I’ve previously opined on the horribly unrealistic educational expectations elementary school engenders in its attendees. The impending classroom visit here depicted is just another example of this trend; not only was my mom coming to school, she was coming to BAKE COOKIES (that yellow blob is an oven). This wasn’t an infrequent occurrence. I also remember entire school days devoted to churning applesauce or making potato latkes, all of which seem like torturous exercises in academic rigour compared to Clifford The Big Red Dog Day.

Never one to see a cloud only for its silver lining, I was quick to take offense when Mrs. Judge errantly attempted to include a personal touch in her response.

To this day, I remain dumbfounded by this error. Until this point in the year, she’d found no occasion to address me by first name in any of her replies. Yet on this, the first (and, as it turned out, the last) occurrence, she couldn’t muster a simple flip back to the front cover to confirm my identity. For all I know, the rest of my classmates luxuriated in the joy of this familiar form of address all year, while I was left to subsist on mere smiley faces.

I never played organised soccer as a kid, nor was I a prodigal student of the game, brought into the coaching ranks to lead men, a boy myself. I didn’t really even like soccer until I was 16, when a whirlwind romance with England saw me up at 5:30 A.M., devotedly watching them in the Korea-Japan World Cup.

In the world of lunchtime recess soccer, I was but one of the scads of first and second graders buzzing flylike around the ball in what can generously be called an extremely rough approximation of the beautiful game. The fact that I was elevated to a leadership position is a biting indictment of the very notion that such an ad hoc confederation of youngsters should have such a complex management structure in the first place.

Middling performances and quick exhaustion comprise my recollection of my playing days. I am left to assume my ascent was the product not of shared acknowledgment of some forgotten accomplishment, but rather indifference to my self-imposed marginalisation.

One thing about looking forward to things is that you actually have to have things to look forward to. That’s not a fatalistic statement about having a crappy life and loathing every next sunrise, for instance, (though it applies!), but rather a comment on naïveté. By the time you grow up, it’s easy to forget the experience of genuinely experiencing everyday things for the very first time. O, the tangible newness!

Remember when you couldn’t get the cereal, candy or whatever your parents put up in the cabinets, because you simply couldn’t reach them (without a death- defying climb)? Then you turned, I don’t know, 12? 16? 8? You could get whatever you wanted, cause you were a grown up! It felt really awesome for awhile, but you had homework to do, girls to fawn over, and video games to play. Somewhere along the line, getting a glass off a shelf and filling it with juice from the fridge - ALL BY YOURSELF - lost its magic.

And such is the case with dioramas. Though I was but six years and 239 days old, I had evidently experienced the joy of taking a shoebox, putting a bunch of cut-up paper, plastic toys, cellophane, and clay inside of it, and pretending I had my very own Museum of Natural History. The allure of making a diorama was just that: still alluring, yet to become the tedious, prototypical example of a “school project.”

Keeping the wonder level at the WOW threshold over the years is difficult, if not impossible. That’s why even though I really like scale models, I don’t make them for a living.

While the 2010 NFL season has seen the twilight of Brett Favre’s career, the 1992 season saw its genesis. Favre played quarterback for the Packers in this “great football game,” just his sixth start in what would turn out to be a record streak of 297 consecutive games. The game was close until Favre, in typical fashion, threw a deadly late-game interception which was returned for a touchdown, giving the Giants - who would have been Favre’s opponents had he been well enough to play number 298 - breathing room and a comfortable victory.

Aside from the clumsiness of stating the losing team’s score before the winners’, and the, you know, complete lack of detail about what actually happened during the game, I’d say this was a pretty worthy summary! I am totes sure Mrs. Judge did not watch the game, but instead drew her conclusion that “It was exciting!” from this very recap!

By the time Friday came around, politics was the furthest thing from my mind. The weekend was coming! That meant Football Day on Sunday, preceded by its crazy, more-exciting-but-less-good cousin, College Football Day on Saturday. Lacking at the time even the slightest inkling of how I might go about finding out which games were on the slate, I, like so many children around the world, had nothing but hope. A full twenty days earlier, Alabama played Tennessee, and won, 17-10. Drawing on my experience playing football in the backyard, my brother my only adversary, I assumed that college football teams must too suffer from the same lack of variety, facing the same opponents week after week with the same result - a win for the guy with the red head!

I’ve always quibbled with my teacher’s quibbles with this entry. While appending “the game” to the sentence makes the antecedent clearer, I don’t think there’s any English speaker to whom the meaning would have been unclear! If you were to take issue with anything, it would the initial vague construction - “I hope that it is” - that introduces the ambiguity and makes me sound like an idiot! I understand that there’s a correlation between teaching a man to fish and the infinite duration of his subsequent ability to feed himself, but if you give him a rotten fish, you’re standing there while a guy vomits in a lake.

With the jQuery Summit just two days away, we’ve allowed more than sufficient time for entrants to win a free ticket to the Developer track! So with no further ado (there’s barely time for any), here are the winners!

Environments for Humans is hosting their second annual online jQuery Summit on November 16th and 17th, and I’ll be doing my part, giving a talk on tips, tricks, and techniques for debugging your jQuery on Day 2.

But since it’s gonna be a tad lonely giving a tech talk from my kitchen, the EfH folks have been kind enough to give me two tickets (street value: $300 each!!) to give away to whomever I’d like. Like my yayQuery colleague Rebecca Murphey, I’ll be giving away my tickets to whomever can best answer the question “Why do you want to come to the jQuery Summit?”

Unlike Rebecca’s giveaway, however, there’s a catch. To win your seat at login for the conference, you’ll need to explain why you want to go - in the same format as my Repeating First Grade project! I don’t want the commentary, just a short, almost-grammatical sentence accompanied by a ham-fisted illustration. If you don’t (?!?!??!) know about it already, here are some recent examples.

You’ve got until this Sunday night (November 7th) at midnight to submit your explanation via whichver medium you like: Twitter, flickr, blog, WHATEVER. Good luck!

UPDATE: Paul Irish will also be awarding his comp’d tickets through this contest, so there are now FOUR tickets available! Break out your magic markers, people! UPDATE: One of Rebecca’s tickets is available too. That makes 5!

Today’s ballot is the most succinct example I’ve ever seen of why incumbents win elections. Here’s how much I knew about the issues at play in the 1992 election:

The only reason I wanted Bush to be president was because he was already president. And let’s face it, the average voter doesn’t really know more about the issues than a six-year-old. Once you give a guy a job, he’s gotta show you why he doesn’t deserve it anymore! I never consciously experienced a time when George H. W. Bush wasn’t in office, so not only was he the president, for all intents and purposes, he was THE president. This joker with the big ears and the Elvis-guy were just trying to take his job away!

Anyone with a keen eye for reading polls (or a basic knowledge of mathematics) can see just how much I wanted Bush to win, forecasting that he would capturing a staggering 100% of the vote, a result that would certainly be anomalous enough on its own, but its anomalousness is increased by the fact that the candidates received a total of not one, but TWO hundred per cent.

It seems strange, until you consider the alternate ballot from this particular mock election. In my YMNSF voting system (Yes-Maybe-No-Smiley-Face) voting system, “maybe” votes count for a third of a vote, and smiley faces are scored via a subjective assessment of enthusiasm. This is roughly the same way that it works in Single Transferable Vote countries like Ireland and Australia.

3-D shapes! Get your 3-D shapes here! You want triangles? I got triangles! You want rectangles? I got rectangles! A table? I’ve got a table right here! Keep the telephone - it’s my free gift to you!

Are your shapes lacking in character? Zest? Wish you had more passion for the one you drew? It could be a common medical condition known as Low D, and I’ve got just the remedy. Take those boring old scribbles, draw some lines behind ‘em to give the illusion of depth, and call me in the morning. If your D’s haven’t increased by 50%, you get your money back! Just pay shipping and handling.

“But Adam, I tried your technique and I’m still feeling flat! It doesn’t even make sense! You can’t see the top of a flagpole from the ground!” You’re right! You can’t…from the ground! Join me atop this pyramid, however, and see if you don’t get some perspective on my perspective.

In a clinical study of 3D Shapes, some users reported sudden hallucinations of hieroglyphics. Others reported an irrationally inflated sense of self-worth stemming from their newfound abilities. Do not use 3D Shapes if you use a rescue inhaler for asthma or if you’re taking an MAO inhibitor. Do not use 3D Shapes if you lack fine motor skills, or …motor skills. Claims of tri- dimensionality are for promotional purposes only; any drawings made on flat paper are inherently 2D. Always consult a doctor before starting a new sketching regimen. ajpiano.com is not responsible for any bodily harm stemming from unauthorised climbing of antiquarian relics.

New experiments can warp a young mind, but it looks like I transformed into some sort of rabid environmentalist overnight! Along with repeated exposure to 90s educational documentaries about how much trash “The Average American” generated during a year (1460 pounds - a figure I thought was unrealistic then, but seems entirely plausible now that I get to tote leaky bags of garbage down four flights of stairs), surely something that transpired the night before inspired this sudden bout of underlining fervor.

It’s clear I knew that pollution was bad; it’s equally clear that I had no idea how it worked. Pollution is caused by our endless consumption, our cars and ships, and our laziness, not a gigantic space toilet shooting cans of soda at us. Despite this crucial - and awesome - misconception, what’s really important is that I was cognizant at a young age the critical threat pollution posed to the Earth, and that’s why I, uh, recycle some stuff.

In retrospect, I’m not sure all the melodrama here was necessary. We’ve been enjoying unseasonably warm weather here in New York all week. Since pollution causes global warming, and global warming is false when it’s cold where you live, it follows that when it’s hot, global warming is true, which means that pollution is the reason it feels like fucking springtime in October! BOOM.