Philly Phun

While Eduwonk was busy making sure the whole edu-world knows about the Missouri Department of Education's shameful anti-NCLB conspiracy, I spent the weekend in Philadelphia visiting friends, eating a lot of good food, and generally soaking up the kind of festive atmosphere that can only come from the knowledge that you, as a city, are collectively sticking it to millions of baseball fans in the greater New York metropolitan area.

On Saturday my lovely wife and I spent some time on Philadelphia's famed museum-lined Benjamin Franklin parkway, which is the big wide street Rocky sprinted down before climbing the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, turning to face the city, and doing that arms-above-the-head, jumping-up-and-down, end-of-"Gonna Fly Now"-montage thing. Thirty-some years after the movie was released, tourists repeat this manuever approximately once every 30 seconds, all day long.

Anyway, they were having some kind of big street-festival type thing, which featured a bad rock band at the end and a motorcycle stunt team in the middle, sponsored by Red Bull. Interesting fact: watching someone jump off a ramp on a motorcycle and then do handstands on top of the motorcycle or better yet backflips with the motorcycle before landing on another ramp is exponentially more exciting in person than on TV. This is a consequence of the CGIfication of entertainment, I think--what with the computer special effects these days, nothing on a screen is truly thrilling, even if you objectively know it's real. Seriously, I now have a much greater appreciation for why people pay $40 to see this stuff at various regional civic centers nationwide.

The event was also rife with for-profit student lenders (Philly has a zillion colleges) who offered a simple, enticing deal: in exchange for your name and email address, we'll give you a frisbee, a beer bottle opener key chain, and barrage you with offers to lend you vast amounts of money at non-subsidized and possibly usurious interest rates, starting tomorrow and ending (possibly) when you die. Who could resist? I know I didn't.

I also saw a guy with a T-shirt that said the following:

Knowledge is Power.
Power Corrupts.
Study Hard.
Be Evil.

Finally, at long last, our blog has a slogan.