This is insanity.

- The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

- The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

I honestly don’t know what to say about this debate except that it’s absolutely ludicrous and it’s making the United States look foolish. By literally rewriting history to fit some radical conservative ideals, the state of Texas is making the U.S. look as if, instead of governed by a Democratic supermajority, governed by a strange group of radical right-wing nutcases.

Removing Thomas Jefferson from history books? HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?

It’s hard for me to think of too many things that I’ve disagreed with more strongly than this article right here. Titled “The Case Against College Education” and published in Time magazine, Ramesh Ponnuru tries to argue that we’re pushing too many people to college who aren’t ready or fit for it. He says the value of college is “oversold.” But the kicker really comes when he tries to rationalize his argument:

To talk about college this way may sound élitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers. But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of kids that their future depends on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish.

Well, he’s right on that first point. It does sound élitist. It does sound philistine. But the sheer gumption of saying it’s élitist to encourage kids to get a college education? That’s absolute insanity.

The author seems to subscribe to the viewpoint that people are born with certain abilities. That some people are just destined for greatness, while others will be trapped in the lower-class culture of our society. He’s simply wrong.

I grew up in rural Kentucky. I come from an upper-middle class, pretty average family. I’ve been blessed–and a fair bit lucky–but one of the primary reasons I have been as successful as I’ve been is thanks to my education and my college experience so far, at American University.

And it’s not just me. I’ve seen friends from lower-class, lower-middle class, and even upper-class go from unsavory circumstances to college, and they’re achieving greatness as we speak. Will they be CEOs, Senators, Presidents or entrepreneurs? Not necessarily. But their advanced education is giving them the knowledge they need to keep pushing our country forward.

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I, like any busy person, love lists. I love being able to flick through a news article or blog post, read a two-sentence introduction, and allow my eyes to flip quickly from bullet point to bullet point. I love numbered lists, where I can tell not only how far I am down the list, but how many more I have to go.

It’s a psychological thing. Anyone versed in business writing knows that it’s easier, quicker and simply more efficient to read lists and bullets than big long paragraphs. And nowadays, we’re all about reading short things, quickly (i.e. Twitter–140 characters, doesn’t get much shorter and quicker than that).

But I’ve just about reached my limit of end-of-the-year/decade/whatever top 10 lists. I just can’t handle it anymore! It seems like every where I’ve looked–starting December 1st and still ongoing–there’s another top 10 list for something. There’s lists of the top celebrities, top people on twitter, top books, top gadgets, top political scandals, top news stories, top movies, top albums… everybody and their brother has their top 10 list of [insert subject here] they want to share.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m guilty too. Even today, I’ve tweeted at least one link to a top 10 list (Engadget’s wonderful Top 10 Gadgets of the Decade). But there just needs to be some kind of restraint here, it’s overwhelming!

I like how Time Magazine does it. They put ALL of their top 10 lists in one place, a neat little index for you to flip through, nice and organized and not too much to handle. But for things like Twitter, I feel like the service is just swamped with everyone’s lists for this and lists for that. It’s drowning out the content. The breaking news. The #FollowFridays (it seems I’m not the only one who almost forgot about that today–it seems totally absent from my feed, at least).

Thankfully, this only comes around once a year. And in a way, it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure, reading all these lists. But when it gets to the point where all media is just saturated with it–like now–and the real content seems to disappear, I feel like it’s time to step back and ask: do we really need all these lists? What do you think?

Warning, this will be an extremely angry rant. Not only because I think RyanAir is the worst airline in the history of the world, but also because Squarespace, in all it’s glory, just decided to close my window and delete the almost-complete rant I had already written. By the way, @Squarespace–as soon as I have time to switch to WordPress, I’m canceling my account. There’s no excuse not to have an autosave anymore.

Friday evening my travel partner and I departed Paris for Dublin. We were super-prepared, had all our papers in order, ready to go. We’d booked via RyanAir because, simply put, they’re the cheapest airline around. In retrospect, I’d pay hundreds of dollars more to avoid dealing with their crap ever again.

We arrived at the Paris Beauvais Airport (by the way, also the worst airport I’ve ever been to) almost four hours early. The airport was tiny. As in, about-the-size-of-a-Walmart, four-check-in-desks, one-boarding-area-with-only-four-gates kind of tiny. Not really a problem, except that there were five flights departing Friday evening and they seemed to just about overwhelm the entire airport. That, and the airport staff were completely incompetent.

My first major point of irritation came at the check-in counter. See, RyanAir does things differently. Instead of having multiple counters you can approach to check in, they decided it must be easier to separate counters by flight, i.e. one counter for the flight to Rome, one for the flight to Dublin, etc. In a perfect world, this might streamline the process, making lines flow faster and easing the crowd. In reality, this is an idiotic idea that’s completely impractical for any airport.

In the real world, flights are staggered. In this case especially, very few customers were checking into any flights other than the flight to Dublin. But RyanAir in its infinite wisdom decided that one check-in counter and one measly, obnoxious little check-in clerk (more on him in a minute) would be plenty for the FULL flight to Dublin. Meanwhile, two other RyanAir clerks sat behind desks and talked. They didn’t offer to check in Dublin passengers. They didn’t offer to help the Dublin clerk. They just sat and stared at their empty queues, apparently enjoying their evening getting paid to do nothing.

After waiting in line for over 30 minutes to check my bag, I was confronted with my second major milestone of irritation for the evening. Unlike EasyJet, which prints the baggage restrictions (in their case, 20 kg. for checked bags) on the confirmation slip, RyanAir hides their baggage restrictions away in fine print on their website. Me, naively assuming that the baggage restrictions would be the same since, well, 20 kg. is a reasonable number and they’re both discount airlines, had planned for that limit. Turns out RyanAir just loves to be different and set their restriction at 15 kilos. My bag? 17.

Not a problem, I thought to myself, I’ll just pay whatever little fee it is, since it wasn’t that much over, and be on my way. So what’s the fee, I asked the clerk.

20 EUROS. PER KILOGRAM.

That’s right. RyanAir wanted me to pay over $60 (more than my entire flight) for my bag that was 2 kg. overweight. Needless to say, I sucked it up, pulled out some clothes and a power adapter and stuffed them in my carry-on to free up some weight. I, and the customers around me facing the same fees, were furious.

Next up–the check-in clerk. The sleepy-eyed, take-my-own-damn-time little clerk then, after telling me my bag was overweight and the ridiculous restrictions and fees imposed, tried to tell me the weight restriction was right on my ticket and I should’ve come prepared. It wasn’t there then, it’s not there now, and it’s never been printed on RyanAir tickets and confirmation pages. I moved on–furiously–and he continued to piss off the 20 or 30 customers behind me by moving as slowly as he could, making all of us almost late for our flight (not that it mattered, in the end).

Finally trudging into the security line we discovered that Beauvais–apparently taking lessons from RyanAir’s organizational abilities–decided to make two lines: one for our flight–the only flight leaving at the time–and one for all other flights departing. That line, of course, was empty. Ours stretched throughout the entire check-in terminal (aka, the entire airport). Even better, our line split into two lines for about the last 10 feet–one for EU citizens and one for everyone else, making it chaos trying to sort everyone out at the last minute once we were almost to the security checkpoint. Once we’d arrived at security, our boarding was supposed to be closed. In other words, our flight was supposed to be leaving, minus about 50 of us still going through security who were supposed to be on it.

But our fears were unfounded. Once we arrived at the departure area–literally about the size of a half-court gym, four gates, one ridiculously overpriced bar–we saw that our flight was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t on the television screens. It wasn’t listed at any of the four departure gates. There were no signs. There was no notice saying “departed”, “delayed” or “canceled”. And naturally, there were zero airport staff to be seen.

After someone finally tracked down a RyanAir employee, we were told that this flight by the “on-time airline” was an hour late, and that our gate would be announced “shortly.”

Over an hour later, we were rushed to a gate, walked outside in the cold French night and boarded the cramped, advertising-infested, all-to-talkative plane. To sum up the rest of the experience: they talked the entire flight, but spoke holding the microphone directly against their mouth, making everything completely unintelligible. Oh, and the take-off AND landing both sucked.

Great job, RyanAir.