A wooden baseball bat, no longer than 8 inches and visible through a car window, spurred Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School officials to call sophomore Cory Henson out of class Monday in order to search his vehicle.
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District policy calls for immediate suspension of a student if a prohibited or hazardous item is found in the student's vehicle.
Henson describes the bat no bigger than the souvenir bats available at professional baseball games. The piece found in Cory's car broke off a trophy, he said. He does not know how it ended up car but said someone was probably playing with it and left it in the back seat.
Henson said her son never gets in trouble. The 16-year-old plays junior varsity baseball at the school. Because of his suspension, he was not able to attend the end-of-the-year sports banquet this week.
"Why did it have to go to that level?" she asked.
What's more confounding to Henson is that it was the small bat, and not the full-sized aluminum bat that was in the trunk with other baseball equipment, that was confiscated as a weapon.
Sgt. Daniel Garcia of the Fort Worth Police Department School Initiative Unit said he was not aware of the full-sized bat in the car. If the student plays baseball at the school, then common sense would prevail in the situation, he said.
"The [smaller] bat could be constituted as an illegal club," because it was in the driver's access area and had a hole in the center of it, Garcia said.
Common sense would prevail? Common sense would also tell you that a pretend bat is less of a weapon than the real thing. But why is common sense even a consideration here? The whole purpose of having zero-tolerance policies is to avoid common sense and judgement. That's why they're so stupid and why everybody makes fun of them. But they didn't go far enough. There need to be written (okay, pictures) definitions of weapons for the severely deranged idiots in charge of public education. It needs to be crystal clear what a weapon is and it needs to be defined without using any polysyllabic words.
The situation at this high school really opens up an interesting new realm of possibilities. If a baseball bat is not a weapon, but a miniature replica of a baseball is a weapon, common sense and judgement have definitely vacated the premises. If an 8-inch trophy component is a weapon, then what isn't a weapon? An empty potato chip bag might be considered a weapon. A full bag of chips might not. This makes no sense, but see above, it doesn't have to make sense. Certainly a car would have to be a weapon, right, since cars can kill people? No, common sense, Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School-style, would say a car's just a car and not a weapon. But a Hot Wheels pretend-car found in the console? Obviously a weapon, and the little bastard gets expelled. By all means, lets funnel more taxpayer money to public schools, for its obvious that the intellect found in professional education circles could really be put to great use, if only given an increase in resources.
I am humbly suggesting that those who must shriek hysterically about paying $2/gallon for gas please stop buying the stuff if it's so damn overpriced. Mainly I'm suggesting they shut the hell up if they can't discuss it in such a way as to at least partially conceal the fact that they are a bunch of goddamn morons. I too would prefer to pay less for gas, rather than more. But I neither blame George W. Bush nor expect him to do anything about it. For what can he do? Release the strategic reserves, which will have a miniscule (if any) impact on gas prices, months from now, and leaving the US vulnerable if something actually does happen to restrict supply? Brilliance indeed. Or perhaps price controls should be imposed, since that worked so beautifully in the 70's? Nuking China, then not allowing them to rebuild would be about the only guaranteed way for GW to get those prices down, since China's explosive growth and resulting need for oil IS the reason demand, and therefore, price, has increased. But do we really need to kill billions of people just so we can save a few dollars a month? I'm one of those right-wing kooks that thinks that's a bad idea. Another price-lowering plan that would be within Bush's power would be suspension of all environmental regulations that apply to refineries, and allowing refineries be built anywhere, preferably on land provided for free by the government using illegal immigrant laborers wherever possible, concerned neighbors and labor advocates be damned. This would also work, but it would take years before prices would be affected. And, again, is this more desirable than paying $2/gallon? I for one applaud Bush for not implementing any of these plans. I don't like it when I pay $28 to fill up, as I'd rather spend more money on lipgloss and beer and less on gas, but I'm capable of handling the situation rationally. It's one thing to bitch about something, quite another to demand hideous and/or ineffective action be taken.
And, since I've noticed that many of the eunuchs that are now sobbing about gas prices are the very same eunuchs that were bitching not one month ago about the evils of the H2 and other large vehicles, I have a few words for you and your ilk. High gas prices are a deterrent to buying such evil vehicles and are thus helpful in your stated goal of seeing fewer of them on the roadways. So you should be happy. And a few months of $2+ gallons of gas are sure to do more toward developing alternative energy sources than 30 years of egregiously over-funded goverment research. So, you eunuch's should be having a f-ing parade. And please, tell me where you're going to have it so I'll know to avoid that area.
11:49 AM
Poppy Madden likes to breeze-dry her laundry outside her modest home in the up-and-coming Coral Ridge neighborhood because it leaves her clothes fresh and wrinkle-free.
But across the street, a contractor building multimillion dollar homes saw her wet clothes and cringed.
"I'm sure if you bought a $3 million house and your neighbor across the street has purple panties flying in plain visibility, you wouldn't want her doing that," said Robert Strauss of Floridian Estate Builders.
If you buy a $3M house with the understanding that panty-drying isn't going to be permitted across the street, then your neighbor suddenly gets a hankering to start line-drying in violation of a pre-existing city ordinance, then you would have a reason to complain. If you buy that house even after seeing the purple panties, then you really don't have any business trying to stop the air-dryer. I tend to be in favor of people drying their clothes out of their neighbors sight but this woman isn't breaking any laws with her drawers swaying in the breeze, and she was there first.
11:41 AM
ODESSA - A West Texas youth who drank a chemical from a high school lab on a dare from another student is in improving condition at a hospital.
The unidentified victim, a junior at Odessa High School, was upgraded Monday from critical to satisfactory condition at University Medical Center in Lubbock.
The student drank the unidentified chemical, described as a poison, on "a bet" at the school. Nancy Smith, a UMC supervisor, said he took another student's $2 bet before drinking the chemical.
Not a Darwin Award nominee yet, but give him time.
10:04 AM
Houston Chronicle's Guide to Talking Out of One's Ass
In a time when Americans are deeply divided about the upcoming presidential election, the war in Iraq, gay marriage, abortion, continuing strife in Israel and abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison, it's harder and harder to have a civilized conversation about current events.
Instead of coming together to share ideas, people are more polarized than ever. Many don't want to listen, they want to win the debate, even eviscerate the debater.
So far so good. "Many" doesn't mean "most," after all, and it would be foolish to argue that listening and civility haven't gone the way of rational thought, i.e., hopelessly out of fashion. But now it gets interesting:
Fortunately, there are many experts in Houston and beyond who spend great gobs of their time, even entire careers, pushing peace and effective communication.
Let us all take a moment to be thankful for the good fortune of the Houstonians who are blessed with the availability of these "experts." For they offer such useful tidbits as this:
"It's so much easier for one kid to grab the ball and smack the other kid than to walk up and say, `May I have the ball for a while? I was waiting, but you didn't offer to let me play.'"
I'm not usually an advocate of playground violence, but I think any kid that would use the aforementioned jackass language in requesting a ball from another kid really deserves a swift beatdown. Not that I would condone a kid grabbing a ball, or anything else, from another, for that's jackass behavior as well. Surely there's a happy medium between jackass bully and whimpering jackass.
Carol Quillen, director of the new Center for the Study of Religious Tolerance at Rice University, suggests that Americans arguing about the war in Iraq stop talking in slogans, consider compromise and take the time to educate themselves about the diverse history and culture of the Middle East.
Well, duh! Being informed about the Middle East would certainly be helpful. But so would educating oneself in such subjects as U.S. History, geography, geology, dictatorships, socialism, feminism, military strategy, physics, biology, chemistry, World War I, World War II, pyrotechnics, economics, ecology,... the list goes on. It seems like someone might be suggesting a focus on Mesopotamian accomplishments at the expense of less flattering realities about the region in question. But that's just my opinion. A study of Middle Eastern men and their seeming propensity for eschewing military targets and slaughtering civilians might also be a useful primer for discussion about the war in Iraq. As would a look at the inverse correlation between women's rights and terrorism. A study of French military victories is certainly a good thing as well, and won't take too much time out of your day.
Missing from this utterly useless article is a bit of instruction that might actually be useful. Such as resurrecting that long-lost trait known as common sense, which it would appear that "experts" are quite opposed to. If common sense can't make a comeback then at the very least, perhaps people could start informing themselves with actual facts and forming their own opinions instead of hysterically repeating the various talking points from their puppet-masters. This would be a good start. Far better than always adhering to the rule advising never to use "always" or "never."
