Checking My Yahoo! today at lunch, the AP, Esteemed News Wire that it is, presented me with the following "Top Stories":
What the hell?? Was noontime today really that slow, news-wise? I mean, were there so few interesting things occurring anywhere on the PLANET that I had to be notified post-haste about Hillary Swank's love life and Suzanne Somers' house? I mean...that's just...oh, I can't even talk about this any more.
Quick survey: what do you hear when you play the mp3 linked to by this article?
From Yahoo! News:
I never thought I'd see the day I'd be saying "You tell'em, Newt!"
In the midst of all the chaos in the wake of Katrina, The Hard Rock Cafe's 112-foot, guitar-shaped, sign in Biloxi survived the hurricane virtually unscathed. I leave it to the reader to decide what the hell that means.
(Courtesy of The Obscure Store and Reading Room)
The City Pages this week is featuring an article about the fight over the International Baccalaureate curriculum currently being implemented by the Minnetonka school system.
The big fear seems to be that IB is somehow one-world-government-y and anti-Christian. As a product of the IB program, I really can't see how they got that impression, unless by "anti-Christian" they mean "not religious in its curriculum and offering an Intro to Philosophy course". Or if by "one-world-government-y" they mean "happens to help students realize that great literature and history also came from non-European countries". The sad thing is that to some of the Minnetonka people, those definitions are probably accurate.
What truly saddens me is that the curriculum that provided by far the first interesting classes I'd taken in my high school career is under fire from knee-jerk, jingoistic, religious zealots.
But what makes me saddest most of all--so sad that when I read it, I am reduced to incoherent groans of agony--is this quote from A Concerned Parent:
"My fear is that my kids are going to be taught America isn't better than any other country in the world."
Eaaaaaaaaeeeeeerrrrruuuuuuuuuuugh.
I truly don't care about the Scott Peterson trial. It's a horrible thing, but the media's blown it waaaaay out of proportion, and that's all I've got to say on that. But I just had to point out this photo of some of the jurors. Do these look like people who've just sentenced a man to death? They look more like reality show contestants.
Yeesh.
While I find most reality shows to be simply irritating, this strikes me as just flat out disgusting.
What I find most interesting about this article is that it's an NPR article about the doings of NPR, and they apparantly got the story wrong intially. What that says about the internals of NPR, I don't know.
Anyhoo, back to work.
In an article about a federal judge rejecting the attempt to block gay marriages in Massachusetts (yay!), we get this quote from the Liberty Counsel's Matthew Staver: "This shows how four individuals can affect the entire country." He makes it sound like it's never happened before. Apparently, he's forgotten when five individuals affected the entire world.
From a story about the State Fair banning guns on MPR this morning:
David Gross from the gun rights group says if officials attempt to remove someone from the fairgrounds who's legally carrying a handgun, that person will have a strong civil rights claim against the State Fair. And Gross says it would be a claim he'd be happy to litigate.
"If an individual who is subject to enforcement comes to me, you can take it to the bank. OK? It would be the same thing as if an African American went to polling place and they said, 'Well, you've got a right to vote, but not here,'" says Gross.
Call me crazy, but, legal or not, preventing some yahoo from toting a Smith & Wesson to the State Fair doesn't really strike me as the same as disenfranchising someone based on their ethnicity.
Then again, I'm sure I'll regret saying that when the Commies use the State Fair as their staging ground for invasion...