So if I’m gonna pick somebody to turn things around, shouldn’t they show a reasonable grasp of 21st century technology? Our kids are lagging in math, science and technology. If a candidate really gets where we need to be, here’s what I want to see, beginning with what’s the most important:

1. A website with a non-stupid domain name (i.e. votenorm.com and not nomranpfleegmanforoffice2010.com)
2. Clear, easily discoverable information about the candidate, their stance on major issues, and who endorses them
3. Strong advocacy for the Internet and technology as part of classroom instruction
4. A site that isn’t static like a printed flyer; dynamic content like a blog and twitter feeds to provide constant updates.
5. HTML 5, competent use of css, adherence to open web standards and use of open source software
6. Community presence and a place for voters to interact and communicate with the candidate and one another
7. Sans-serif fonts that improve the reading experience
8. A site that doesn’t look like a canned site purchased from a third-rate webmaster
9. Even better, a site built and maintained by the candidate themself

Basically, if I can’t tell that the candidate knows what the Internet is for, they’re not getting my vote. And so my impressions of the prospective future Superintendents of Public Instruction:

Larry Aceves has a decent website. The color scheme isn’t the greatest and the css isn’t the most sophisticated, but it’s functional and not buggy and I was able to find what I was looking for quickly. There’s the obligatory links to Twitter and Facebook, which no marketing person or candidate for office The dude’s from the Bay Area, so maybe being surrounded by techies and not rednecks from Barstow pays off when it comes to communicating effectively online. Its main weak spot is lack of any dynamic content. A blog would have taken this site from static but useful to a truly twenty-first century campaign hub.

Karen Blake’s site looks like a bad parody of 1996. From the horrible rotating cube in the right corner to the broken flash links to the graph from PowerPoint hell, everything about this site screams “I do not understand the power of the web nor its importance in our society.” This chick instills no trust in me whatsoever, but then she does have the disadvantage of coming from Bakersfield, which ranks pretty low on quality of life. With this kind of a presence, I just don’t trust her to understand how to guide kids toward the future.

Alexia L. Deligianni only has a Facebook page. I want somebody to guide kids, not to want to be back in junior high with them. Pass.

The website of Lydia Gutierrez kept timing out due to being tapped out on bandwidth. Somebody who understands tech infrastructure so little as to not purchase enough bandwidth to handle election traffic has no business governing the infrastructure of our schools. Insufficient bandwidth = visitors can’t get information. Something tells me she’d also give teachers insufficient resources and then wonder why kids aren’t reading.

Diane Lenning’s site is a nightmare of digital clutter colliding with a blasé color scheme and useless sound bites of information. It reminds me of a bulletin board in a dorm hallway; too much information to absorb in reasonable amounts and too shabby in presentation to care about. Also, using comic sans for your resumé is justification for murder in geek circles. This site shows no connection with anybody under 40. No thanks.

Leonard Martin used WordPress (plus) but didn’t leverage it by employing anything as simple as widgets (minus). Too many pages clutter the header, and the long list is repeated in the sidebar. Still, the fact that this guy knows what open source software is is a mark in his favor, although he really needs to surround himself with people who can help him understand how powerful it is.

If Karen Blake is a bad parody of 1996, then Grant McMicken is a bad parody of 1997. All it needs is a Geocities banner and sparkles on that California flag graphic.

Gloria Romero has the funding and marketing power to put together a decent website, but website bugs and stupid use of generic images makes this look like a canned corporate site, not something I should take seriously. I can’t even find a page that breaks down the issues.

Henry Williams, Jr. has put up a poster where a website should be. If you don’t know what the Internet is (and no, it is not a digital telephone pole on which to staple enormous bandwidth-sucking graphics), stay the hell away from our classrooms, thankyouverymuch.

Tom Torlakson’s site is the first one that really gets it. With a blog and easily discoverable information on the issues, this site shows that the candidate grasps what the web is actually for. Candidates take note: being an out-of-touch middle aged schlub = bad. Leveraging modern, dynamic technology = good.

Daniel M. Nusbaum lives in Beverly Hills but doesn’t have a website. Neither does Faarax Dahir Sheikh-Noor. Someone who thinks so little of the Web shouldn’t be elected to any office at all, let alone one that shapes educational policy.

California’s need for a Superintendent who really understands how badly we need to move forward in science, math, and technology is probably our most critical issue. Based on that, I’d have to go with Torlakson. All the other candidates look like old fogies who haven’t bothered to keep up with the times, and won’t demonstrate the sort of forward thinking that we so desperately need.

What a boring question. Why would Orwell use satire? Why would Mark Twain use sarcasm? Why would Jim Carrey rely on his flatulence to carry an entire film? Because it works, ya lazy English teacher. Duh. How about a worthwhile question, like asking students what they think about the merits and pitfalls of trusting authority figures? But no. We’re stuck with this. It may as well have been one more lame-ass essay about irony. Oh, well. Let’s tackle it.

Why does Animal Farm employ satire? How about because it would have totally sucked if he didn’t? Satire, with its stock characters, simple, allegorical plot structure, and extensive use of mockery, allows for really complex political ideas to be boiled down into something the average person can understand, and makes it fun to boot. By using fiction, you stand a chance of telling a story somebody wants to read. Nobody goes home from work and thinks, “gee, I’d like to read a lengthy PhD dissertation on the inherent dangers posed by totalitarian power structures.” Bo-ring. Animal Farm without allegory and satire is just the three pages in a high school history textbook where they gloss over the Russian Revolution. With the allegory and satire, it’s funny, thought-provoking, and has the ability to be applied to many scenarios beyond Stalin and Trotsky.

A big plus of using fiction rather than history to make your point is that it’s easier to keep readers hooked. Fiction allows for a compact story, a manageable cast of characters, and a little mystery about how it’s going to end. History can’t (and shouldn’t) provide any of that. The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism wouldn’t have been interesting if it were about a real country. I plowed through that part of Nineteen Eighty-Four because it was a new tale, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next.

Using real people to discuss complicated political theory is a bad idea. Human beings are flawed, and there’s never a purely “good guy” or “bad guy” in real life. Orwell was interested in exposing bad ideas, not people. By leaping into a fairy tale he could show us that in any society, there are sheep who go along with whatever the leaders say, workhorses who can be duped and exploited in their honorable efforts, and pig leaders who will tell you that your opinions matter when they really don’t.

Animal Farm is deliberately simple to keep Orwell’s message from getting muddled: totalitarianism is the worst system of government possible, as it creates the most opportunities for those in power to abuse those who are not and leaves no way for the people to correct bad leaders. You can’t get that point across with a complex, nuanced history of real people. You need characters that represent ideas, not reality. That’s why when Orwell revisited these ideas in greater detail in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he still stuck with storytelling rather than some preachy work of political non-fiction.

So when writing your Animal Farm essays, kids, remember that its simplicity is its strength. The allegory makes it easy to understand, and the satire keeps it entertaining. Although come to think of it, an essay about irony probably would be most appropriate for a high school paper on Animal Farm. After all, classrooms tend to be totalitarian states, and the sooner you learn to chant to yourself “the teacher is always right” and “I will work harder,” the sooner you can grab your A+ and escape to the sunnier pastures of college.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

This has been your friendly neighborhood robot with a public service message about the socially awkward.

When I finally finished the game I made my parents play it. Everything went perfectly until they got to “What city is Big Ben in?” and they kept getting it wrong. They told me the game was broken. I told them duh, Big Ben was in Paris, so the game was just fine. Okay, so the code was just fine but the answer wasn’t. I was nine. Quit laughing.

I didn’t major in computer science; I started out in Physics with an Astronomy emphasis, became disenchanted after I realized that our department believed that theoretical training was the only thing that mattered and I’d never get to use the telescope. I switched to a double major in Humanities and History (much to my parents’ dismay) and got a degree that guaranteed I could be an assistant manager at a very fine Taco Bell one day.

At any rate, I can now see the first major gap in my education that will no doubt afflict many of my generation. I can’t code. I’m adept at HTML and a little Java, and I can modify PHP templates in WordPress, but only very slightly. I can decipher which chunks do what and rearrange them, but this is more like arranging tiles in a mosaic than taking my own brush and painting my own picture. I’m limited. If I find this annoying now I can’t even imagine what it will be like for current high schoolers in ten years or so. They don’t teach coding at all in school, and it will become more and more critical to have some basic ability as our economy meshes ever more with technology.

They used to have typing class, and typing skills of 70 words per minute or more with over 95% accuracy used to be a standard if you wanted a lot of desk jobs. Having some ability to code, it seems, will become one of the new office standards. It used to matter that you could put on your resume that you knew how to use Windows or WordPerfect. Now it seems stupid to mention it. The new bonus items for your resume are IT skills and software fundamentals.

My lack of coding ability won’t hold me back in my career, as it’s not essential to what I do. In fact, this entry is just an attempt to distract myself from the fact that I’m really annoyed that I don’t know how to fix my WordPress theme so that it will adjust to fill out the entire browser horizontally instead of staying in the same cramped vertical layout with too much blank space on the right. Oh, well.

You know who I’m talking about:

That’s right! Johnny Cash. You should follow his example. How should you feel toward your spouse? You should tell them, “I walk the line, because you’re mine.” Should you take that vacation? You should be able to say “I’ve been everywhere, man.” Do you want to be stuck in Folsom Prison? Well, then shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Wait. Not that one. But you can definitely wear black. And you most certainly ought to get rhythm when you get the blues.

After reconciling with the dirty mangy dog who named you Sue, you really ought to name your son Bill or George– anything but Sue. Don’t ever apologize to the Yankees if everything is done with a southern accent where you come from. Remember love’s been good to you. And for goodness sake, don’t take your guns to town.

Listen. Learn. Achieve Nirvana.