The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

True love waits, for at least another 13 years or so

Two young lovers, accompanied by the young lady's sister to serve as marriage witness, slipped aboard a train and tried to escape to Africa where they planned to wed. But their plans were foiled when they arrived at the train station and it was discovered they had neither passports nor money... and that the bride- and groom-to-be were five and six, respectively.

An early contender for Cutest News Story of 2009, as reported by BBC News...

Two German children - aged five and six - have been stopped by police from eloping to Africa to tie the knot in the sun, reports say.

The budding lovebirds, identified as Mika and Anna-Lena, packed bathing costumes, sunglasses and a lilo and headed for the airport.

They even had the presence of mind to invite along an official witness - Anna-Lena's seven-year-old sister.

The three got as far as Hanover railway station before police intervened.

The young couple were "very much in love" and had decided to get married in Africa "where it is warm", police spokesman Holger Jureczko told the AFP news agency.

...

Officers persuaded the children they would not get far without tickets and money, but consoled them with a free tour of the police station, where they were shortly picked up by relieved parents.

Although any marriage plans have been put on hold for now, police did not altogether rule out the possibility of an African wedding.

"They can still put their plan into action at a later date," AFP quoted the spokesman as saying.

Fire, fire

We just found out that the Martin fire in Bonny Doon, California, is burning close to our wonderful friends Karan and Joe's house. Joe's out of town, so Karan has had to evacuate all by herself, along with their kitties.

Please think good thoughts for them... this is really scary.

Segregation in the classroom--hurt or help?

New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof edits the regular "On the Ground" column, which publishes essays by teachers in public schools around the US about education and its discontents. Yesterday's essay, "The Mire," by Chicago inner-city teacher Will Okum, talks about the problem of trying to teach those few students in a class who are genuinely engaged and hungry to learn while the "kids at the back" make noise and trouble for everyone else:

Midway through another brilliant lesson on five-paragraph essays, chaos erupts in the back row among the students who do not care. My first-period English class crashes to a standstill as several failing students ignite a hysteria of insults. Other students stew in frustration as they wait for me to restore order and continue the lesson. Sitting in the front row, Kentrail is visibly exasperated that I cannot do my job. Shatara’s teeth and fists are clenched; she stares at me with accusatory anger. Finally, Ronetta screams, “Make them shut up!” Only after the temporary removal of the two instigators six minutes later does the class return to our discussion of thesis statements.

Class time not wasted on discipline is often squandered explaining make-up work to oft-absent students or reviewing remedial skills that should have been learned in early middle school. Intelligent, motivated students like Kentrail, Shatara and Ronetta suffer the most on such days when academic progress is glacial. Too often, their individual brightness is consumed in the mire of the whole. They should not be in this class; they should not be in this school.

Did you have a class like this in high school? I know you did. I did too. Sometimes I was one of the kids at the front. More often, alas, I was one of the kids at the back (though I was seldom really loudly disruptive... I was usually just tuned out and scribbling in my notebook).

This situation strikes me as one of the most critical affecting public education. Schools have a mandate to serve every student; students are required by law to attend school.  A handful of students want to be there, or want the reward of the good grade enough that it's as if they want to be there. A few more are actively unhappy to be there and take out their frustrations on everyone else, demanding more than their share of the teacher's time and energy. Most of the rest don't really care and just want the bell to ring so they can get outside and talk smack with their friends or engage in PDAs with their sweeties or drive their cars fast through the parking lot and escape.

What's the solution? Okum suggests that disruptive kids should be removed entirely and that high-potential, high-achieving kids should never have to suffer the indignity of sitting through another class interrupted by those Rotten Apples. I'm inclined to agree, on one level; but then there's the problem of what to do with the Rotten Apples. Segregate them all in a big warehouse-like classroom where monitors patrol with stern eyes and Tasers at the ready? Sounds like a perfect prep school for prison. Load them down with punishments so harsh that they'll just drop out of school altogether and become somebody else's problem? Once again: fast track to prison (where more than 1 out of 100 US adults are currently cooling their heels, a rate higher than any other country's--including China's).

I guess in my happy little liberal puffy-cloud dream world I like to imagine a public school system where different resources exist to serve different needs. Kids who want to master the five-paragraph essay (and beyond! Maybe someday they'll grow up to join the exalted ranks of bloggers!) could have a nice quiet place to do so. Kids who want to work on cars while listening to speed metal could have a nice speed-metally place to do so. (And I guess kids who want to master five-paragraph essays while listening to speed metal could just be issued iPods or something.) Kids who need some serious mentoring from people who grew up in similar situations to their own and managed to emerge un-pregnant, un-addicted and ready to move on... well, maybe there could be a big living room with couches and books and art supplies and maybe even an Xbox for those kids.*

Pipe dream, yeah... what makes me think that a one-size-fits-all world would ever adopt the radical notion that kids are people... and that people deserve to be treated as individuals, not statistics or prodigies or problems? Hmmm. Crazy dream though it is, it seems to have at least slightly influenced the architects of the Finnish education system--supposedly the best-performing system in Europe. (Imagine: vocational schools pairing up with apprenticeship programs to ensure students have good jobs before they even graduate! A comprehensive lifelong education system designed to allow anyone--regardless of age--to jump back in at any time! Not trying to teach kids ABCs and 123s and the joy of the phonics-based reader until they're at least seven years old! "Polytechnic" schools that provide advanced career-oriented training for those students who don't need or want university degrees!)

*I am biting my tongue and not mentioning how much, except for the cars and speed metal part, this idyllic pipe dream resembles the daily scene at Village Home Education Resource Center, our local "homeschool school." Well, OK. Maybe just briefly.

Whold Your Whorses

Most little girls have a moderate to serious obsession with horses. I, not being a Real Girl, never did. Well, I read Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague and a couple of the Black Stallion books, from whence I developed an unholy love of the name "Alec." But the whole horses-are-beautiful thing? Just kind of passed me by.

My sister was a much more wholehearted horsie fan. She loved and adored her Breyer horses, which I have to admit were pretty cute.

But you know what was wrong with those Breyer horses?

They just weren't slutty enough.

No boobs. No sparkly eyelashes. No high freakin' heels.

Thankfully, though, Playmates Toys--makers of such quality products as (Slutty) Disney Fairies and (Slutted Up for a New Millennium) Strawberry Shortcake--has found the perfect way to combine prepubescent girls' age-old fascination with horses with contemporary American culture's focus on glitter, cell phones and underage sexuality.

Presenting: Struts!

   

The inaugural "Runway Magic" collection includes four different horse figurines, each of which comes with "a head shot and a personal bio... just like a real model!" That's awesome, because if there's one thing young girls are missing out on today, it's the opportunity to learn all about the vast career potential offered by the modeling industry.

Sadly, the little one with the pink shoes is doomed to failure when she turns up at her first audition and is told they're not interested in anyone less than 15 hands high at the withers. And the purple-togged one next to her is far too ethnic for the cover of Equestrienne. The other two? They can look forward to two or three wild seasons of coked-out jet-setting before they pack on a couple extra pounds around the fetlocks and end up getting pregnant by some washed-up racehorse. Look for them hanging all over the Budweiser Clydesdales in the paddock at Super Bowl LXV.

Here's what a real Strut looks like:

Look, you can brush her tail and play with her pearl bridle. I wonder if her platform shoes come off, or if they've been nailed on by the farrier equivalent of Sergio Rossi?

RIP, Dungeon Master

Gary Gygax, co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons game system, has died at age 69.

He has failed his saving throw; there was no 20th-level cleric around to resurrect him; he is even now journeying along the silver cord that connected his worldly body to the Astral Plane, no doubt to find rest in one of the several heavens the D&D planar system made available to us. (I'm thinking maybe Valhalla. Elysium sounds a wee bit too boring for a man of his ilk.)

Thanks, Mr. Gygax, for introducing me and millions of other overly bookish, highly imaginative kids to the joys of polyhedral dice, exquisitely painted miniatures and reams of regulations setting out everything from the types of non-player characters one could encounter in a typical town ("01-06: Trollop. 07-10: Doxy. 11-15: Madam.") to the exact speed at which a two-handed sword could be swung by a paladin while under the combined effects of haste and cause fear spells. Your legacy lives on in thousands of basements, dragon tapestry-bedecked living rooms and grottyish gaming shops around the globe.

And my sprogs still thoroughly enjoy paging through my old (original, even!) Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide. Another generation will grow up fascinated by world mythology and miscellaneous arcana thanks to you.

Science Friday: Starbucks kills babies!

Coffee, the staff of life. Where would we be without a morning cuppa? Still in bed, that's where.

Since coffee's introduction to the Arab world in the 12th century and to European society five centuries later, the drink has inspired thinkers, writers, artists, politicians... and scientists. Johann Sebastian Bach celebrated its virtues in the Coffee Cantata, written for a group of student-musicians who met at his favorite coffeehouse. Balzac enjoyed up to 50 cups a day of super-strength Turkish-style coffee, and sometimes resorted to chowing down on straight coffee grounds when he needed an additional caffeine blast. (The upside of this intemperate habit: he completed over 100 books in his lifetime. The downside: he had stomach cramps, high blood pressure and "hypertrophy of the left ventricle of the heart," all probably linked to his coffee jones, and may even have died from long-term caffeine poisoning.)

(Maybe I should start drinking 25 cups of coffee a day and plan on finishing a comparatively modest 50 books in my lifetime. Hmmm...)

Even in its first heyday, though, when the coffeehouses of Venice and Vienna were crowded with hopped-up intellectuals and the Schlagsahne flowed like water, there were those who failed to see the benefits of the drink:

Certainly our Countrymens pallates are become as Fantastical as their Brains; how ellse is't possible they should Apostatize from the good old primitive way of Ale-drinking, to run a whoring after such variety of distructive Foreign Liquors, to trifle away their time, scald their Chops, and spend their Money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous Puddle-water: Yet (as all Witches have their Charms) so this ugly Turkish Enchantress by certain Invisible Wyres attracts both Rich and Poor; so that those that have scarece Twopence to buy their Children Bread, must spend a penny each evening in this Insipid Stuff: Nor can we send one of our Husbands to Call a Midwife, or borrow a Glister-pipe, but he must stay an hour by the way drinking his two Dishes, & two Pipes.

--from "The Women's Petition Against Coffee, Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniencies accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that drying, Enfeebling Liquor.
Presented to the Right Honorable the Keepers of the Liberty of Venus," 1674

And now, in our enlightened scientific Starbuckified age, four new studies have been released in the last week both praising and damning coffee (or, more precisely, caffeine).

As every woman of child-bearing age has probably heard and commenced to freak out about by now, a new study published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology has concluded that even moderate caffeine consumption (about two cups of coffee a day) appeared to double women's risk for miscarriage. Scary stuff! Throw out the coffee pot, stat!

But of course, a second and larger study that found no increased miscarriage risk among women drinking two cups of coffee a day (and three or four cups before becoming pregnant) has gone virtually unreported in comparison. Also underreported: the fact that approximately 80% of miscarriages are the result of chromosomal abnormality, which has no relationship whatsoever to caffeine consumption.

Is caffeine bad for pregnant women? Many women will probably choose to err on the side of complete and total caution and abandon their morning cup of joe as soon as Aunt Flo misses her scheduled monthly appearance by even one day. This should bring the list of forbidden pleasures during pregnancy to... what, four hundred and seven? No soft cheese, no tuna, no sushi, no wine, no white flour, no rare steak, no roller coasters... heck, pretty soon we're just going to sidestep the warning labels and give up on getting pregnant altogether. (We know how well that turns out, don't we?)

Lest you think caffeine causes irrevocable harm to your lady bits, however, consider the conclusions of another study released this week. Apparently, caffeine consumption is linked to a lowered risk of ovarian cancer. So if your ovaries are all done popping out little growths, you can lessen their chance of producing further and more malignant growths by upping your daily coffee intake. Belly up to the counter, ladies!

Oh, and just as a bonus: swigging coffee on your daily power-walk may cut the risk of skin cancer. If you're a hairless mouse, anyway.

Me, I'm all done with the child-production assembly line... so I'm going to grab a double short half-skim latte, lace up my walking shoes and go prevent some cancer... and maybe trim my thighs while I'm at it. Yay science!

N.B.: When I was preggers with Fisher, I was scared by such evil books as "What To Eat While You're Expecting" into cutting out coffee altogether. The result, reliably: killer freakin' headaches that only augmented my morning-sickness woes. My doctor's advice: "Stop torturing yourself. Why would you give up coffee when you're already miserable?" Thoroughly enjoyed my caffeine mainline the next day, and every morning thereafter.

And now for a commercial-type interjection: Hey, if you liked this post, would you please click on "Digg This" just below the list of tags down there? One of my goals for 2008 is to concentrate more heavily on science writing, and getting my humble little Science Friday posts out there might help. Or not. But it doesn't hurt to click, unless you have serious carpal tunnel syndrome, and it only takes 0.23 seconds. Thanks!

All I need to know I learned from KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY

So when the New York Times is a little too Gray of a Lady, the Washington paper threatens to drive you Postal and the... er... local paper... seems overly... er, Oregonian... thank goodness that we can turn to that bastion of free speech and incisive political analysis, the Korean Central News Agency. If it's fit to print in North Korea, it's fit to be translated into a stilted, yet entertaining form of English and posted at their snazzy Web site.

Among today's headlines: "Promising Boy Artist." This story tells the heartwarming tale of an eleven-year-old boy whose artistic accomplishments have "startled people from his first work"--all without the unnecessary frippery of illustrations that would, y'know, show you what the kid's art looks like. But who needs pictures, really, when you can visualize his creations' content so clearly by benefit of their titles alone? "My dream of joining the army of the General and becoming hero" and "A Yankee I have captured" certainly speak for themselves. And of course, "[t]he boy artist... would [like to] become a soldier-artist to delight Kim Jong Il."

Kim Jong Il... wow, I think his name appears in more KCNA stories than it doesn't. Mofo gets more press than Paris Hilton. (I mean Kim Kardashian. Paris is so fifteen minutes ago. Wow... Kim Kardashian should hook up with Kim Jong Il. Would that make her Kim Kim Kardashian?) Frex: a book was just published in South Korea, of all places, lauding the philosophy and accomplishments of Kim Jong Il. And it is apparently  "the 30th anniversary of Kim Jong Il's famous work 'On Establishing Revolutionary Trait in Carrying out Party Policies.' " We learn that "the wise leadership of Kim Jong Il also found its expression in that he has led the party organizations to closely link the work of organizing and guiding the party life with the implementation of their revolutionary tasks and set an example of the times in devotedly carrying out the party policies and helped all the officials and party members earnestly follow it." Geez, it's like being back in core class at Kresge all over again. Or Stevenson Core, which was notoriously even more boring than Kresge Core. Go Slugs! Also: Party life? Party policies? I thought North Korea was a grim place... but apparently it's startlingly grooovalicious.

OK, back to Kim Jong Il (or K-Jiddy, as I like to call him). He certainly is one busy fellow! He recently spent a grueling day touring a military installation (the boys of KPA Unit 479. The fightin' four-seventy-ninth!), during which he feasted his eyes on such proletarian delights as "a wash-cum-bath house," which I don't even want to know what that is, thank you.

He highly praised the sub-unit for leading a tenacious economic life, pleased with the fact that it has not only successfully built cultural and educational and supply service facilities by thoroughly managing the unit the way the anti-Japanese guerrillas did but also splendidly conducted the sideline job to make its life abundant.

Looking round the compound of the barracks under trees laden with red persimmons and feasting his eyes on the mountain ridges covered with chestnut trees, he praised the commanding officers and soldiers of the sub-unit for having successfully spruced up their post, adding that this is one of the beautiful traits which can be displayed only by the KPA soldiers who ardently love the country.

See, now when's the last time you read a story about Bush visiting the troops and noticing anything as big and round and obvious as a persimmon, let alone something as ethereally picturesque as a mountain ridge, tree-covered or otherwise? "Heh-heh. Know what kind of trees those are, Big Time? Them's're chestnuts. Heh-heh. Nuts." (Cheney: "Waaagh!")

But, all joking aside, this story is absolutely sublime in its phrasing. I'm quoting it here in its entirety.

Highest Praise Awarded to DPRK Aerial Trapeze
Pyongyang, November 8 (KCNA) -- "Gold Lion Prize" Cup, the highest prize, and certificate were awarded to DPRK's aerial trapeze "Diverse Flight" at the 11th Wuqiao International Acrobatics Festival held in China from October 27 to November 4.

Acrobats of the Pyongyang Circus successfully presented latest technical movements such as treble flip-flap with simultaneous pirouette and quadruple flip-flap in the air, drawing the particular attention of experts and spectators during the entire period of the festival and winning a top point.

After watching their performance, many spectators of China, members of the international jury and participants in the festival were unsparing in their praises, saying that the present status of the festival would be unthinkable without the DPRK's aerial trapeze.

The festival brought together famous acrobatic organizations and acrobats from 16 countries including the DPRK, China, Russia, France, Italy and Canada and regions.

I would give anything if I could only perform a treble flip-flap with simultaneous pirouette. Alas, the imperial capitalist Yankee nature of my upbringing has rendered me incapable of so much as a cartwheel, let alone the type of gyrations that would cause acrobats from 16 countries (and regions!) to be unsparing in their praises.

Tid-bits

• "Party People": Parliament's most boringest song. (Which is kind of like saying that you went to Rick James' most mellowest party, but hey, whatev.)
• Speaking of parties: nobody threw one like the Hellenistic Alexandrians, apparently. During a giant civic procession staged in the 270s by Ptolemy II, "...[A]ctors and masses of women joined officials...dressed as satyrs in a show which included scenes of Dionysus' drunken return from India, the figure of Alexander, and an enormous gold phallus, 180 feet long, covered with ribbons and tipped with a large gold star."* Where, oh where, can I hire one of these last for our next holiday bash?
• Rhys: reading. "Go, Dog. Go!" remains a favorite, joined of late by the Word Bird series... and, of course, Lego Magazine.
• Fisher: reading (nothing new) and drawing up elaborate plots for the robo-mechanical domination of the world (also nothing new). He's cranked through the Harry Potter books again--he and Jim are reading them simultaneously--and he's now revisiting the Lemony Snickets. Any suggestions on how to get him to pick up a book he's not already read would be most welcome.
• Science marches on: A fossil of a Miocene whale--possibly of an entirely new genus--was unearthed by a group of amateur paleontologists along the Oregon coast last week.
• Most fun quote from a hip-hop song ever: "Whoop! Whoop! That's the sound of the police." Just try to stop saying it.
• Dangerous diversion: creating your own free ringtones with Audacity. Jim is now the proudish owner of brand-spanking-new "Paranoid Android" and "Knives Out" ringtones, while I kept it simple with Beck's "Truckdrivin' Neighbors Downstairs." Now I just need to find someone to assign it to. 'Cuz it's not quite good enough to dethrone Amy Winehouse's "Rehab," which earns me a funny look every time my phone rings in the grocery store.
• How you know your kids are getting properly exposed to D&D: Rhys comes upstairs and asks "What's the difference between an ogre and a troll?" Fisher grabs the Monster Manual and says "Let's find out."
• Halloween: Fisher is a bandit. Rhys is a... well, can you guess?
  
  All costumery 100% homemade, which rocked. Thanks, Papa, for being the wardrobe master! Hooray for UHU glue, which bonds plastic cups to cardboard box with notable success!
• Never rains but it pours: Should probably return to pursuit of deadlines, which I've been composing this post by way of avoiding.
• Eternal bloggery: I want to write a brief monograph on the topic of Constraint as a spur to Creativity. Would you read it?

*Robin Lane Fox, "Hellenistic Culture and Literature" in The Oxford Illustrated History of Ancient Greece and the Hellenistic World.

Military precision

As every soldier knows, calisthenics are a critical part of building both physical strength and mental focus. Who can imagine basic training without pushups, "burpies" and the rest of the typical regimen?

And as part of our mission to ready Iraqis for the ultimate goal of assuming responsibility for their own country's security and welfare, we're helping to turn their raw recruits into responsive, battle-ready professional soldiers. Partially, of course, through the magic of physical exercise:

Your tax dollars at work.

Jumping on the gun bandwagon

So Doc, Chris and Daryl have already weighed in on this one; even the NYT's The Lede has chimed in.

From AP:

A troubled teenager accused of plotting a school attack built up a stash of weapons with the help of his mother, authorities said Friday. Michele Cossey, 46, was arrested Friday on charges of illegally buying her home-schooled son, Dillon, a .22-caliber handgun, a .22-caliber rifle and a 9 mm semiautomatic rifle with a laser scope. ...[T]he teen, who also had a brief court appearance Friday, was ordered held at a juvenile facility while he undergoes a psychiatric evaluation. He was charged with solicitation to commit terror and other counts, but his lawyer, J. David Farrell, stressed that all but one of the weapons prosecutors put on display were pellet guns and air rifles.

Guns--in the hands of a kid. Scary stuff, right? Especially the 9mm--you could hurt somebody with that.

Except:

The teenager said the two .22-caliber weapons were stored at a friend's house. ...[T]he search did not turn up any ammunition for the semiautomatic rifle.

Oh.

Then we read on:

Authorities have said they do not believe an attack was imminent and are not even certain one would have occurred.

''This was a smart kid that clearly believes he was picked on and was a victim,'' Castor said. ''He had psychological issues and began to act out on those feelings.''

[...]Acting on a tip from a high school student and his father, police searched the boy's bedroom and found the 9 mm rifle, about 30 air-powered guns modeled to look like higher-powered weapons, swords, knives, a bomb-making book, videos of the 1999 Columbine attack in Colorado and violence-filled notebooks, Castor said.

Now, I know almost nothing about guns, .22, 9mm, air-powered or otherwise. We're not a gun-owning family, and I've never been interested enough in weaponry to educate myself in the field (except for a fascinating conversation with Zara in which I discovered that the Desert Eagle would be the perfect weapon for the bad guy in my as-yet-to-be-written-or-even-outlined murder mystery to use to kill someone from a block and a half away). And I don't know a lot about "bomb-making books" except that (a) the book in question, the Anarchist's Cookbook, was owned by at least six of my high school buddies, and (b) the only person you're going to blow up by following the directions in the Anarchist's Cookbook is yourself... and that's if you screw something up somewhere.

But I do know something about the subtext of this story: a boy who was poisoned by fear.

This kid was bullied at school--bullied to the point that his parents pulled him out to homeschool him. Every day that he walked down the hallways of his middle school, his heart would pound and his hands go clammy with sweat. There was no way to know where his tormentors would pop up today, what they would say, what they would do. He might have asked for help from a teacher or a counselor, or he might have felt so bound by the peer-pressure code of silence that he was unable to speak up to defend himself. He might even have spoken up and found that the school administration was so helpless, or so unwilling, to protect him that he never went to them again.

And even when he was removed from that environment, the bullying continued. Maybe anonymous taunts were left on his MySpace page. Maybe he had to walk quickly, head down, past the bullies' houses on his way to the library or the store. Maybe he answered the phone several times a day to hear nothing but rough breathing, and then laughter. Maybe the taste of blood and grit in his mouth never seemed to go away, was always as fresh as a wound reminding him of who he hated and why.

I didn't have access to a gun in high school; not even to a decent knife. But I carried a wrench tucked inside my jacket, figuring anything hard and metal would be better than nothing if it came down to a fight. And I filled up notebook after notebook with outpourings of hate (and some pretty damn bad goth poetry). If the Authorities had gotten their hands on what I had written, in this era of zero-tolerance and punish first, ask questions later, who knows where I would have ended up? Maybe in a "boot camp" like this kid.

Should what Dillon Cossey was doing have been ignored? Obviously not--it was a clear plea for help. But should the response have been to throw him--and his mom, who I honestly can't perceive as having done anything illegal--in jail, where he'll be bullied and terrorized in ways your average middle-school thug could only imagine? Yeah... that'll turn him out just fine.