Maomao invokes the power of fruit sherbet to rescue Xiaolan from the trouble she got into, crossing her fingers that it will be enough to placate the one concubine she’s had no direct contact with. Shisui once again appears out of nowhere just in time to swipe the leftovers and hang out with her pals. Lots of fun, and a good character-building moment for Maomao as Jinshi forces her to confront her reason for helping.

Later, Gyokuyou once again demonstrates what a lucky guy the emperor is, as she makes a tough call for the sake of her unborn child. Meanwhile, things continue to stir in the background.

Unrelated, Last Bite

Thursday night, for his mere-days-away birthday, I took my brother to see Alton Brown, who was in Cincinnati for his Last Bite tour. As the name implies, this is his final national tour. As far as we know.

It was very funny, and just a little bit naughty. If one of the remaining shows is near you, go; you won’t regret it. Don’t worry if you don’t get one of the hotdogs; despite the buildup, they were nothing special.

Even more unrelated, school funding

I was carefully discussing current events with a friend, when he went off on the proposed Ohio budget that was estimated to cut $105 million from education, with $95 million of it coming out of special education. His son is autistic, and he had been informed that this will cancel all sorts of programs that benefit him.

When I was back at a computer, I looked into it. Spending and budget numbers are highly obfuscated, and I found half a dozen contradictory claims for the total funding from federal, state, and local governments. More importantly, I found nothing about how much of the money actually ends up in classrooms helping special-needs kids.

But what I did find was a lower bound for the totals in both categories, as well as the easily-missed fact that the claimed cuts were for two years, not one.

TL/DR: the cut for special-ed was ~4%, and ~0.5% for the total budget. That looks like the standard bullshit “if you don’t pass this levy, we’ll have to cut football” trick that school districts have been pulling for decades, but even with that, 4% sounds quite modest when there’s been steadily-declining enrollment for years. Especially if it’s as badly run and grift-y as most public-union-associated programs; how did we get to the point that over 16% of students are considered disabled?

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