Miscellaneous Curmudgeon

Here's some miscellaneous items we didn't get to this morning in our rush to post on the Virginia Senate primary.

Dangerous Minivans?

The Washington Post recently reported a study that purports to show that minivans (and to a lesser extend, SUV's) are more dangerous than smaller cars because they are involved in a higher rate of incidents of backing into a child in a driveway.

This is a pretty bad study. Our guess is that owners of minivans are more likely to have small children than owners of cars. So all the study really shows is that owners of minivans are more likely to have children playing in their driveways. Did someone really need to figure that out?

School Gender Gap

The Curmudgeon has commented before on the growing gap between young men and young women going to college (today, only about 42% of college undergrads are men). This alarming trend is the basis for our "looser" award to advertisers who portray young men as doltish losers.

Now this: today, men make up a smaller percentage of teachers than at any point in the past 40 years.

The Curmudgeon doesn't have any easy solutions to this problem, although we would like to see our male children assigned books in school that appeal to their little boy brains (instead of the chick lit book my older son struggled through for several weeks earlier this year).

Weather Curmudgeon

The Curmudgeon didn't post yesterday. Here's how the long range weather forecast fared both yesterday and today:

Sunday, June 11, 2006

TWC forecast five days ago: Sunny, 80 degrees, 20% chance of rain.
Actual: Sunny, 77 degrees, no rain.
Curmudgeon mark: Y

Monday, June 12, 2006

TWC forecast five days ago: Partly cloudy, 80 degrees, 20% chance of rain
Actual: Rainy, 73 degrees.
Curmudgeon mark: N

Tomorrow--our first test of the 10-day forecast!