Tag: Drinks

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The Three Martini Renovation Or How To Piss Off Bloggers

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The Wall Street Journal has a article title “The Three Martini Renovation” in which the the article can be summarized to this

But when novices who’ve had a few drinks get a hold of crowbars, drills and Sawzalls, the results are sometimes less than satisfactory.

A number of house bloggers were interviewed for this article, including myself. Many bloggers believe the reporter of the story, Jennifer Saranow, misrepresented herself.

The reporter told me she was writing a story about such work parties. People helping people. That sort of thing. When I described the plaster party to her on the phone, she expressed the usual polite surprise that people still help each other like that.

Then the reporter admitted the story was not a feel-good story about people helping their neighbors. It was a story about people throwing renovation parties to save money and inviting inexperienced friends over to mix alcohol with demolition – friends who ended up screwing things up or getting injured.

1902victorian.com’s account of the story is pretty good. I recommend reading the whole thing.

I was contacted via my blog, but I took several weeks to get back to the reporter. By the time she had interviewed me, I think she pretty much had the story written and didn’t dig too much. I did have a demolition part with plenty of beer but there was no excitement like some drunken friend taking out the wrong wall. I’m not mentioned in the story.

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Would I Fail This 4th Grade Test

Johnny Mango declares that the current APS (Albuquerque Public Schools) assessment test will be too hard. Look at the examples test questions he gives:

  • You go to a party. There are 3 drinks, 2 sandwiches, and 4 kinds of candy. How many combinations of all three are possible?
  • You have the sides of a rectangular prism flattened out. How many faces and how many total cubic inches are there?
  • You have a carpet and a runner of certain dimensions. Is the rug 3 square feet more than the runner?

These test questions or for 4th graders, do they seem like they might be over their heads? I’m not qualified to say what’s good for a 4th grader and what’s not but this seems like they are bit complicated. I even had a hard time understanding exactly what the questions are asking on the first few read through.

Albuquerque schools are in a dismal state. I;m glad to see the school district trying to improve things but this might be a bit more than the kids are ready for right now.

Click through to see if I answered them correctly.

Let’s see if I answered these questions correctly?

  1. 3x2x4 = 24
  2. This question was confusing to me. But it says a flattened rectangular prism. So at one point it was 3 dimensional which mean it has 6 faces. But since it’s flattened out it has no cu inches, otherwise they would have to give some size information.
  3. I have no freaking idea.