Comic for Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Posted: 6:31 am, Wednesday, October 14

Since there's not a lot to add to this, let get right into my story. So, on Thursday, I'm there in class giving an exam ("mista, we got a test?! why?!" "because I don't like you guys, and I want to see you suffer"), and there's a knock on the door. It's the lady with the mail, and there's this ginormous box for me. Got my name on it, and everything. The kids are like, "open it, mista," and I say, "quiet and take your test." And they basically forget that I have it, or that I even exist, so I open it and see what we have.

What we have is a giant box of scientology.

Holy crap. Let's look at this in depth, shall we?

OK, so this is from Galaxy Press, publisher of the "fiction works" of L. Ron Hubbard. This is important, because the fiction works don't seem to include any scientology stuff. It's all pulp. Which, you know, generally, I'm pretty down with.

Holy crap, it's a TON of pulp, according to the catalog.

Pretty gorgeous pulp, too. I can't stress enough how high the production value is on this whole package.

The covers of these books are just gorgeous.

And they come with CDs, for my auditory learners. The most disturbing thing about this is how pedagogically sound it is. I'll keep pointing it out as we move along.

Here's another thing it does - you can use it for a genre study. The other ones are fantasy, sci-fi and "sea adventure," which really isn't much of a genre, I guess.

Here's a performance kit to get your... I want to say kinesthetic learners, but I don't think that's correct. ad?

The readers' theater bit is wild. You get a CD of sound effects, and it lets you know when to cue them, and everything. This is really a well put-together pacakge.

It wasn't until the end of the day that I noticed about fifty newspapers at the bottom of the box. This is all pre-reading stuff to get the kids amped up about reading these things! Another very fundamentally sound educational approach.

I mean, look at that. What kid wouldn't be jazzed by contraband cargo missing at sea? (And did the thief steal the Empire State Building? Because that narrows it down to one of Godzilla or King Kong.

Here's an out-of-class activity - make your own drink! The fuck?

There also came this newsletter - with absolutely no explanation - for a CPA. I have not even a guess.

Throughout all this, I was convinced someone was fucking with me. Clearly, of course, this entire thing is taking advantage of under-funded schools (another buddy of mine got the same giant box of crazy) by offering them free books, and hoping that later on in life, the kids go, "I remember this guy from Mista's class! I'll become a Scientologist," or whatever. Because, despite Galaxy press publishing the fiction works of L. Ron, there was...

..a whole page of this in the catalog...

...this in the newspaper, and an order form for Battlefield Earth, and Target: Earth or whatever the ten-book series is in every book. Not creepy at all!

The most startling part about all of this was that Scholastic seemed to be involved. I let our resident Scholasticite know about it, though, and the matter's being looked into immediately.

I guess it's mostly a read-to-achieve program. Still, hopefully this ends soon.

Nothing left to do but mock some crazy, I guess. These were my two favorite books in the catalog:

Awesome title, dude.

Man, that is one saucy picture for a classroom. Of course, it'll get the boys to read.

Anyway, so that's my big box o' crazy. I'm going to e-mail something to the city desk of the Daily News and maybe the Times, see if there's any interest in this. Especially if they're using a Scholastic program they're not supposed to. Of course, this might open me up to the Scientology whack-assness, but even one of the freshmen knew I should get rid of this stuff immediately. (I'm going to use it as a conversation piece in the Man Room.)

bullfrog

Bullfrog -- Wednesday, October 14 2009, 06:27 am

I follow Roger Ebert's twitter feed, which is extremely cranky, and today he gets riled about Jack Chick, which is awesome, because Jack Chick is nuts. Here's a great one about dinosaurs that uses - get this! - bad science.

http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1038/1038_01.asp?Store=True

Yukon Madness looks pretty good. I mean, I want to know how that Spanish woman got there and ended up wearing just a rough-cut piece of bear pelt. But come on, the one schoolboys will want to read more, much more, about is The Great Secret. The winner of the wet dress contest obviously knows stuff about DOING IT that makes her the idol of poor slobs who reach out to her in desperation even as she looks off into space (literally) with nothing but the contempt the losers deserve. Will any man (or woman?) be able to fulfill her? I gots to know.

PS- Aren't all of Hubbard's works fiction?

Yeah, I can't really stress enough that Scholastic had NOTHING to do with this.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE today's cartoon!

Frog and RAW: The next fivebucks architecture release should include a "permalink" feature. I'm sure that you'll get right on that... you know, with your mountains of leisure time.

Good post today, top to bottom!

I'm glad I'm not the only one with a CBLD t-shirt. I have the '94 "It's not how you rank it's how you play" shirt. Which is very ironic because the team was very rank that year and thus wasn't ranked in the standings.

I'll give the Galaxy Press/Scientology crowd points for trying. Have you tried any of the drinks? And is there a potent potable (to use a Jeopardy! phrase) version?

I guess this will be the permalink...

http://www.fivebuckstofriday.com/2009/archive091014.html

It's just that comments are closed, because I was getting some files all blown up from spambots well after the fact.

Captain Lou Albano died! Even more surprising, he was freaking 76! That's got to be the oldest any wrestler has ever lived to be after a WWF stint.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/rip-captain-lou-albano,34135/

RAW--I'm taking a web design class. More likely I will be getting on that.

Look out Five Bucksers...spinning gifs and unnecessary flash elements are in your future. (kidding, I swear).

Sure, kinesthetic learners... Basically the kids who get sick of sitting in their seats, which on any given day could be most of them. That is a box of crazy, though in some ways unsurprising-- The real question becomes where they got your name.

The comments section wasn't up when I checked on Wednesday, so I hope this isn't too late!

If you like the Hubbard covers, then you'l *love* this blog: Judge-a-Book. http://judgeabook.blogspot.com

Its description: "I worked in a public library. I saw literally thousands of books every week; the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. These are the covers from the latter category."

Lots of cover fun!

more football talk please.