents had brought it with them and given it to men and I'd actually never seen it either, so I was vaguely interested.

For a crappy movie, it did manage to spawn some interesting discussion material for use after the vacation. The whole thing is about the terribly depressing life of whiny, dim, and entirely unlikable Lewis (who's supposed to be 15 in the flick, but looks somewhere near 20). She's abused, drugged, then for some inexplicable reason murders the one guy who ever cared for her. The whole thing is told in flashback to her lawyer, and at the end of the movie she's tried as an adult and sentenced to death. The movie's aim is to give the viewer a nice, solid guilt-trip about kids being sentenced to die, and there was a statistics roll at the end of the film discussing the numbers of kids on death row.

Interesting thing though. It might have been because they didn't really like the movie (everybody was getting jumpy and chatty toward the end), but half the class applauded when the verdict was read and clapped again when the statistics came up. Bulgaria's youth, it seems, is in small part pro-death penalty. I've never gotten this vibe out of Bulgarians before, so I'm very eager to talk about it with the class. I've always been against the penalty, especially with the rise of DNA proof and the increasing potential for exoneration. I think it's one of the worst things a government could could do, sentencing an innocent civilian to death. Life in prison is so much more reversible given an error, it's hard to fathom why there's still a death penalty, anyway.

It's getting late, I'm getting tired, and the week has been far to long to get into morality and politics at 10:30 on a Friday night. It's time to go. Forgive the typos and grammar screw-ups, this just isn't onw of those proof-reading nights.

Posted by Rob at April 2, 2004 09:48 PM