Gen Y Republican
by Elisabeth Meinecke
He’s from Illinois, young, smart and has a natural talent for relating to voters. And no, he’s not Barack Obama: he’s Aaron Schock, the newly elected U.S. representative for Illinois’ 18th district. Even Biden would like him -- he’s young, clean, and articulate, and at 27, will bring a Generation Y voice to Congress in January.
History and geography axed in primary schools for lessons on healthy living and the environmentThis announcement comes on the heals over another important British educational study: (Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs)
By Laura Clark
Traditional subjects such as history and geography are to be axed in the biggest overhaul of primary education for 20 years.Timetables will instead be arranged around six 'areas of learning' that merge subjects into general themes. Pupils will also spend more time learning how to deal with 'deep societal concerns' such as violence, drug abuse, obesity, teenage pregnancy and debt.
School lessons designed to help children to learn social and emotional skills and improve classroom discipline have had little impact on pupil behaviour, a study suggests.
The programme called Seal (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) encourages pupils to discuss their feelings and manage their emotions. But a study of the group work phase of the project indicates that it is not having the desired effect on classroom or home behaviour.
Parents, teachers and pupils who took part in the study said there was no formal evidence the programme had any impact on “core” social skills like behaviour, empathy and self-awareness, when undertaken in groups.
I guess groups hugs, journals, wearing the same t-shirts, and hours upon hours of role play just couldn't rid middle school of mean girls and bully boys. Now they want to make failed programs like this into "curriculum". I wonder if students will be tested on it. Do you fail the section on healthy eating if they catch you snacking on a candy bar? Get caught fighting and have to "retest" on anger management?
I gotta feel for the students though. If there's one thing they can do, it's smell BS in adults. Can you imagine having to put up with 40 minutes every day?
Here's the background story: Some religious groups have been putting up their holiday displays and an atheist group wanted to add their own Winter Solstice display. The sign was displayed, but stolen, found in a ditch, returned to a radio station, and put back on display.Now the College Station Walmart is not a Super Walmart like the Bryan site. The Super Walmart has two entrances though, making it a fair fight. Kudos to Bryan people!
Twin Cities' Mayors Ring Bells For Salvation ArmyIts a rivalry in the twin cities that's even involved the mayors, only this contest is friendly, and all about trying to see who could raise the most money for the Salvation Army.
Bryan mayor Mark Conlee rang a bell and took donations outside the Bryan Walmart for an hour Saturday.
College Station mayor Ben White did the same, in front of that city's Walmart.
Mayor Conlee was the overwhelming winner, and so Mayor White will present his Bryan counterpart with a bell trophy at an upcoming Bryan City Council meeting.
Over $5,500 dollars was raised for the Salvation Army, with Walmart providing $3,000 dollars to the cause.
Conlee collected $4,002.89, and White brought in $1,589.28, officials said.
Wal-Mart added $1,000 each and pitched an additional $1,000 to Conlee's kettle for his victory, bringing the total raised during the event to more than $8,590.
Last year, Bryan's mayor raised more than $3,000, while College Station's mayor pro tem raised roughly $1,600.
The KBTX article makes it seem like $3000 of the $5,500 came from Walmart. It's good to know that the total was actually over $8000! Wow!
Many of Amsterdam's Brothels, Marijuana Cafes to Close
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Amsterdam unveiled plans Saturday to shutter up to half of its famed brothels and marijuana cafes as part of a major cleanup of its ancient city center.The city says it wants to drive organized crime out of the neighborhood, and is targeting businesses that "generate criminality," including prostitution, gambling parlors, "smart shops" that sell herbal treatments, head shops and "coffee shops" where marijuana is sold openly.
But in June, Columbia got a new chief administrative judge who had a different interpretation of the law, Coble said.
Judge Dana Turner, who was one of the city’s assistant city managers, said the disorderly conduct ordinance was meant to keep people from shouting profanities and fighting in public, not from having sex in public.
“We have made an attempt to have people charged for doing things in our park that were not acceptable, and we were not successful in court,” Baker said.
:a petty offense chiefly against public order and decency that falls short of an indictable misdemeanorDoes not keeping your clothes on in public fall under the term decency? Isn't keeping sexual activities out the public park part of keeping public order? If the judge is confused, she should just hire a Texas Grandma. If Texas Grandma says, "Well, that just ain't right," then it probably doesn't qualify as "decent".
People are having consensual sex in Columbia’s parks — but primarily in Granby Park along the river — and a loophole in the city’s ordinance has kept the city from prosecuting them.Consensual sex? Versus what- rape? By applying the label "consensual", the reporter is telling us not to judge them -butt out- as they are adults making their own decisions that are none of our business. If the newspaper is justifying the sex, then you know it's gotta be about gays. Oh yeah, it was all about gay men. However, I find over and over, it's always worse than I think.
Granby Park has had problems before with men soliciting sex from other men.
But what if we could combine disease awareness with brand name recognition by actually renaming the disease with your drug's brand name? Better still, forget disease recognition altogether. Cast an even wider net and tie your brand name to the symptoms of the disorder. Who cares if other diseases might have the same symptoms? You're going to own that symptom, and then, like a rancher with aGrowing up, my mother always said that generics were no different than the name brand medicines. She might have been right then, but with the emergence of non-American drugs, can we still be so sure? Dr. Reyes breaks down a recent study for us here.
roped calf, brand it.
Translation: one of the ten studies, they found that generic diuretics, AKA “water pills”, a medicine used for water retention and high blood pressure,
didn’t work as well as the name brand product; but what is more upsetting is that two of the seven studies that compared Calcium channel blockers found that the drugs were not equivalent. These medicines are mainly used for high blood pressure, but sometimes used for irregular heart beat.
I WROTE THE BOOK OF LOVE
9-YEAR-OLD REVEALS DATING SECRETS
By JENNIFER FERMINO
He's only 9, but this pint-sized pickup artist already knows plenty about pleasing the ladies.
So much, in fact, that Alec Greven's dating primer, "How to Talk to Girls" - which began as a handwritten, $3 pamphlet sold at his school book fair - hit the shelves nationwide last week.
The fourth-grader from Castle Rock, Colo., advises Lothario wannabes to stop showing off, go easy on the compliments to avoid looking desperate - and be wary of "pretty girls."
"It is easy to spot pretty girls because they have big earrings, fancy dresses and all the jewelry," he writes in Chapter Three.
"Pretty girls are like cars that need a lot of oil."
He advises, "The best choice for most boys is a regular girl. Remember, some pretty girls are coldhearted when it comes to boys. Don't let them get to you."
Guns N’ Roses delivered and so will Dr Pepper
Nov. 20, 2008
LOS ANGELES — Dr Pepper is making good on its promise of free soda now that the release of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy is a reality.
The soft-drink maker said in March that it would give a free soda to everyone in America if the album dropped in 2008. Chinese Democracy, infamously delayed since recording began in 1994, goes on sale Sunday.
“We never thought this day would come,” Tony Jacobs, Dr Pepper’s vice president of marketing, said in a statement. “But now that it’s here, all we can say is: The Dr Pepper’s on us.”
Beginning Sunday at 12:01 a.m., coupons for a free 20-ounce soda will be available for 24 hours on Dr Pepper’s Web site. They’ll be honored until Feb. 28.
Dr Pepper is owned by Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Inc.
I just started reading Texas Women on the Cattle Trails. Yes, I'm a little weird. I read non-fiction instead of just fiction. In high school just glancing at the non-fiction section would give me the heebie-jeebies. Why would anybody voluntarily read a boring book? Why did the book stores even stock them? Did people actually buy, take them home, and read them more than once????In 1855 Kate, at seventeen, had attracted the interest of a local German, who asked to marry her. When Kate's mother, Polly, refused the offer, the infuriated man shot Polly and mortally wounded her. Kate's father rushed to his wife's defense, wrestled the gun from the man, and beat him over the head with the gun, breaking the man's neck and killing him.
The war was hard on the women of the county, who were kept busy spinning and weaving their "own dresses; they looked awefully coarse and ugly, as many of us had never woven any cloth, much less worn such shoddy looking goods. "
"Once out into the frontier of Texas amid the cattle range, we stayed there long enough to gather enough stock to bring with us, which took until the 3rd of May. Then we started for California with our string of seven wagons."
Having selected a captain and given him decision-making authority on the trail, they set off heading west to California. As they neared the cutoff for the fort where they had planned to get provisions and ammunitions, the captain, expressing assurance for their safety, decided not to go to the fort but rather to continue on to find sufficient grass and water for the livestock. Hall Medlin, Kate, and the others went along with the captain and thus were not equipped with the needed guns, ammunition, and food for the ordeals that lay ahead.
"So we started to our doom and I felt as though we were going into trouble as we had heard that the Indians had taken a large herd of cattle only three days before. This, our Captain did not believe, but I did, as we could see find beef cattle along the roadside. The Indians had secured them from the train ahead and had let them scatter out on the range to feed."
"I quickly placed my children and my sister's children in my wagon and put my feather beds around them, as I had heard that bullets would not go through feathers."
Kate grabbed her old Enfield rifle, but the men told the women to make bullets for their few weapons. ... The women melted lead and then poured the hot metal into the molds and, after a quick cooling, passed the bullets to the men, who were reloading as fast as possible.After the fight, the women went ahead to town while the men tried to gather what was left of their cattle. For two weeks, they had to beg for food but were told they were lucky to be alive.
One day Kate's daughter Sarah was walking by the side of the wagon. While attempting to climb back inside, she fell underneath the front wheel, which ran her over, breaking her leg and thigh. Hall Medlin had to sell one yoke of oxen, worth $25, to pay for a doctor in Yuma to set her thighbone.
Kate, as was common at the time, married her late husband's older brother, Marion.
"I tell you, the women of California don't know what hard work is. We women of Texas had worked both indoors and outdoors when needed, which was often during the Civil War."
A 6-year-old Arizona boy was grounded by his mother after he was hit by a police car while riding his bike, MyFOXPhoenix.com reported.
Recently released surveillance video of the Nov. 2 accident shows Jason Justice and his sister Jessica riding their bikes through an apartment complex parking lot. When the Phoenix police car slowly approaches the two, Jessica veers away while Jason continues straight ahead, ultimately getting hit and pushed a short distance by the car.
....
Justice said her son is grounded until he gets his bike fixed and starts wearing a helmet.
How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million
by Joshua Kaplowitz
An idealistic new Yale grad learns up close and personal just how bad inner-city schools can be—and why.
It was May 2000, and the guy at Al Gore’s polling firm seemed baffled. A Yale political-science major, I’d already walked away from a high-paying consulting job a few weeks earlier, and now I was walking away from a job working on a presidential campaign to do . . . what?
Well, when push came to shove, I didn’t want to devote my life to helping the rich get richer or crunching numbers to see what views were most popular for the vice president to adopt. This wasn’t what my 17 years of education were for.
My doctor parents had drummed into me that education was the key to every door, the one thing they couldn’t take away from my ancestors during pogroms and persecutions. They had also filled me with a strong sense of social justice. I couldn’t help feeling guilty dismay when I thought of the millions of kids who’d never even tasted the great teaching—not to mention the supportive family—I’d enjoyed for my entire life.
I told the Al Gore guy, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Weird as he might have thought it, I had decided to teach in an inner-city school
School more important than world record, says coach
By Paula Schlueter Ross
It's official: "The longest basketball marathon is 77 hours, 7 minutes, 7 seconds, set by students of Heartland Lutheran High School in their gymnasium, Nebraska, United States, from 4 to 7 July 2008." So reads the certificate from Guinness World Records, received in August by Coach Lloyd Wagnitz on behalf of the LCMS high school in Grand Island, Neb. Wagnitz plans to officially present the award to the school during its first basketball game of the year Dec. 4.
The "Basketball Extravaganza 77," as it was called, also was designed to raise money for the school's new building, which houses classrooms and its first-ever gym. Players accepted donations from sponsors, with a goal of raising $27,000. As of Oct. 21, the fund was still growing and totaled more than $62,000.
...
Playing basketball for a little over three days straight wasn't an easy feat, he admits. After 10 hours of continuous basketball, the two dozen players - ages 15 to 23 -- wanted to keep going, even though their coach wasn't so sure they should. "I saw in their eyes that they were starting to question if they could do it," Wagnitz told Reporter. But he "continued to encourage the players, said a prayer, and pressed on," even though he was "sick with grief" and "guilt" for hours, and even "broke down in tears" to a parent, who assured the coach that the boys really wanted to keep playing.
Wagnitz says "God had His hand in this event all the way" and also credits the players, who "were willing to do whatever it took" to help the school raise needed funds. The "Basketball Extravaganza 77" Web site at http://www.icanphil413.com/ features photos and testimonies from the players, including Brett, a former Heartland Lutheran Red Hornet, who said he played "to honor all of my teachers, family, and friends that supported me when I was enrolled at Heartland Lutheran High School. They all encouraged me to be the best I could [be]. By playing this game we are raising money to save the school so more kids can attend and have a great experience. This is a great thing God is doing with this school and I want it to continue." The Web site and quotes from players "tell everyone that the main purpose was our school, not the record," acknowledged Wagnitz, whose life has changed dramatically as a result of the "Extravaganza."
