This lede tells me I’m gonna read this article:

I always strove to give my daughter access to good schools in “safe” areas, but an experience in a public school has taught me how students of color, even in well-resourced schools and neighborhoods, can fall victim to the school-to-prison pipeline.

I know a mother of a mixed-race child who moved her out of an integrated public school to a less-mixed Catholic school when the girl was getting into fights for the first time. More later . . .

via ZORA

You go high enough on the academic ladder, you are properly “robed” at commencement ceremonies, observes Fr. Hunwicke, explaining:

Doctoral garb distinguishes the achievement of, er, achievers.

He contrasts it with what the priest wears at mass:

‘VESTMENTS’, on the other hand, negate the individuality and achievements of the wearer. He wears them to indicate that he is nothing; that he is acting solely in the name of Another.

He did not walk proudly up to a stage to the tune of pomp and circumstance, Rather:

He is a man who was not honoured but humiliated, when, at his Ordination, he lay prostrate on the ground. He now acts clothed in the Priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Far from gaining or achieving anything, he has lost individuality. ‘Initiative’ is, quite simply, not his job. Nor is ‘personality’.

He is a man whose hands and voice are not his own because his sacramental words and deeds are those of the Redeemer.

When you see him emerging, chasubled, [wearing the chasuble] from the Sacristy, you should say to yourself “Ah … jolly good … another of these Nobodies …” [Emphases added throughout]

Jolly good, eh? I get it, but wouldn’t have said it that way, I’m sure.

via Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment: Pedantries

The big guy has clay feet.

Many of the millions of people who shop on Amazon.com see it as if it were an American big-box store, a retailer with goods deemed safe enough for customers.

In practice, Amazon has increasingly evolved like a flea market. It exercises limited oversight over items listed by millions of third-party sellers, many of them anonymous, many in [well-known cheater] China, some offering scant information.

One of our newspapers doing what newspapers are ‘sposed to do.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves.

Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children.

Great. Ebay digging into Jeff B’s margins? Coming up: auctions?

Buyer, beware — as usual.

via WSJ