The mission statement of Chicago’s Urban Prep:

The mission of Urban Prep is to provide a comprehensive, high-quality college preparatory education to young men that results in graduates succeeding in college.

This mission is a direct response to the urgent need to reverse abysmal graduation and college completion rates among young men in urban centers, particularly African-American males. Urban Prep’s tailored curriculum is based on the developmental stages and learning styles of boys as well as the unique challenges facing urban youth. The Urban Prep motto is “We Believe.” We believe that our students will shatter negative stereotypes and defy low expectations. We believe that our students can be prepared for and will succeed in college. We believe in the long-lasting impact community support and positive role models can have on our students’ lives. In short, we believe in our students’ futures. At Urban Prep, we believe.

Note: “boys.” Not girls. At the moment, female presence is considered a distraction.

Urban Prep’s first graduating class: 107. Number accepted by a four-year college: 107.

This is not a hyper-selective school, either: students are chosen by lottery from the pool of applicants.

So what’s the trick? No excuses accepted for anything:

Each new freshman starting school gets his own wristwatch to keep track of time.

“Kids would be late and say they didn’t know what time it was,” [founder Tim] King said. “Part of our creed reads [that] we make no excuses, so we wanted to remove that excuse.”

Nor do you get to leave early. Classes run 8:30 am to 4:30 pm — just like a real work day. And students dress like it’s a real work day, too:

The young men at the academy wear suit jackets and ties as signs of respect.

“It distinguishes us. We stand out in the crowd,” said student Jerry Hinds. “Freshman year, maybe, people had problems with it at first. But after a while, you see the bigger picture. … These uniforms show that, oh, he’s wearing a tie; oh, he wants to do something with himself.”

More like this, please. And soon.

Try to imagine Johnny Carson saying “I did not know that” as you read this:

When, in the year 1288, after the Battle of Worringen, Düsseldorf received its town charter, the children turned “wheels of joy”. Since then, small Radschläger can be seen here and there in the city, displaying their abilities for a penny. The fastest and best ones in this discipline are crowned during the cart-wheeling tournament, which is held annually on Königsallee.

There’s even a Cartwheel Fountain — Radschlägerbrunnen — on the Burgplatz.

(Suggested by Frill Seeker Diary.)

Canada is getting rid of paper money, or at least the “paper” aspect of it:

They say money doesn’t grow on trees. Well, the federal government has taken that adage to heart — it announced earlier this week that Canada’s paper-cotton banknotes would be replaced by newly designed plastic ones next year.

It’s part of a plan to modernize and protect Canadian currency against counterfeiting.

The new plastic bills, made from a polymer material, are harder to fake, recyclable, and two to three times more resistant to tearing, the Bank of Canada said.

If “will not jam the soda machine in the breakroom” also makes it to the list of advantages, and I suspect it will, I’m calling for Washington to follow Ottawa’s lead here.

This is just some of LeeAnn’s proposed email footer:

IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the individual addressee(s) named above and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humor or irrational religious beliefs. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail is not authorized (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word absquatulation has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the transmission of this email, although the chihuahua next door is living on borrowed time, let me tell you.

Said chihuahua would be well advised to absquatulate.

We’ve had URLs both Tiny and Huge. Now we have ShadyURL, which says: “Don’t just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening.”

The Twitterati will just love that.

(Via http://5z8.info/smut_a5a0d_creditscore Miss Cellania.)

The Code Organ reads a Web page and derives some sort of music from it:

The Code Organ algorithm uses letters on the page to find the most used note, selects a major or minor scale, and then based on the total characters on the page, it chooses a synthesizer. There are 10 different drum loops from which one is selected, based on the percentage of characters on the page that are actually musical notes.

Of course, I had to try this for myself, and while the old rule of “The girl who can’t dance says the band can’t keep time” holds true, I did like the synth, which has a liquefied-Hammond sound to it. Incidentally, the gizmo seems to reread the page each time, so things may be slightly different by the time you read this.

(From the Fire Ant Gazette.)

Rob De Witt updates Hamlet’s Soliloquy for the Age of Blogdom.

Not that this has ever occurred to anyone before. The new version, however, has the virtue of timeliness.

(Via American Digest.)

Barbie did, when she was younger. But Mattel’s iconic doll, just turned fifty, is past all that; now she’s a full-fledged Computer Engineer, complete with pink laptop and a Bluetooth headset, presumably both detachable, but you really never know with Mattel.

Of course, some aspects of this makeover don’t quite ring true: no sneakers (I mean, really), and the hair screams “High maintenance!” On the upside, those glasses might even override Dorothy Parker’s rule. And if you’re a member in good standing of the We Need More Female Geeks movement, you might find this higher-tech Barbie a worthy effort:

Lynn Langit, a developer evangelist at Microsoft who teaches programming to girls and works on a Microsoft program called DigiGirlz that teaches girls about technology careers, said she was thrilled about Barbie’s next career.

“We can use any sort of positive influence that we have, because the number of girls studying programming is abysmal,” she said.

And maybe I won’t grumble about the hair: from the looks of things, this Barbie is going to grow up to be Miss Cellania, and you know that can’t be bad.

(Seen at Consumerist.)

Addendum: Perception vs. reality. (Via Zoe Brain.)

It’s not quite the same as the simulator you’ve been using with Air Guitar Hero, but you’ll catch on quickly enough.

(Via Dax Montana.)

“Lacktion” means exactly what you’d think it means, and nobody has been more enthusiastic about getting the word into the vernacular than the Basketbawful guys; in fact, they have regular lacktion reports on underachieving NBA players.

Of course, if you have a whole squad full of underachievers, you have — well, no, not the New Jersey Nets, even with their four-and-infinity record. But there’s one way to find out what you do have, and that’s what they did: a game, created with 2k Sports’ NBA 2k10, featuring the Null-Stars (!) of both conferences. The game was played, says Dan B., “with five-minute quarters because referees could not be expected to stay awake for that long.”

Lacktion or not, it’s massive fun to watch, with amazing airballs, suboptimal shot selection, and, via the 2k10 canned announcers, every roundball cliché of the last ten years. I thought it was flat wonderful, even especially when it was thoroughly horrid.

It’s so nice to have you back where you belong:

(From Mostly Forbidden Zone via Miss Cellania.)

And no, she’s not even joking:

On Sunday, we went to Antarctica.

What’s more, she has pictures.

A gadget called OhMiBod, as explained by Agent Bedhead’s sidekick Mr. Atoz:

[B]asically a wireless vibrator that will tap into your iPod and buzz along with the music while you’re doing whatever you’d do with a vibrating cylindrical gizmo that’s slightly over eight inches long.

I’m assuming it won’t work with my Sonicare.

And oh, these directions:

(From b3ta via Miss Cellania.)

It was Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors who dictated that GM ought to be selling at every conceivable price point, and that once Joe and Susan Sixpack were able to elevate themselves out of Chevyland, the General would be able to ease them into a Buick or a Caddy.

Then or now, though, GM has never had an aspirational vehicle in this league:

I’d been thinking that, when my beloved car Calvin finally goes to that great redneck’s-front-yard in the sky I’d invest in something a little greener, a hybrid, but with four-wheel-drive, maybe the kind of car that Arnold Schwarzenegger might drive Brangelina around in. But look: I wants me a Shuttle. I’d rather have Atlantis, but I suppose I could settle for Endeavour if they lowered the price, installed a keyless entry system and an iPod dock. Which shuttle did crazy diaper lady and that other astronaut have sex in? I don’t want that one. Again — unless the price is right.

GMAC probably won’t finance this deal, which means:

We could get corporate sponsorships, too — think of it. Haven’t you always thought the shuttle lacked a little … panache? We could get that mother looking like Jeff Gordon’s car so fast — do you think DuPont and Nicorette would agree to have their logos painted on the side for, say, $14 million dollars each? Then we could sell tickets. The Russians charged all those crazy gozillionaires and Lance Bass $20 million a head to go into space. Screw that — for the low, low price of $15 million (plus baggage handling fees, natch), I’ll take you all the way to the moon. For an extra hundred thousand dollars I’ll buzz the International Space Station and let you give those guys the finger, or moon them through a porthole. It will basically be the universe’s most badass party bus.

And let’s face it, you could never pull this off in a Honda Civic, no matter how it’s slammed.

Asterisks, schmasterisks. Here’s what we do about athletic records which may have involved “performance enhancements”:

I think the real answer to the use of performance enhancing drugs by athletes is to add a new section to the record books for certified organic players.

You like “certified organic,” right?

It really doesn’t get any better than this:

For [five-year-old] Hailey’s Multi-Cultural Day party at her school all the other parents brought food for the party indicative of their culture. I showed up with a plate of crackers. No one got the reference. The kids were all “YAY! WE LOVE CRACKERS!”

The young people have spoken.

(Revealed by Cynthia Yockey.)

I suppose it wasn’t easy being green after all.

(Via Eileen Chew.)

“Arguably the world’s fastest,” says the Chinese news agency Xinhua:

The Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway, arguably the world’s fastest train journey at a speed of 350 km/h, started operation on Saturday.

Two passenger trains rolled out of Wuhan Railway Station and Guangzhou North Railway Station at about 9 am and reached their respective terminals within three hours, compared with the previous 10-hour journey.

The service between Wuhan, capital of central Hubei province, and Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province and a business hub in the southern region, started a trial run on Dec 9 and hit a top speed of 394.2 km/h.

I am not one to sneer at 217 mph, with gusts up to 240.

But here’s the zinger:

China will build 42 high-speed passenger rail lines with a total length of 13,000 km in the next three years, covering more than 90 percent of the population.

By 2012, trips from Beijing to most provincial capitals would only take between one and eight hours, said Wang Yongping, the Railway Ministry spokesman.

Right now, it takes 23 hours to get from Beijing to Hong Kong.

And it’s taking ten years to replace 6 km of freeway in Oklahoma City. Who’s for sending ODOT to Beijing for a couple of years?

From the Harold Arlen-Truman Capote (!) musical House of Flowers, set in some idealized West Indies, this is Ivette Oliveras singing “I Never Has Seen Snow.”

Somehow it seems appropriate this weekend.

Tam points out, quite correctly, that a “new AR clone these days is about as ‘unexpected’ as another Friday the 13th sequel or Law & Order spinoff.”

On the other hand, I’d love to see the pricing on this as-yet-unannounced weapon:

Apple iR-15: Only works with proprietary ammunition. Made of sleek, white plastic. Has to be sent to an authorized service center for field-stripping and cleaning. Owners soon sport glazed, zombielike expressions of loyalty familiar to posters at MacForums or GlockTalk.

Wonder if there’s a Nano version in the works…

I blame Morbius.

(Discovered by Roberta X.)

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

“And there were in the same country imperial stormtroopers abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.”

(Not precisely Luke 2:7-8)

August Horch founded the car company that bore his name in 1899. He left it ten years later and set up another firm with the same name, only different: the German word horch is the imperative form of hoeren, “to hear.” In Latin: Audi. In 1932, the Auto Union company was formed, a fusion of four smaller firms, including both Horch and Audi. Auto Union’s four-ring logo survives today as the Audi logo.

A firm that’s lasted this long has a lot of history, not all of it easily accessible. Officially, the Horch line ended in 1940; apparently, however, the Ingolstadt works (still used by Audi) apparently turned out a one-off Horch 830 BL in 1953, a copy of Horch’s last big, opulent V8-powered sedan, for Auto Union president Dr Richard Bruhn. Bruhn drove it for a while, then let it get away; an American serviceman stationed in Germany bought it and shipped it home to the States circa 1957, and the story might have ended there.

Except that car collector Al Wilson, outside San Angelo, Texas, bought the thing from a junkyard back in the 1960s, figuring it might be worth something more than scrap metal. It ran, briefly; then it didn’t. Replacement parts were of course out of the question, though Wilson fired off queries to various connections in Europe, and eventually he just let it sit — until someone at Audi, circa 2006, realized what it was that Wilson had.

Negotiations took place, and in 2008 Audi sent a film crew to cover the retrieval of the car; that film has now been released. They plan to restore the old Horch, but for now, visitors to Audi’s museum seem to be fascinated with it as is.

(Spotted at Autoblog.)

With a nod to Lisa, one of the bigger Donny Osmond fans in blogdom, here’s The Donald himself, hoofing it with The Insider host Lara Spencer:

I mean, the man has done Broadway, fergoshsakes. You should have known he could dance up a storm.

Maybe. The city of Detroit’s Water and Sewerage Department is replacing every single water meter — 275,000 of them — with new automated meters that don’t require someone to come out and read them. Further, the city is picking up the tab: property owners aren’t billed for the installation.

There’s just one catch: if they don’t find you at home when the installers come by, you’ll need to schedule an appointment to have the meter installed. And if you don’t, DWSD will bill you $30 for any subsequent manual meter reading.

The installation takes about 45 minutes, and the water is shut off for only about 15 minutes. The new system will, they say, eliminate estimated bills entirely, and leak detection will be greatly simplified.

Interestingly, the mailers being sent out to announce the arrival of the installers are being printed in English, Spanish and Arabic; I was thinking that most of the Arabic-speaking folks around town were in the ‘burbs, notably Dearborn and Hamtramck, but DWSD pumps water to them too. The average water/sewer bill in the city of Detroit this past summer [pdf] was $62.75. Suburban customers are billed locally, and DWSD takes a cut.

In my erstwhile capacity as a gadget freak in this part of the world, it was probably inevitable that I would someday meet Linda Soundtrak, the TV face of the electronics chain that bore her name. (Well, actually, she took the store’s name as a stage name, but that’s not important.) Not everyone was as crazy about her as I was:

Linda Soundtrak was the most annoying pitch person alive at a time when being an annoying pitch person was an art form. But don’t you miss her?

Well, yes. And while people still revile her, I’m looking forward to her return: when she wasn’t being Linda Soundtrak, she was calm, almost demure, and incredibly focused, and she occasionally had time to chat up some of us wandering about on the sales floor. She won’t be doing that this time around — she’ll come in once in a while to record a few spots for the reopened store’s new owner, sort of like Tom Park — but sixteen years without Linda is quite enough, thank you very much. (And if nothing else, this should demonstrate that no, that’s someone else doing the far-more-annoying 1-800-2SELLHOMES ads.)

Delilah is not mentioned, but you know she’s giving this song another listen.

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

What do you get when you cross Net-a-Porter with Netflix? It’s called Rent the Runway, and it goes like this:

Harvard Business School graduates Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Carter Fleiss have created Rent the Runway. The site allows users to rent that showstopping outfit for four days. The dress is delivered directly to your doorstep, just like a Netflix movie. And just like the movie site, when the four day rental period is over, simply place the dress in the included prepaid envelope and send it back. No muss or fuss.

Featuring a tagline of “love. wear. return.”, rentals run from $50-200, which includes dry cleaning fees. There’s an additional $5 for outfit insurance — just in case there’s staining or structural damage to the clothing. If you totally wreck the dress, however, you will be charged the full retail cost so you’ll have to be sure to handle the piece with serious kid gloves.

Which is important if you’re dealing with a $2000 frock. (Kid gloves not included.)

Rentals are nothing new in the evening-wear realm — ask any guy who went to the prom — but this is the first time I’ve seen a variation on the theme that included actual home delivery. Furthermore:

Your dream outfit arrives in a custom garment bag that includes double-sided tape, bra strap extenders and deodorant stain removers to prevent any embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions.

Now all you need is the right pair of shoes — or to be in Boise.

Chatty Cathy was never like this. “Baby and Me” by 505 Games is, for lack of a better description, an infant simulation for Nintendo’s Wii console, and Kotaku’s Owen Good seems, um, unimpressed:

[I]t takes doll-playing to the next level by incorporating motion control (and balance board support!) into 18 game modes designed to test even the most darling little girl’s resistance to saccharine depictions of parenting.

Not only that, this hellspawn will actually cry through the Wiimote’s speaker. You quiet baby down by rocking, burping and teaching him/her/it to walk. There’s even a feeding exercise. I’m sensing a Wiimote breast pump attachment down the line.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that some of the people actually playing this simulator, which is due out next week, might not be “darling little girls.”

(Via Popgadget.)