Bill Murray warned us about the endtimes, when there would be cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.
But this has got to be related:
No one warned us that the four horsemen of the apocalypse might not even be ‘men.’
Peace.
T
Archive for the 'This Bizarre World' Category
Walking Robot Clothes
October 7th, 2008, 12:49 pm by TonyI don’t know what else to call it. “Exoskeleton” is a technical term.
But when you consider the people with reduced mobility that this could help, it’s a marvel of modern science by any name.
Bigfoot, Chupacabra, UFOs, oh my!
August 15th, 2008, 8:49 am by TonyOkay, so a couple of fellows in Georgia claim to have recovered the body of a sasquatch. A press conference is scheduled for today.
And a cop says this is video of the fabled Chupacabra.
All in the same week?
Where are the UFO videos? Oh. Here’s one.
And here’s our own News Herald expedition to uncover the elusive Florida Skunk Ape.
It’s a bizarre world.
Shapeshifting Catwoman
July 29th, 2008, 9:02 am by TonyIt’s a bizarre world.
Take this story, from the Nigerian Tribune: A cat gets run over by a motorcycle, turns into a middle-aged woman. Police remove her from the scene as the crowd is about to beat her to death. Instead, crowd beats another cat to death for fear it is also a shapeshifter. It dies a cat.
Believe it or not.
How bizarre
July 23rd, 2008, 12:08 pm by TonyIt’s a bizarre world. Thank goodness. Some examples:
Is it a sky-scraper or an M.C. Escher drawing?
How about this six-legged fawn that’s recovering from an attack by dogs?
Or the fact that, despite a request from residents of the Aegean isle of Lesbos, Greece has decided not to outlaw the use of the word “lesbian.”
Happy B-day Nathan
June 30th, 2008, 3:58 pm by TonySo yeah, entirely personal message.
My son is 20 today.
Halfway to 40, as his girlfriend says.
Two years older than his mom was when we married. One year younger than I was.
So happy birthday, boy. I love you.
More on the book ban
June 20th, 2008, 1:12 pm by TonyReactions to the Bay County School Board’s recent decision to ban “The Fighting Ground” by Avi continue to surface.
There was this letter to the editor in Thursday’s paper.
Here’s what I said about it last week, and in the comments there you’ll find a letter from School Board member Pat Sabiston, one of three who voted to pull the book from school libraries.
Rosie O’Bourke, whom many regular readers of this blog will know, sent the following via email:
Extra, extra, read all about it – or not. The dark specter of censorship rises again in Bay County and is efficiently tucked under the proposed school closings in the meeting agenda and pushed through with little notice in the summer, while school is out. It’s brilliant!
For those of you who don’t remember the times of the last censorship battle, you may want to read Gloria Pipkin’s “At the School House Gate”. Back in 1986-87 Bay County became the laughing stock of the country when then superintendent Leonard Hall banned 64 books including such classics as Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and “The Merchant of Venice”, and novels such as “The Old Man and the Sea” and “The Red Badge of Courage”.
There were articles in the New York Times (see “Florida Officials Yield on Book Ban” published May 15, 1987) in the Wall Street Journal and in the Washington Post. There were interviews in the Oprah Show. A young reporter’s porch was bombed with an improvised explosive, fake bombs appeared inside teachers cars, and the lives of children whose parents chose to fight the book banning were threatened by telephone calls in the middle of the night. It wasn’t until a lawsuit was filed on constitutional grounds that the school board changed its policy to agree with the superintendent.
Still and to this day, there are books banned from that episode.
This time, however, it’s more insidious. “The Fighting Ground” is not a book that teachers are requiring students to read in the classroom. This is a library book, for goodness sake! No one is required to read it. And yet, one parent has read two pages from it and decided that the rest of the Bay County children must not be allowed to read it at all. Even more, three school board members, Donna Allen, John McFatter and Pat Sabiston voted to ban it from all Bay School District library shelves without even reading it. Thank goodness for Ginger Littleton and Johnny Brock, who both gave serious thought to the matter and who listened to the district’s book review committee’s recommendation in voting to keep the books on the library shelves.
As for the book, captured and dying soldiers don’t say “gee, wow, I hope they come back to save us soon!” They are desperate. They use desperate language. What an excellent opportunity to discuss the power of language with your child! Sheltering your children from the horrors of war will simply create a generation that glorifies war and justifies it for just about any reason.
The book is banned until June 30. Bay County parents, grandparents and others that care about civil liberties and constitutional rights should keep their eyes and ears open. There are those who will try to take your children’s first amendment rights away. And for those of us who have already fought this battle once before, we fight it at the polls as well, and we vote.
Rosie O’Bourke, Bay County grandparent
———-
Thanks for joining the discussion, Rosie. How about the rest of you?
School Board bans book
June 13th, 2008, 10:40 am by Tony(Warning: Contains English language.)
No joke. The story is here.
And why did they ban it? Because a character says “God damn.” Because a character says “My God.” Not because it was inappropriate reading for the targeted age group (4th and 5th grade).
Well, gee whiz, Beav’.
Board member Pat Sabiston said she had to vote to ban the book because policy states no religious sect or belief should be held up for ridicule by a teacher. Pat, please explain. If that’s your reasoning, let’s us start a list. I believe you’ll find single sentences and sets of words you can take out of context all over the library that match those, God forbid.
Board member Jon McFatter called those words “the worst of profanity.” Jon, trust me on this. There’s a lot worse out there. (Or maybe, we just have different hot buttons. Could be that all people are not equally offended by the same words? Discuss.)
Board member Johnny Brock said he had to vote against banning the book: “There’s hardly any book where there’s not something that might offend someone,” Brock said. “The book is not required reading. If it was, I would have voted no real quick.”
Johnny gets it. So does Ginger Littleton, who also voted to keep the book in libraries: “It isn’t constitutionally wise to allow one person who reads one page of a book to speak for everyone who might read the entire book,” Littleton said.
I haven’t read the book. I will now. It’s by Avi, the award-winning children’s author, so it’s probably well written. And I encourage everyone else to seek out the book and read it for yourself before deciding if it’s a bad thing for children. A team of media reviewers for our district read the book and didn’t think it should be removed. Our School Board members didn’t read the book, but thought it should be.
Thank God (no offense intended) that they weren’t on the board a few years ago when Goosebumps, Harry Potter, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack and other books were “challenged.” (By the way, in case you haven’t read it, Dinky does not actually shoot smack. She just wants some attention.)
What is this, 1987 all over again? Read this story about the marathon School Board meetings after our elected officials saw fit to ban 64 books including works of William Shakespeare, Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” and Ray Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451″ (a book about book burning). Most of these were removed because of variations on “G-D” used in them. Do we really want to appear in The New York Times or on the Oprah show for this again? (By the way, this story is the third to show up in a Google search of the words “Bay County bans book.”)
What say you?
The Man with the Golden Cup
May 28th, 2008, 12:31 pm by TonyKid uses old brass cup his granddad gave him for target practice with his airgun. Some 60 years later, the all-growed-up kid decides to find out if the cup has any value. Turns out, it’s a priceless golden Chinese relic dated before the birth of Christ. Check it out. Then get the old cups out of those boxes in the attic and take them to the auction house.
Maybe Sharon Stone would like to explain the concept of karma to him as it applies to China?
Or not.
Toil and Trouble
May 21st, 2008, 10:40 am by TonySo the witch burnings continue. Welcome to the 21st Century — in Africa — where 11 people (all of them over 80 years old) were pulled from their homes and burned alive, accused of being witches. Story here.
And totally unrelated: Have bad skin? Let tiny fish eat it off you. Photo here.
It’s a bizarre world.
