Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school – Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. – have been grating on him, and it shows. His teacher recently emailed me; she’d noticed a change in his behavior (more belligerent, less likely to cooperate) and wanted to know if there was anything going on at home.
More:
The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.
And
Kids haven’t changed much over the past 150 years; our society has. So while my son still needs movement, still craves real-world learning, physical labor and ways to contribute to his family and his world, he’s expected to spend most of his time in a desk, in a classroom, with 20-some other kids his age. He’s not allowed to go outside at school when it’s too cold or wet; he’s expected to sit quietly in the library or auditorium during recess time. He’s allowed few opportunities for “real” work; today, when you hand an 8-year-old a saw or allow him to start a fire, people look at you askance.
I will be honest.. I really never thought of this until I read this article. And with a 4-year-old getting closer to the magic age of kindergarten, I am a little disturbed now by what me and my wife as parents may face..Especially known the movement and activity my son needs.
Why after all of these years of does a PINK FLOYD song continue in schools.. why does it seem kids are meat for sausage instead of brains for education? Why have we failed not only boys, but girls? Why is America lagging behind? Why is it all just wrong.
There is lots of information online regarding net neutraility.. lots of truth. Lots of bunk. Lots of reasons to also be a little freaked by what may occur when the FCC decides on this..
There’s one source I trust: The Electronic Frontier Foundation. The site also has a great post that may lead you to understand this entire mess just a little better.
Madge is showing her age a little.. the Material Mom fell off a stage onto one of her male dancing goats at the BRIT awards.. The world of gossip and celebrity is abuzz about the Madge Taking a Tumble Video.. the UK DAILY MAIL, without question, has the best coverage: Giant full screen images of the shocking moment when Madonna fell backwards off the stage.. The Drudge Report is leading with this as the top story today—Drudge knocked down the FCC rules for the Madonna fall. He knows how to get hits, still..
Others are looking at the video in a little more curious way. After all, this is the year of the goat on the Chinese calender—and that’s not a good thing for the world. Play with the ram? Get the horns. Madonna did with this mishap.
The DAILY MAIL notes the lyrics of a song she performed:
Sang lyrics including ‘I’m going to carry on’ and ‘Watch me stumble’
Stumble. Tumble. Fumble.
This is stuff memes are made of..
My wife and I saw this and showed it to my now four-year-old son. He laughed at gave back the phone.. nothing major, just a lady with a cape falling on top of a goat. Nothing he never saw on Phinneas and Ferb already..
But in the end, things seemed ok.
The 56-year-old looked shocked - and briefly stopped singing - after she fell down a set of stairs, but picked herself back up and continued to the end.
No goats were harmed in the making of this GIF that will live in showbiz infamy..
Eclipse to block out 95 per cent of sunlight in parts of Europe
According to the report appearing in the UK TELEGRAPH today, this nearly 100% eclipse on March 20 may actually cause problems..
The eclipse is going to be the biggest one since 1999.
Victoria Ward writes this,
Power supplies could drop suddenly next month when the UK is plunged into darkness with an eclipse of the sun. Energy experts warned there could be possible blackouts in the biggest solar eclipse since 1999. Nearly 90 per cent of the sun’s rays will be blocked out in parts of Europe on March 20. In London and the South East, 85 per cent of the sun will be obscured by the moon whilst in northern Scotland, more than 95 per cent will be covered. The National Grid has warned that solar power output in Britain will halve during the event.
My first inclination on this was that the story appearing is just an example of fear porn and attempt to get readers and clicks. But it could also be a relevant message about the future. If we rely heavily on solar energy, there very well will be moments where, perhaps, our power source goes black. Or maybe times when that same power source throws a hissy fit and solar storms knock down a grid..
Ward says,
He told the Financial Times: “In a way March 20 is a glimpse into the future of our power systems.” The eclipse will last around two hours from 8.40am. The next one will not be until 2026.
So .. Eclipsepocalypse 2015 begins in earnest.. Be afraid.
The title was “My Name is Metal” and talked about the very real future that is about to hit humanity like a freight train: Babies becoming less inclined to being born from a womb.. instead, futuristic ways of putting stem cells away for later, so women can choose when she has a child, is coming. Along with that, religious implications, societal upheaval, commonplace gay parents, and future shock..
Clyde Lewis opened his show with shock and awe:
Being in a lab or a building where we can grow children is at least two years away according to a report from Russia Today and the child-growing lab is being used in order to allow two men to have children. Babies of same-sex couples are becoming a future prospect, as scientists have disclosed revolutionary research on making human egg and sperm cells using the skin of two adults. It means that we might soon see a fully “dish-manufactured” baby in a lab.
The show had a free-flowing only caller driven format .. during the course of the program—and this is not a scientific viewpoint at all—the majority of younger callers seemed to be better apt to having agreeable minds to the future coming. However, older callers—and those who professed more of a Bible bumper belief system—did not.
The amazing part is this: It’s all happening. Not later, but now.
There are dangers with this future. But amazing possibilities too.. the idea of knowing genetic defects prior to birth.. the chance for parents who cannot have children being able to in new ways.. And even more, as Clyde Lewis argued, this could end the abortion debate. Imagine no more need for women to consider aborting a fetus… instead putting it all on hold, saving the pregnancy for when she is ready through the use of artificial practices.
The future is now. And it’s going to scare a lot of people. It’s going to shred old style beliefs on life and death.. And it’s going to be a totally more revolutionary idea than the test tube baby of last century.
For a LOT of fun, go about 2 hours and 29 minutes into the broadcast..
And while you’re at it, check out the "the future" tag from Coal Speaker to see all of the years I have been talking and thinking about this very thing.,.
This video was caught by a police dash cam. You can see, quite literally out of the clear blue sky, the gas line ruptures and the entire house blows to bits.
The current thought is that a gas main was ruptured—somehow. This is how the UK TELEGRAPH summed up the event for historical record:
The explosion happened about 90 minutes after police received the first report of a strong gas smell in the area.
"As the gas company was working to localise and mitigate the gas leak there was an explosion that by all accounts totally destroyed the house at 59 Oak Avenue, there’s nothing left there but the basement foundation," said Captain Tom Dellane of the Stafford Police Department.
This is a prime reason that if you are going to excavate the ground, place a call before you dig. Call 811.. It can save a life.. The footage you see is not foreign.. it can happy in any happy and quaint neighborhood near you..
Rapper Azealia Banks brought witchcraft back into the mainstream by tweeting ‘I’m really a witch’. But women in the US have been harnessing its power for decades as a ‘spiritual but not religious’ way to express feminist ambitions
This fascinating story written by Sady Doyle in the UK GUARDIAN explains how a new burst of ‘witches’ is taking place in the modern world..
The GUARDIAN seems to credit modern pop culture and entertainment with the new witchcraft of our age.. Things like AMERICAN HORROR STORY and the COVEN. Doyle even gives a nod to the TUMBLR site http://charmcore.tumblr.com/.. I have visited it, though it seems more that it’s a site of reblogs as opposed to original content.
But there is another angle, one more political: Feminism and the power of the female, symbolized by the strength of a witch..
Doyle writes,
Wicca, with its focus on a goddess (rather than a male god – though it has those too) and its relatively open approach to creating canon, was a natural fit for many feminist women interested in writing their own spiritual script. But women who weren’t explicitly Wiccan were also drawn to “witchy” ways of processing the world: not only did women make feminist tarot cards in the 1970s, author Alice Walker personally endorsed one set – the Motherpeace deck. Feminist psychologists such as Jean Shinoda Bolen and Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote books on using goddess imagery and myths as means of understanding female subjectivity.
There has been a long and wrong series of centuries in which witches were proclaimed evil.. they were stoned, drowned to death, and ‘pressed’ with heavy objects.
I know several people who practice Wicca. They are fine, amazing people. While they may have one too many ‘coexist’ bumper stickers, they don’t cause harm to me or society.
This is a movie poster blast from the past.. it was called THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN, and a was loosely based on the ‘Phanton Killer’ or the ‘Texarkana Moonlight Murders' that took place ni 1946..
The other evening, I got the chance to watch the 2014 remake of this 1976 classic.. The redo was interesting. It was like DICK TRACY meets SCREAM, a movie with cartoonish appeal that also featured a ‘we know this is a horror movie’ attitude like Wes Craven’s late 20th century horror series..
However, any time I watch a remake, I typically go back and watch the original. Either for posterity or just because I want to check off the similarities and differences between each incarnation..
The original SUNDOWN film wasn’t exceptional by any stretch of imagination.. But it created a new genre—it may be one of the least known movies that started the slasher flicks of the late 70s and all of the 1980s. The TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN was brutal at times and most likely difficult to view during some moments in theaters during the Carter years..
But there was one thing that THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN got right in 1976: One of the most memorable posters I have ever seen for a movie, especially a horror flick.. There’s something freakish about that sunset image and the town, that lonely town, tucked safely but dangerously between the trees and mountains.. And that foreboding image of the Phantom with his freakish mask that only displays two eye holes..
This poster has stuck in my mind for years.. Since I was younger and first stayed up late without my parents knowing to watch this on Rhonda Shear’s UP ALL NIGHT, I remembered that poster. . and that quaint image of Americana destroyed by a masked villain to stole innocence..
I was born in 1980, years after this original film.. But as a child of the 1980s, a certain spirit of the 70s was bred into my in my early life..
This image presented on the poster haunted me for two distinct reasons: 1) It reminded me of the scene from ET where Halloweeners begin to the roam the streets at sundown, and 2) the image looks amazingly like the town I grew up in the 80s, Centralia PA—a town with an underground mine fire that met its demise because of that crisis..
This post is not a movie review .. I quite frankly disliked the new remake and the original was lackluster. But it was important in the history of horror movies. It gave us the slasher flick. And it gave me chills each time I thought about that hauntingly beautiful movie poster..
Two newspapers followed me on TUMBLR today—2!
Out of respect, I will hold off on my ‘print is dead’ rhetoric for at least a week.
This is going to become quite the epic battle. Not sure how many internet users realize how important this is, if they did their be moving gifs and memes already
UK GUARDIAN: Exclusive: Secret interrogation facility reveals creeping aspects of war on terror in US city as accounts describe shackling and brutality without basic rights
British press dropped a bombshell on the world.. Reporting by Spencer Ackerman of the UK GUARDIAN has created a firestorm of controversy around the globe, even though American news seemingly is ignoring the revelations printed in latest runs of the British paper..
Ackerman writes,
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Among the many points blasted in the story from the GUARDIAN, police do some interesting things.. these salient points are presented:
Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
One quote from the article was a bit chilling, with one protester telling the reporter, “It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you”
The Chicago police department was forced into an awkward position on this matter.. they issued their defense in a statement to the GUARDIAN.. They said, in part:
"The allegations in this instance are not supported by facts. The vast majority of our officers serve the public with honor and integrity, and alleged actions of one individual decades ago are in no way indicative of the hard working men and women who put their lives on the line each day to protect residents."
Is this the night Chicago died? Or the night that constitutional did?
It all started with a quote ‘we are’ tweet. Olbermann responded ‘pitiful’.. The problem is the original post linked a story showing that Penn State raised 13 million dollars for cancer research. Regardless of the controversy, he did not back down ..
