Proposed Missouri law could land librarians in jail for objectionable material

A Missouri lawmaker has proposed a law aimed at making libraries "safe" for children--a law which critics say could land librarians in jail.

Rep. Ben Baker (R - Neosho*) introduced a bill that would create a five person parental review board to make sure "inappropriate material" does not fall into the hands of minors.

"The main thing is I want to be able to take my kids to a library and make sure they’re in a safe environment, and that they’re not gonna be exposed to something that is objectionable material," Baker told KOAM-TV news.

Missouri must be a hotbed of library hedonism, where the Judy Blume books practically throw themselves at small children.

"I just think that we need to be careful about funding something with our taxpayer dollars without parental consent," Baker said. Indeed, the parental board's decisions on what is or isn't "appropriate" will be final, with no appeal allowed from librarians.

Doubling-down on the legislation, librarians found to "willfully" disobey the board's rulings may be fined $500 or face up to one year of imprisonment in a county jail.

Before you dismiss Representative Baker's bill as being misguided, his own campaign website lists his belief in fighting for "excellence in education" and "defending personal liberties."

Because nothing educates a child quite like taking away their freedom to read a book.



* While Neosho sounds like the name of a futuristic city in some Japanese anime show, it's a small town of around 12,000 people in the southwestern corner of Missouri, down near the Oklahoma and Arkansas borders.

Don't assume it's a backwater no man's land. Its citizens have a multitude of things going for it, including a Walmart, a Taco Bell, and a gnawing sense of desperation and melancholy you just won't find anywhere else.

Poor school and rich school are not the same school.

The Commonwealth School, founded in 1957, is a tony private institution in Boston. With a yearly tuition of $40,000, it typically sends students off to MIT and Ivy League universities.

The Commonwealth Academy, founded in 2011, is a small private school 90-miles away in Springfield, MA. With a yearly tuition of under $1,200, it typically does not see students attend the elite educational colleges of America.

This hasn't stopped the School from filing a $2 million lawsuit against the Academy claiming "irreparable harm" and financial loss that is "presently incalculable" has occurred. Why? Because both facilities use the word "Commonwealth" in their name.

While the School claims they didn't even know the Academy existed until 2015, School headmaster William Wharton tells the Boston Globe that the word is "a part of our identity, and it’s something that we ultimately have to protect." Nothing like stopping confusion among things by creating confusion in the first place.

One major sticking point is that Massachusetts officially goes by the title of Commonwealth of Massachusetts. (As do Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.) With both institutions located in the same state, and thousands of different locations and buildings in the state all labeled with the word, it's a tricky argument by the School.

Then there's one other minor issue, if this isn't already too much commonwealth for you to handle in one sitting: There's already a separate Commonwealth Academy, located in Virginia, who says they're perfectly content with the similarly named school in Massachusetts.

A hearing on the matter is expected to be held on July 12th.

In the meantime, no common sense or common good can apparently come from "Commonwealth."

Russian man shot in grocery store during argument over the writings of philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Naturally.

10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You

Charles Wheelan of the Wall Street Journal wrote 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You the other day. It's everything you'd expect a gentleman of a higher socio-economic background to tell you, with stellar tidbits like:

"It's all borrowed time. You shouldn't take anything for granted."

HOLD ON! Let me get the steno pad and pencil out. Borrowed time, you say? Don't...take...things...for...granted. Jotting that nugget down. Got it!

But Chuck is just rehashing yesterday's homefries. If you're taking things for granted, odds are you're taking Chuck Wheelan's advice for granted, too, so his article is a little self-defeating, no?

So here's my own 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You:


1.) Eat more Taco Bell.

Listen, cheap and fatty fast food is probably on the horizon for you at some point or another. You'll either be broke after getting off the gravy train of mommy and daddy that you've ridden in college, or you're going to become one of the tens of millions of Americans who's morbidly obese. There's a 50/50 shot you'll probably die of heart disease at some point eventually, so why spend a lot of money in the process? I'm fairly certain Taco Bell's "beef" is just modified zesty cat food anyway.

Which brings me to...


2.) Eat more cat food.

Just cut out the middle man at this point.


3.) Get a pet.

You shouldn't have a baby before you can handle a pet. Fish don't count either. No one's impressed by your ability to keep a betta fish alive two weeks while vacationing somewhere. You need something capable of dying after a few days of neglect. A cat is good. A dog is better. A dog with failing kidneys and a bad hip is best.

Don't get a snake or a bird. That's for lonely people.


4.) Don't read.

Don't read what you're supposed to at least. Don't read what your old professors like, what Oprah enjoys, or what your best friend swears by. (Just say no to Twilight.)

Professors are biased. Oprah is nuts. And your friend is probably functionally illiterate.


5.) Don't travel to Europe.

Listen, if you're traveling to Europe, odds are you're setting back international relations by a solid fifty years. There's a reason Europeans hate Americans, and a lot of it has to do with your affinity for cheap beer. That might work in a dorm room, but it ain't flying at Westminster Abbey.

Save the European vacations for when you're elderly--when bedtimes are at 7pm and the hardest thing you'll drink is pudding.


6.) Don't eat anything bigger than your head.

That 2lb Fuddruckers cheeseburger? Don't go there.


7.) Be a real person.

It's great that you're highly skilled at brown-nosing. You're really angling for that middle-management position someday that'll make your soul dead and vacant by the time you're 40. Congrats! Having a large supply of Chapstick on hand to kiss butt for the next fifty years of your life is admirable, but it'll lead to a life of misery, monotony, and expensive therapy bills.

In the meantime, do me a favor and be a real person. Be a contrarian. Feel free to go against popular opinion when warranted. Life isn't an Up With People routine, and drum circles won't occur nearly as often as you hope.

Grapes don't just grow on a vine, y'know?


8.) Wear pants.

Odds are you don't have the legs for anything else.


9.) Always keep people hanging.

Which brings us to #10...

International Women's Day: 2012

Pay some respect to the women in your life today. It's International Women's Day. Created in 1909, and largely only celebrated in most of the world starting in 1977, it's a day to remember the struggles women have faced--and still face--in an unjust world of inadequate pay, secondary status, and nonexistent civil rights in large swaths of the world.

Being largely raised by only women myself--women who worked two jobs or struggled daily to get by--a hat-tip / fist-bump / hug goes to my mother. She's credited with anything good that comes out of me.

And anything bad in me? Outside influences. I promise, she's trying to fix it. Every day.




As a side note: how is this not an official holiday in the United States? It's an official holiday in various countries including, but not limited to: Moldova, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Zambia, Eritrea, Angola, Armenia, Russia, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Burkina Faso, and Uganda. UGANDA! Home of the ever-internet-famous memes Joseph Kony...Uganda celebrates International Women's Day.

But not America.

Personally, I always thought Miss Piggy was a Fascist.

Also from the interwebs recently:

Fox Business Network analysts say that The Muppets are communists.

I, for one, have always suspected Elmo of being a commie. Why the red fur, man? Why the hippie love? Why all the sharing??

Says Mr. Corporate Analyst #1:
"It's amazing how far the left will go just to manipulate your kids, to convince them, give the anti-corporate message."

Says Mr Corporate Analyst #2 in reply:
"They've been doing it for decades. Hollywood, the left, the media, they hate the oil industry...They hate corporate America. And so you'll see all these movies attacking it, whether it was 'Cars 2,' which was another kids' movie, the George Clooney movie 'Syriana,' 'There Will Be Blood,' all these movies attacking the oil industry, none of them reminding people what oil means for most people: fuel to light a hospital, heat your home, fuel an ambulance to get you to the hospital if you need that. And they don't want to tell that story."

I know! Why hasn't there been a film about someone fueling up an ambulance?!


Photo: A website called libcom.org. Libcom = libertarian communists. I don't know what that even remotely means, but the photo is cute/serves a purpose.

Massachusetts teacher was once...errr...he was once...uhh...how do I say this?

Kevin Hogan is a teacher at a Malden, MA, charter school. The local Fox News affiliate found out from a tip that Hogan acted in a few gay pornography movies in his past.

Teacher?

Porn?

Gay??

Film at 11!!!

BBC: Trollope to rework Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

Now, that's no way to talk about a writer!

Ahhhh, wait, Trollope--my mistake. It seems the Trollope in this case is Joanna Trollope, writer of "upmarket family dramas and romances" (per Wikipedia). In essence, she makes the book equivalent of a Mercedes SUV.

Trollope is part of a movement by HarperFiction to create a series of modernizations of Austen's books. If that sounds like a bad idea, well, it is. Remember when Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1998? No?

Neither does anyone else.

Quibble No. 4: Self-obsessed books

See this paperback book? (((finger points upward)))

The one with two blurbs on the front cover from The New York Times and Newsweek about how "haunting" and "impressive" the book is?

That same book has five more blurbs on the back cover hyperextending a shoulder joint congratulating itself. Four lines are also devoted on the back to various awards won.

There are also twenty-four (twenty-four--24!!--for emphasis) rave reviews published on the immediate pages inside the book, everything from Kirkus Reviews to fellow authors.

You know what's not mentioned? Not on the front, the back, or the inside?

A description of the book.

Keep looking. It's not there. I'll wait if you want to check.

Which makes me wonder: Do people only buy books based on the number of self-obsessed reviews it has, and not whether they might like it themselves?

Because why read a book you like when you can just have others tell you what to like?



Before you ask: I had to read the book for work. Otherwise, I'd have refused simply on the grounds of the book's narcissism and inability to share its feelings. It's like going on a blind date with someone who lets all their friends tell you how great they are--but you never hear it from them. They just make you buy dinner.

Boston has fewer bookstores than San Diego. Worse tans, too.

According to the website LiteraryTraveler.net, Boston--home to millions of universities and untold book clubs operated by Jodi Piccoult-obsessed soccer moms--has fewer bookstores than San Diego.

This should sound devastating. Boston? Fewer bookstores than San Diego?? Shouldn't Harvard and MIT and Boston College and Suffolk and Simmons and any other whatchamacallit school single-handedly keep bookstores in business?

But let's look at some opinions I'll pretend are facts:

NPR: "3 Memoirs That Won't Make You Slit Your Wrists."

In other words, books not written by Cormac McCarthy?

Except good ol' Cormac didn't write a memoir--least I don't think so--but if he has, I wager it involves creative ways to kill someone and people who weren't loved enough as children.

NPR has a little side show to their website called ThreeBooks--where they pick (wait for it...wait...for...it...) three books with a very loose common theme they think you should read.

But this is NPR after all. NPR = No Personality Really. Their idea of wrist-slitting is probably my idea of a hot read. Don't believe me? Look at the comments by readers of the NPR article who take umbrage over the wrist-slitting headline.

Someone named Tiffany from Jacksonville, FL, says: Wow. The stigma in the headline alone is horrifying. NPR, you're the last source I would have expected something like this from. [You mean that NPR is the last group you'd expect to have a sense of humor? I know!]

Sheila from Michigan: Hmm...that's a pretty insensitive headline. [Indeed, insensitive to the people multitasking with wrist-slitting and reading NPR at the same time.]

Diana from Chicago: Um, dude, that title is extremely inappropriate. Have some class, NPR. [Potentially the only adult woman to use the word "dude" in a serious context in the last fifty years.]

Sleeve Heart from Oregon: "3 Memoirs That Won't Make You Light That Dynamite Cigar" has a little more class. [Just goes to show you that it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between NPR listener rage and their idea of humor.]

James from Unknown Regions: Apparently some have not experienced the trauma associated with losing a loved one in such a manner. While I'm not for censorship, a little sensitivity could go a long way. [Sensitivity is something I don't think the listeners of NPR lack.]

Male Nobel Prize winner says no woman is his equal.

Nobel Prize winner, V.S. Naipaul--known popularly in suburban books clubs as "Who's V.S. Naipaul?"--is famous among the literary set.

But it might be safe to say his fan base among women has dwindled slightly.

According to Salon, Naipaul was interviewed recently, and suggests that he can detect a woman writer whenever he reads. This might be because of psychic premonitions he's always kept on the down-low (how mysterious!)--or, possibly, he's just a misogynist. But it's more fun to pretend a Nobel Prize winner in literature has psychic abilities. It spices things up.

Anyway, Naipaul kept the misogyny bandwagon rolling in the interview, saying that no woman writer, alive or dead, was his equal, mainly because of "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world." It's funny when he talks about narrow views of the world because he's misogynistic. See how that works? Naipaul is a comedian! It's open-mic night at The Chuckle Hut!

His views on no woman equal includes Jane Austen--who he backhandedly comments that he couldn't "share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world."

At least Austen had sense. I'm going to go on a limb and say Naipaul long lost his.

Tiger Mom daughter gets into Harvard

[Start digression from blog post title]

In case you're hazy on the facts, Amy Chua made a name for herself earlier this year when she wrote a Wall Street Journal article talking about her parenting techniques, techniques she suggests were the result of her Chinese upbringing--thus, making her a Tiger Mom. (Sounds like someone has been listening to too much Survivor, circa 1982.) Considering that Chinese years are named after a variety of animals, it's smart marketing not to call yourself Goat Mom or Rooster Mom. (She'll peck your eyes out!)

What are Amy Chua's parenting techniques? They involve:

1.) making her daughters potentially socially awkward

1.) giving her children a complex

1.) guaranteeing her kids have anxiety issues

1.) giving her daughters enough information for a fantastic memoir twenty years from now

1.) making her two daughters as dull and uninteresting as possible

1.) being strict to the point of psychological abuse

Chua claimed her parenting techniques (which actually involve never allowing her children to sleep over a friend's house, have a play date, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch tv, "choose their own extracurricular activities" (her words), receive a grade less than A, and play any instrument other than piano or violin) are supposedly based in some sort on that Chinese tradition of parenting.

This is nonsense, of course.

Chua based her "facts" off her own experience, as well as one study in which 98 mothers were analyzed. Yes, 98. That's about a thousand times smaller a sample size for any study to have validity. But, hey now, she's busy. 98 is good enough, no?

In reality, Chua had motivations for the Journal article. She was publishing a book. (I won't link to it on Amazon. If you want to raise your children so they spontaneously cry whenever they see any form of popular entertainment, you can seek it out yourself.) She portrays you as a bad parent while she explains how she eliminates all forms of joy in a human being's life. Sounds like a beach read to me!

[End digression from blog post title]

Well, last week her daughter was accepted into Harvard. It was a supposed validation of her parenting techniques. Indeed--I'm sure it had nothing to do with Amy Chua being a law professor at Yale Law School--or that Chua herself went to Harvard for a degree in economics, and later a law degree. Nope. Not at all.

Pssh. If there's anything we know in this crazy world it's that Ivy League schools never do legacy admissions.

BBC: England prisons aren't a fan of your memoir writing skills.

According to the BBC, Arts Council England has had its budget slashed. This isn't good news for the writers-in-residence program, a program where a writer gets to make a nominal salary (£20,000 a year) while teaching prisoners how to write and speak properly--in essence, to communicate.

Considering that most have a difficult time communicating, this program helps prisoners develop social skills for whenever they're inevitably released back into the public. One former prisoner, now a writer for the Guardian, told the BBC as much.

"They can communicate with a pool ball in a sock or a razor on the end of a toothbrush or by shouting and bawling," said Erwin James.

Did I mention Erwin James, the writer for the Guardian, is a convicted murderer who used the writing skills taught in this program to reform his life?

Truth be told, Apollo Creed did have a mean right hook.

The University of Central Florida has a case of paranoia. Not the kind of paranoia that is cute really, like wondering if you left the iron on when you left for vacation, or whether your dog can read your mind. No, UCF generally thinks every single student is going to cheat. It's like the girlfriend who checks your cellphone and wants to know who this woman named "Grandma" is, and why did you call her one Sunday morning?

According to the New York Times, UCF has gone to the extreme:

No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside.

The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot.

Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.

When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.

So, in other words, UCF builds a culture of trust.

One student the Times talked to, an MBA student named Ashley Haumann, prefers being watched by Big Brother. According to Ashley, being watched by surveillance cameras "encourages you to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?'" Statements like this show what a cog Ashley will be in the near future working as middle-management with little room for advancement for some Fortune 500 company.

Paranoia over cheating has gone to the extreme, and not just with UCF. I've even been a party to it. Back when I took the GRE subject test, I encountered a glitch with the Great Fear of Cheating in our educational culture. During the three hour subject test, test takers weren't allowed to leave the room. No bathroom breaks, no stretching your legs, no, no, no. "But can I--"

No.

But, suddenly, my nose sprung a leak. A bloody nose, as if I struck oil in the middle of my face. (Hooray, uncirculating dry air!!) In a matter of seconds, I looked like I went ten rounds with Apollo Creed. I didn't have a napkin, a tissue, a rag--anything--to hold the blood in. But would the GRE folks let me grab a tissue? No. To do so would void my test. The fear? That I'd rush into the bathroom and grab some answers. Clearly, making my face look like it was hemorrhaging was all an elaborate ruse to pad my test grades.

A proctor took pity on me and handed me a tissue--of which I tried to stem the blood flow for the next hour (while still taking the test) in what can be casually described as epically failing at modern medicine practices. Reading giant passages of a GRE test, while scribbling in answers--all the while trying to hold back a bloody nose that looks like open-heart surgery being conducted on your face--is a skill set not regularly suggested in GRE practice books.

It is instances like that, Ashley, when sometimes--just maybe--maybe possibly--common sense can be allowed for just a moment.