Your video, A History of Chuck E. Cheese: Last Squeak Tonight, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

It occurs to me this may be a highly regional food item. Cheese curds are really just chunks of (typically) mozzarella or cheddar cheese. Usually about the size of a regular or large marble. They can be bought fresh, or at restaurants you'll generally get them deep fried. That's what White Castle had a few months ago, and they were not quite MN State Fair quality (which are divine), but pretty damned good for the price.

If you want the best possible unfried cheese curds though, look to Wisconsin. In rural areas you can get them ridiculously fresh, and you'll know if you have - they squeak when you bite into them. That stops happening in less than a day, regardless of how they're kept.

Edit: Cheese curds are also a vital component of poutine, a Quebecois dish. French fries, cheese curds, crumbled bacon, and brown gravy. So goddamn bad for you / delicious.

Squeak, you fools!

I disagree. Pinpointing the problem isn't very hard if you have some idea of where to look.

As someone who was 'coming of age' in my profession when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its successor the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I can provide some insight into how these policies have been enacted and how both have been detrimental to the public education system as a whole. The former is a GWBush policy, and the latter is an Obama policy meant to mend the original law, so both liberals and conservatives are to blame to some degree, but both are based on the same philosophy of education and teacher-accountability.

There are some other mitigating factors and outside influences at work that should be noted: gun violence, the rise & ubiquity of the internet, and universal cell phone availability, all mostly concentrated in the past 10 years that play a large role. Cell phones, for example, are probably the worst thing to happen to education ever. They distract, they assist in cheating, they perpetuate arguments which can lead to physical altercations, and parents themselves advocate for their use "what if there's an emergency?!?!"

The idea of "teacher accountability" is the biggest culprit though.

Anecdotally, I've caught people cheating on papers. A girl in my honors English class basically plagiarised her entire final paper that we worked on for close to a month. The zero tanked her grade, which was already floundering, and the parent wanted to meet. I'd rather not go into detail to protect both the girl and my own anonymity, but suffice to say, all of the blame for this was aimed directly at me. How? Well I (apparently) "should have caught this sooner and intervened." Now, the final in that class is 8 pages long, I have ~125 students all working on it at the same time. but my ability to check something like that and my workload are beside the point. I'M NOT THE ONE WHO COPY PASTED A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE AND DOCTORED IT UP SO IT COULD SQUEAK BY THE PLAGIARISM DETECTOR (shows she knew what she was doing, IMHO). Yet, I'm still the one being told that I was responsible for what happened.

Teacher-accountability SOUNDS like the right thing to do, but consider the following analogies

--Students are earning poor grades, therefore teachers should be demoted; put on probationary programs; lose some of their salaries; and if they do not improve their test scores, grades, and attendance; be terminated from their positions.

as to

--Impoverished people have poor oral hygiene/health, therefore their dentists should be forced to take pay cuts from insurance companies. If the patients continue to develop cavities and the like, the dentist should be forced to go for further training, and possibly lose his practice.

I have no control over attendance.
I have no control over their home life.
I have no control over children coming to school with holes in their shoes, having not eaten breakfast.

@Mordhaus the part about money grubbing could not be further from the truth.

I'll be brief b/c I know this is already too long for this forum, but Houton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Etc. Book Company is facing a shortfall of sales in light of the digital age. It may be difficult to blame one entity, but that's a good place to start. They don't sell as many books, but guess who produces and distributes the standardized tests and practice materials? Those same companies who used to sell textbooks by the boatload.

When a student does poorly, they have to retest in order to recieve a diploma. $$$ if they fail again, they retest again and again there is a charge for taking the test and accompanying pretest materials. Each of which has its own fees that go straight to the former textbook companies. See: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html

In short, there is an incentive for these companies to lobby for an environment where tests are taken and retaken as much as possible. Each time a student has to retest that's more $ in their pocket.

How can they create an enviorment that faccilitates more testing? Put all the blame on the educators rather than the students.

That sounds a little tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory-ish, but the lobbying they do is very real: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/?utm_term=.
9af18f0d2064

That, combined with exceptions for charter/private schools where students have the option to opt-out of said testing is skewing the numbers in favor of all of these for-profit companies: http://sanchezcharter.org/state-testing-parent-opt-out/ << one example (you can't opt-out in a public school, at least in my state)

@bobknight33 idk if i'd call business-minded for-profit policies "liberal"

Your video, Squeak Toy, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

OK, I can kind of get on board with this, but who the hell designed this one? How stupid can you get to make it stop if the cat touches the screen? It should require a specific pattern to stop, and otherwise just react to touches, like make the moth turn around and flutter, or make the mouse squeak if the cat touches it. Going back to the static start screen is terrible and defeats the purpose, no?

The squeaks! TOO CUTE

Oh god, it's 31 minutes long? Fuck that noise. I'm just going to assume it's "blah blah god blah blah those awful gays blah blah climate change is fake something something obama"

@newtboy, apparently he squeaks in on a technicalit
y.

Between being Canadian and being an idiot, you would hope it's the idiot part that disqualifies him. That, and he stole his campaign logo from Al Jazeera

I actually thought the shark fin seizure might have been legit but I guess they squeaked through a loophole in the act prohibiting it. A loophole which was closed in 2011 by another act signed by Obama.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately_64,695_Pounds_of_Shark_Fins

Your video, Baby Sloth Squeaks Compilation, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 185 Badge!

Well thanks kinna dag. You pm'd me AFTER the fact and after I posted this to the sift-talk....THANKS, for the fucking heads-up.

If it's "sort of" a one time thing deal, Not fine. The only way anyone knows if the embed is not spot on is if another user (either the original submitter or someone else that sees and remembers it different, alerts someone.) WHY then, would not the person who cried foul contact the person who raised it from the dead and TELL THEM, rather than (and this is what i suspect) tattle to the admins (because they have a particular hate-stick lodged in their assess towards another user, or were never taught manners by their abusive mothers and fathers) who then unilaterally FUCKS MY POWERS AWAY) to the giggles and squeaks of the internet DOUCHEBAG who brought it to your attention? Which is what I KNOW has transpired, the cowardly little fucks whoever you are, suck it.

Cowardly. infantile, sophomoric douchebag bullshit thuggery.

Now, how do I get these powers back, and now codify these arbitrary "sort of" rules??

By bringing this mishap to the sift's attention, and perhaps *cough, put it to vote??

Voting only works for those who use it for evil apparently, just look at the state of the planet.

I would appreciate again, the ability to clean-up dead videos. I regularly fix dead embeds and then immediately give other videos a chance by *promoting them to the front page....to foster a spirit of courtesy and joy and good will in the hearts of the original submitter.....GOOD THING

I even deaded all of Kronosposidens dead shit since he's AWOL, and am bringing his back tto life slowly but surely, even though that charlatan gentle-man was the biggest prick in the universe to me, and set-out on a similar quest, to burn me at ever turn...

(like copper-dan the resident ban-hammer obsessive-compulsive) regularly peruses the sift for violators, to satisfy his badge-point quest to be head NARC of the site). GOOD THING?? I consider it not, but I suppose everyone needs their little jobs.

Can you...People who don;t recognize the hatred in your hearts, act as civilly as you accuse me of acting the opposite of?? Look in the fucking mirrors and stop lying to yourselves, it's getting really fucking old..

Or how bout this.

Let's take a fucking vvote, or pole (like the one in so many assess) and vote whether or not to let love rule...Just tell me to fucking leave and I will....Don't keep playing the the punk-ass bitch card about it why doncha??....Bare your true natures and use small words if you have to. please. A single sentence will do.

You'd think so, but he's barely touching it, and it doesn't do anything but squeak. No thrashing around, no running away. If it was eating, it would probably go back to munching between squeaks.

*✨
Has anyone ever heard the sound of the velvet ant or 'cow ant'? All over Texas- If you pin one down they squeak similarly...real cute until you don't heed the squeak and pick one up-Their stings' worse than a wasp's-

Car goes honk
Boat goes toot
Plane goes neeeeeeaaaaaarrrrroooww
and brakes go squeak.

But there's one sound
That no one knows
What does the HULK say?

SMASH-A-SMASH-A-SMASHSMASH