Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, April 30, 2010

Another job I'm unqualified for...

By Dave Anderson:

I firmly beIieve that I speak 3.8% more efficiently than most other native-English speakers as I only use 25 letters in my speech.  The letter R is massively overrated.  In other words, I have a thick Boston accent.  It has softened slightly during the twelve years I have been in Pittsburgh (where I sometimes lose the verb to be, but that is another problem entirely).

According to Arizona, my accent makes me ineligible to teach English in the their public schools.  Balloon Juice has the details:

 The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented... must be removed from classes for students still learning English.

Damn it, another job that I am no longer qualified for.  I wonder how many other snow-bird English teacher transplants are SOL under this policy.  It has to be targeted against the Bostonians in Arizona, right?  

2 comments:

  1. As a west coaster I pronounce creek - crick. It used to drive my X-wife who was from NYC up the wall. My guess is that would be OK in AZ.

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  2. I guess you'd have to have piles and piles of money if your livelihood was in AZ, you had kids & you actually wanted them to have even a slim chance that they might have a future - i.e. you'd have to send them out of state to receive an education.

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