Browsing Posts in Misc
“Your score is 0 on a scale of 1 to 10. You hate Bush with a writhing passion. You think he is an idiot, a liar, and a warmonger who has been an utterly incompetent, miserable failure of a president. Nothing would give you greater pleasure than seeing him impeached and run out of the White House, except maybe seeing him dragged away in handcuffs.”
The last video today, I promise. Some people might remember the post I had a few weeks ago of the girl that took a picture of herself everyday for 3 years. Well, it turns out she’s not the only person who had that idea (or apparently the first). This is a guy named Noah whose been taking his picture for 6 years:
If the world’s population were reduced to 100, it would look something like this…
According to Pastor Brian Lewis and his wife Tara, Animo Venice Charter Public High School, a school serving the city of Venice, California, and the Los Angeles Westside, violated their parental rights when school officials failed to inform the parents that the school would be showing his daughter Alexis and fellow students the R-rated movie, Donnie Darko.
The Motion Picture Association of America gave Donnie Darko the restricted rating “for language, some drug use, and violence.” But the Lewises say the movie is filled with all kinds of offensive subject matter, including “gross obscenities, various types of deviant sexual activity, and misogynistic fantasy.”
The Internet Movie Database describes Donnie Darko as the story of “a troubled teenager who is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.” Tara Lewis says the film’s disturbing and obscene content has negatively affected her daughter both spiritually and emotionally.
“My daughter likes to write. She generally writes poems and things of that sort,” Tara explains. “And right after she saw the movie, I started seeing poems with profanity, sexual content — things that I have never seen her write before, never even found in some of her poems,” the distraught mother says. She has no doubt Donny Darko was the source of this new and disturbing bent in her daughter’s writing, she says, “because this movie was pretty graphic.”
Brian Lewis is likewise convinced that his daughter’s mind was invaded by the film’s explicit content; he even goes so far as to say that Animo Venice High School officials are responsible for the “emotional kidnapping and psychological rape” of his daughter’s “Christian innocence,” which is why he says he and his wife plan to sue the school for showing Donnie Darko to their daughter without giving them prior notice.
The California pastor notes that he has rejected an offer from the school’s insurance company to settle his complaint out of court. Far from being prepared to settle, he says he and Tara would like to bring others into his fight with the school over its decision to allow the inappropriate film to be shown to kids without giving parents advance warning and an opportunity to opt their children out.
“We would love to launch a class-action suit,” Brian says, “because it was shown to approximately 148 fifteen-year-olds. And the thing is that they violated the law when they showed it without parental consent. You know, these movies are restricted for a reason, and these guidelines are put there for a reason. You can’t just show anything to a teenager.”
“There are other things that need to be taken into account here. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can’t just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else!” – Donnie Darko
Personally, I like this was a minor mistake on the school’s part (like 15 year old’s don’t ever see R-rated movies), and a gross over-reaction by the parents. This is how you want to teach your children to react when they encounter something objectionable in their lives? Just like in the Barney penis letter, I think the parents’ reaction to the situation is far more harmful than whatever damage the original situation could have caused. I saw this over on Wasp Jerkey, and I love his comments:
Check out this interactive map of Northern Africa and the Middle East. How well do you know your geography?
Happy Birthday, Rachel!!
No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle’s house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house.
This is just weird. After hearing complaints for 40 years, the city is finally told Mr. Lyette to stop his digging and will be filling in the holes with concrete at a cost of £100,000, which Mr. Lyette wil be billed for. He claims it was just home improvements and denies that he dug under anyone’s property but his own.
link: After 40 years’ burrowing, Mole Man of Hackney is ordered to stop
Just in case any of you were wondering, I thought I’d post a link to an explanation. This comes from a German children’s book on reproduction. (Do not view if you are offended by cartoon depictions of sex.)
Now we know.
