Sep
12
2007

URLs du Jour

2007-09-12

  • Reductio ad absurdum: sometimes it happens quickly, but in Merrimack, NH, it takes two years.
    A New Hampshire teenager's yearbook photo has been rejected, because she's holding a flower. Merrimack High School student Melissa Morin's senior photograph featured her and a small red flower. School officials, however, said the picture is not going to make it in the yearbook because props aren't allowed. […]

    The policy stemmed from a 2005 controversy in Londonderry, where a student posed with his gun. A judge ruled in favor of the school, but Merrimack officials said they didn't want to face similar scuffles.

    As a wise man once said: "Sailing the ship of policy to avoid controversy guarantees it will run aground on the rocky shore of ridicule."

    Well, actually, it wasn't a wise man, it was me.

  • But it's not just in New Hampshire.
    Under a new school rule, students at Hobbton High School [in Newton Grove, North Carolina] are not allowed to wear items with flags, from any country, including the United States.

    The new rule stems from a controversy over students wearing shirts bearing flags of other countries.

    Surely some other state can give NH and NC some competition in the coveted "dullest school administrators" competition?

  • Radley Balko has a good piece at Politico excorciating the GOP for being weak on federalism, specifically with respect to federal raids on marijuana clinics in states that have legalized medical pot. Fred Thompson is the lone Republican hope:
    Thompson is the only candidate yet to take a public position on the raids. While he's right to note his impressive pro-federalist voting record in the Senate, he also voted for a number of bills strengthening the federal war on drugs.

    And while Thompson's campaign essays rightly decry the federalization of crime and the soaring U.S. prison population, they're curiously silent on the war on drugs — a leading cause of both of these troubling trends. Thompson's campaign did not respond to inquiries about his position on the DEA raids for this article.

    In response to the recent request for blogospheric Fred-questions, I submitted:
    How does your enthusiasm for Federalism apply to the War on Drugs?
    … it'll be interesting if I hear anything back on that.

  • I spotted the New York Times using my favorite euphemism for aging boomers: "New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age" (emphasis added). Also amusing was the reporter's apparent cluelessness in passing along this quote from "Martha Starks, 52, a retired optician in Tucson":
    "They don't even know who Aretha is — she's the queen of soul!" she said.
    Martha not only remembers Aretha from the 60s, she also remembers Steely Dan from 1980. Hard times have befallen the soul survivors.

    [UPDATE (2007-09-30): Ms. Starks wrote me to confirm my guess about the NYT's reporter:

    ... during two different conversations, the reporter couldn't even PRONOUNCE Aretha correctly!
    Ah, kids these days!]

  • In the same vein, the Torch points out how modern-day University administrators are probably too young (or, more likely, too humor-impaired) to remember the line from 1975's Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!" Specifically, failure to have a well-rounded Pythonesque background can cause one to write ever more idiotic speech codes.


Last Modified 2012-10-17 3:09 PM EDT