Splendiferous Loquaciousness

The Shutdown is over and I have been celebrating. The nation lost about $24 billion in that deal, but don't worry, Congress still got paid and they are all back doing their job (working on gridlock, according to Stephen).

In a related story, a hungry woman was arrested in Bellefontaine, Ohio for taking $2.87 out of a pretty fountain in order to buy some food. She's unemployed. Someone should tell this woman to run for Congress.

But, to get back to the show, Ted Cruz is excited because, "We saw the House of Representatives take a courageous stand, listening to the American people that everyone in official Washington just weeks earlier said would never happen. That was a remarkable victory."

In a segment that might have been labeled "Let's Blame Someone" but wasn't, Stephen talked about Dr. Keith Ablow, Psychiatrist over at Fox, who gave a "brilliant long distance diagnosis" of President Obama. Stephen was amazed at Ablow's "yankability." Stephen even staked his professional reputation and said that Dr. Ablow is able to retain that which he has grasped and even now is allowing his creativity to blossom and move his thought processes to tomorrow's show. (I'm paraphrasing somewhat.)

Education is important of course. Why else would we watch the The Colbert Report if we didn't want to learn stuff? Unfortunately, U.S. students aren't doing so well on the global level. In fact, "...students in Latvia, Chile and Brazil are making gains in academics three times faster than American students..." Stephen pointed out that that is almost twice as much and I think we have discovered the problem.

Enter the Common Core Standards. Sounds good, but here's a related problem. Robots are grading test papers. They can grade 6,000 essays in 20 seconds. One way they do this is by simply counting. How many letters in a word? How many words in a sentence? How many sentences in a paragraph?  Go read about Mr. Bleep Blorp's method and success at grading papers. Then, next time you take a test, just put in big words, long sentences and lengthy paragraphs. Or should I say enormous words, gargantuan sentences and humongous paragraphs? I think we can all agree that this will end all the controversy about kids taking too many standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test. As long as kids use big words when writing essays, content will not be important.

You know, it reminds me of one of my college professors. He could grade research papers in five seconds! He would stand at the top of stairs in the old library and throw all the papers down the staircase. The ones at the bottom got an A and the ones at the top got an F. It worked for him.

Stephen had a short literature segment about dinosaurs. It was interesting in that I learned something I had not known before about our scaly friends.

The guests on Monday night were The Reflektors - Win and Will Butler. They are from Montreal. That's in Canada which was a nice tie-in because Senator Ted Cruz was born in Canada, eh? They discussed with Stephen some other Canadian bands, namely Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Arcade Fire.  Win, Will and Stephen all agreed that BTO is the better band. Arcade Fire is "kind of pretentious." The interview turned into a travel promotion for Haiti. But of course they sang a song and of course there is a bonus song over at Colbert Nation. But sadly, we got to see what the staff at Colbert Studio does when Stephen is away. Arts and Crafts, Mischief Making and general poking fun at Stephen's big head. At times I was even confused at to who was actually playing instruments and who was singing.  I think it just points out how important it is for anyone to pay attention to details in the fascinating world of music and music makers.