| Sunday,
January 21 2001 From THIS IS TRUE:
HIT PARADE: A 14-year-old boy in Espanola, N.M.,
admits he swatted a female schoolmate on the butt. That was enough for
Espanola Middle School Assistant Principal Ruben Lucero. "We have a
strict sexual harassment policy," Lucero said. "Anytime a
person's body is violated, we consider that major" -- so the police
were called. The unnamed boy may now face felony charges if prosecutors
determine his action meets the test of "criminal sexual
contact." Espanola Police Chief Wayne Salazar explained it was a case
of the "target area" of the slap. "Why the buttocks? Why
not the arm, why not someplace else?" (Reuters) ...Ask his parents:
that's probably where they whack him.
QUESTION AUTHORITARIANISM: A third-grader found
some jewelry and took it to Owen Elementary School in Pontiac, Mich. Since
the 1.5-inch-long medallion is shaped like a gun, the boy has been
indefinitely suspended under the state's zero tolerance weapons law.
School district officials admit the boy did not point the toy at anyone,
nor made any threats, but "state law takes precedence and requires us
to take action," a spokeswoman said. (AP) ...Maybe it's time for the
adults to take a stand and refuse to obey laws that make them do wrong
things to children.
To which last I can only say AMEN. How long
do we put up with idiocy masquerading as compassion? It is justice
to treat the same things equally. It is injustice to refuse to make
discriminations among unequal things.
The SHAME page
continues: excerpts from Spam I have received. Is it wrong to wish ill to
the people who sent it? As well.
THIS IS TRUE had some good stuff this week:
DID STEPHEN KING START OUT THIS WAY? A 16-year-old boy from North
Stormont, Ont., Canada, had an assignment in his favorite class, drama, to
read a dramatic text aloud. "I wanted to prove to my teacher that he
was wrong," the boy said. "He said my stuff was crap,
unrealistic, worthless." So he recited a story he wrote about a
student tormented by bullies who takes revenge by planting bombs at
school. His grade was two out of four marks. The principal didn't like the
story either: the boy had to deny that he was the story's lead character,
and make it clear he had no plans for committing any violence. Police
searched the school and his home but found no weapons or explosives.
Still, the unidentified boy was permanently expelled from school and
jailed for a month while his family arranged for C$10,000 bail. He still
faces felony charges, and a lawyer has offered to represent him for free.
"I just hope I don't have to go through this kind of hassle every
time I write a good story," the boy said. (The Ottawa Citizen)
...With that kind of attitude in the face of teachers calling his work
"worthless crap," the kid will go far.
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Discussion of these school horrors in
mail for next week.
Actually Monday Morning: heading for home.
I need to remind myself to write an essay on mandatory minimum
sentences. The immediate stimulus is one of Clinton's pardons. The
implications are fairly large.
President Bush is off to a good start symbolically by talking to
reading teachers, but my wife says most of those people are the problem,
not the solution. Do they want to end illiteracy and do themselves out of
jobs as specialists? Once you have experts in a problem, that
problem will never go away...
And many have asked about Baen's new free books for download. Niven,
Flynn, and I are letting them put up Fallen Angels that way. I will
have more to say about all this shortly. But I have to tell you all my
books are on the web in pirate editions. Not much to be done about it,
either.
Home. And found this about the custom of kissing (which is not
universal among humankind):
The custom seems to have spread across Indo-European culture, with the
Greeks
being the first Europeans to take it up. But the prize for bringing
tonsil-hockey to the masses has to go to the Romans. Those lusty Latins
even
had separate words for different types of kisses. The osculum was the
peck-on-the-cheek greeting; the basium a more amorous lip-to-lip
affair; and
the saviolum was a passionate tongue kiss.
Them Latin lovers...
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