Category: Uncategorized

A public school teacher provides a little too much help after class:

[Daniel] Cliatt is accused of raping a 13-year-old repeatedly after school, at school, every day for months. Cocoa police say the 29-year-old, 360-pound sixth grade teacher started by showing the boy pornography, then moved to sex acts, almost 100 of them. That didn’t stop until, police say, another teacher walked into Cliatt’s classroom Friday after school.

“At first, she walked in and didn’t know what she was seeing. But she ran out and grabbed a supervisor,” explained Detective Barbara Matthews, Cocoa Police Department.

Cliatt has been a teacher at Endeavour Elementary School for five years and he’s worked there for 10. The school district is already planning a termination hearing.

Too bad Cliatt doesn’t work in Detroit. He’d still have his teaching job. I’m only surprised the other teacher turned him in.

The NYT paints an unflattering portrait of Katie Couric:

Viewers – and most of them are women – like Ms. Couric’s cheeky, easygoing manner; affection grew into admiration after her husband died of colon cancer in 1998 and Ms. Couric made early detection her cause. (In 2000 she underwent a colonoscopy on the program.)

But “Today” has turned her popularity into a Marxist-style cult of personality. The camera fixates on Ms. Couric’s legs during interviews, she performs in innumerable skits and stunts, and her clowning is given center stage even during news events. “Today” hit a low point in July, when Saddam Hussein appeared in a Baghdad courtroom to hear the charges he will face when he goes to trial as a war criminal. All the networks interrupted their programming to show live images of Mr. Hussein – all except NBC. “Today” stayed on Ms. Couric swatting shuttlecocks with the United States Olympic badminton team.

A Marxist-style cult… how very apropos! As some of you may know, I am an anti-democrat as well as being against both the Democratic and National Democratic parties, and the fact that anyone cares even the slightest about what this woman thinks, says or does should suffice to prove the inadequacy of the concept.

I find the cult of the celebrity to be massively distasteful. It is a mistaken conflation; the fact that one of the SF writers I consider to be the most talented and insightful is a blithering cretin when it comes to politics takes absolutely nothing away from my admiration for him or my appreciation for his writing and ideas about the future. But the celebrity cult is a form of demigod worship, as we assign importance and values on the basis of what is often nothing more than physical attractivness or even just familiarity with a friendly fake smile on the television screen.

I hope that the decentralization of the media will lead to the reduction in importance and influence of these celeb-cults. I suppose that’s unlikely, however, since it has always suited the Imperators to make sure the eyes of the people are focused on what is happening in the Coliseum and the Arena, not on the Palatine Hill.

Apparently those newspaper editors who said my columns were too difficult for their See-Spot-Run readerships weren’t entirely off-base. I ran today’s column through the Readability Index – courtesy of Bane – which rendered the following results:

Gunning Fog Index 14.07
Flesch Reading Ease 46.90
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 9.57

Which apparently means that my column falls somewhere between The Times and The Guardian, both UK papers rated at a Fog Index of 14, and academic papers (15-20). Time Magazine, on the other hand, was rated at 10.

This blog, however, is a rather easier slog, almost translucent in its clarity:

Gunning Fog Index 10.18
Flesch Reading Ease 67.49
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 6.87

Of course, it’s pretty clear that this boils down to little more than how many syllables are in the words one uses. I’ve been a little skeptical of this concept ever since being accused – in print – of showing off by using big words such as “nadir”. That’s right, all five letters and two syllables of it.

From the US Dept. of Education, brought to my attention by TZ:

Responses from students who indicated they had experienced one of the listed behaviors were analyzed using descriptive statistics and frequencies. This analysis (Shakeshaft, 2003) indicates that 9.6 percent of all students in grades 8 to 11 report contact and/or noncontact educator sexual misconduct that was unwanted. 8.7 percent report only noncontact sexual misconduct and 6.7 percent experienced only contact misconduct…. Of students who experienced any kind of sexual misconduct in schools, 21 percent were targets of educators, while the remaining 79 percent were targets of other students.

So, think for a moment about how much unwanted ass-grabbing and whatnot was going on around you at your high school. Now figure a quarter of that was also happening a little less publicly thanks to the teachers, principals and coaches around you. Strangely, male students are nearly as likely to be targeted as female students, although male educators do most of the abusing. This proclivity of public school teachers for homosexual abuse is supported by the fact that 4 of the 22 school employees exposed in a recent Detroit article were men attacking boys.

Another interesting tidbit is the fact that the younger the abused child is, the more likely the abuser is to be an award-winning teacher considered to be one of the best ones in the school. This shouldn’t be that surprising, as it’s only logical to expect pedophiles to go where the kids are. I’ve always had a certain skepticism about any man who voluntarily spends a inordinate amount of time with children; most dads consider four straight hours with their own kids to be an overdose. Especially all those youth pastors with mustaches….

I coach little kids soccer myself, so one could argue that I belong on the sketchy list too, but in my defense, I don’t even pretend to be interested in the kids. They are simply my little pawns on the big green chess board… I teach them the skills and tactics they need to succeed on the field, nothing more. The parents appeared to be stunned at the first big tournament I coached, when we had a break for 90 minutes and I simply told them where to bring the kids for the next game, then walked away for the duration. Hey, they were all right there and I’m a coach, not a babysitter.

I’m pretty sure they would have demanded my dismissal by the club had we not shocked everyone by winning the tournament, in the finals beating a team that had stomped us 14-0 only three months before. You want the Phil Jackson of kiddy soccer, you’re going to put up with some idiosyncracies. Minus, of course, the mustache.

Finally, I should note that 6 of the 14 teachers convicted in that Detroit report are still certified to teach in the Detroit public schools. Socialization is important, after all!

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

Minnesota adopted a law in 1987 that clearly established the legality of home education. In 1985-86, an estimated 654 Minnesota children were home-schooled. This year, that number is 18,000. Today, Minnesota has some of the stricter laws overseeing home schooling….

For many years, Northwestern College, a Christian liberal arts school in St. Paul, has actively recruited home-schoolers, who make up 10 percent of its student body. It was a unique strategy — until now.

“Until recently, a number of colleges and universities were very skeptical of home-schoolers; they just didn’t know how to approach or deal with them,” says Ken Faffler, Northwestern admissions director. “That was fine with me; we wanted all of them we could get,” Faffler says. “We could see, on average, they’re above average … on SAT and ACT exams. And they also seem to have a slightly higher level of maturity — all this worry about socialization is something we knew we didn’t have to consider.”

Now, Ivy League schools, businesses like Apple Computer, PBS and many others are reaching out to the home-schooler.

Rather than simply picking someone, I elected to decide the matter in a very high-tech way, assigning each volunteer a number then rolling two ten-sided dice. Hey, it’s as close to role-playing as I’ve come since the time I had a bikini-clad Space Bunny rolling Traveller characters in the Bahamas*.

The amusing part of that experience was how Space Bunny was simply in agony over the fate of her characters, one of Traveller’s distinguishing characteristics being that you could actually kill off your character while in the process of making him.

So, after each die roll, she’d immediately cover her eyes, usually as a prelude to something that went like this:

“What happened? Tell me what happened!”

“Well, the good news is that you survived the raid. The bad news is that you were badly wounded, lost an eye and will be cashiered from the Imperial Marines without gaining any more skills. They did give you a nice medal, though.”

“I hate this game! It’s awful!”

Anyhow, next week’s pinata – that is to say, Guest Blogger of the Week – is ANIMATE MATTERS. In 750 words or less, get it to me sometime on Friday, Wes.

* Sure, it sounds bad, but this should not be held as evidence against me in any future Nuremburg Geek Trials. We held the rights to the game at the time and were in the process of designing a second-party title for Sega of America on what was then called the Katana, later the Dreamscape. Unfortunately for Traveller fans and us, Sega of Japan killed off SOA in favor of giving Arsenal a lot of money to put Dreamscape on their jerseys. Good for the Gunners, not so great for the Sega Dreamscape. I still have the Arsenal jersey.

Andrew Stuttaford writes of the impending French NO vote on the EU “constitution”:

Luxembourg’s prime minister, the evocatively named Jean-Claude Juncker, has proved that, contrary to the rumours, that dour bunch of eurocrats, placemen and rentiers located down in the Ardennes really do have a sense of humour. He’s saying that the EU will “continue to develop” if the constitution is voted right (true enough, alas), but that the process will slow down and that as a result “we would lose two decades, during which certain parts of the world would move ahead by adopting Europe’s model, while others would catch up with us.”

Quite why anyone else should want to adopt “Europe’s model,” which is best seen as the Ford Pinto of economic management and the Rolls Royce of corruption, is beyond me.

Stuttaford’s description of the European model is correct, but he seems to miss the crucial implication of what Juncker is saying, namely, that other parts of the world are already working on adopting Europe’s supranational model. Now, what parts of the world could he be referring to? And is it possible, perhaps even probable, tht this just might have a little something to do with the Mexican minister’s mention last week of US-Mexican integration?

From the Telegraph:

The BBC was last night plunged into a damaging general election row after it admitted equipping three hecklers with microphones and sending them into a campaign meeting addressed by Michael Howard, the Conservative leader….

Last night, the BBC claimed that the exercise was part of a “completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling” and said that other parties’ meetings were being “observed”. However, The Telegraph has established that none of Tony Blair’s meetings was infiltrated or disrupted in similar fashion.

Of course, this would never happen in the USA, where journalists are trained to be objective, unlike that amateur operation at the BBC. And I’m sure it’s merely a coincidence that the employees at the government-owned and operated BBC should actively favor the party that supports increasing the size and scope of government.

No wonder the Democrats seek a nationalized media.

There’s no question that the NFL is the premier sports league in America. I daresay there’s more interest in the NFL draft than there is in any baseball or basketball playoff games this weekend.

I mean, the White Buffalo is in no less than THREE draft pools. It’s madness, I tell you, madness!

Although not as crazy as the idea of the Vikings taking another RB at 7. Unfortunately, the possibility is a real one given the low-wattage at which Mike Tice operates.

In the unlikely event that you care but aren’t watching, the first three were: Smith, Brown, Edwards. And if you don’t know exactly what that means, you really don’t need to know.

UPDATE – WR Troy Williamson. 6-2, fast, big-play receiver. A good pick. He’s got more speed than Mike Williams, who strikes me a more as a potential Keyshawn Johnson possession receiver than a Randy Moss replacement. It’s a roll of the dice in any case, but regardless of whether it was Brown, Williams and Benson being gone that forced the Vikes to do the right thing or not, it was a sensible pick, which for the Vikings is all one hopes for.

The question of filling a need higher than one has to is a bogus one; a need is a need. There’s a lot more genuine value in having Troy Williamson catching balls on the field than in a hypothetical higher value like Aaron Rodgers sitting on the bench watching Daunte throw the ball.