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The
schoolyard in Toronto, Canada, is safe again, thanks to the quick action
of a school principal who has banned the dangerous weapon of ... soccer
balls!
Before you deride the news as yet another example of school bureaucracy gone mad, won't you think of the children? They're an absolute terror when weaponized with hard balls:
Students at an east-end Toronto school are being told to leave their soccer balls — and other hard balls — at home.
The principal of Earl Beatty Public School banned the balls this week after a parent recently suffered a concussion from being hit in the head with a soccer ball.
The principal, Alicia Fernandez, banned hard balls, claiming they're dangerous. "Kids were coming in complaining of injury, or being scared," she said. [...]
Students can bring sponge or other soft balls to play with, but soccer balls, footballs, baseballs and even tennis balls are not allowed for safety reasons.
September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. In honor of the occasion, here is a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Talk about an easy subject to research! It might have been easier to write up a “books that have never been banned anywhere” list. The banning of books seems so ridiculous, simplistic, and stupid to most of us. But man, in all his Jeckyll and Hyde glory, will all-too-often, when trying to solve a problem, come up with a solution much worse. This is “the 29th annual Banned Books Week.” The week is used to condemn censorship and “thought police.”
O.K., let’s take a look at a brief (in the scheme of these things) list of books that have been (ironically) banned here in the U.S….
1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 has to head this list of “ironic books banned.” Why? Fahrenheit 451 is an entire novel about the future and the banning (and burning) of books. It was banned, ironically, because one of the books that eventually gets banned and burned is the Bible. Drawn your own conclusions, my (hopefully) intelligent readers.
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Mark Twain was a racist? A product of the times? Twain uses the bombshell “N” word so as to illustrate the awfulness of the word (and all its connotations). This vicious word is still, far and away, the most highly-charged and controversial word in the English language. So, the knee-jerk reaction is to ban the book. Or better still, as in more recent examples, issue the book with the “N” word cleverly edited out.
3. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
There isn’t enough time to edit out all the examples of the expression “f*** you” being used in this one. Also banned because it promotes youthful rebellion and disrespect of authority. Catcher in the Rye was the book that guy was reading when he shot and killed John Lennon. So maybe if it were still banned… hmmm, slippery slope, isn’t it?
4. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Handford
Misprint, right? Uh, no. The very first Where’s Waldo? book was, indeed, banned, because in one of the Where’s Waldo? drawings a beach is shown featuring a woman lying on the sand with part of her breast showing. It was actually just a side view of her breast, with a penciled-in microscopic nipple shown.
Do you realize the meticulous research and hours of time it must have taken whoever discovered this “offensive” character amidst all the thousands and thousands of characters featured in a Waldo book?
5. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
This is the incredible story of an ever-hopeful and ever-wistful young girl who is eventually killed in the Holocaust. In some ways, it is the ultimate example of the ever-classic theme of “Good vs. Evil.” Or one very good person in the face of perhaps the greatest evil of the past several centuries. Yet despite her incredibly horrible enemies and fate, this remarkable teenage girl still believes in “the basic goodness of mankind.” Banned by the Alabama State Textbook Committee in 1983 for being “a real downer.”
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Like our pal Huck Finn, this book has been banned because of the free-flowing use of the “N” word. And like Twain’s book, it is used to paint an accurate picture of the period (and all its ignorance). It has been banned across America for “racial slurs” and for “promoting white supremacy.” Also because a parent thought the way “blacks are treated by members of [the] white community in a way that would upset black children.” Only ironic because never, but never, in the entire history of literature, has good and evil been so clearly portrayed and delineated. Real (not ersatz) racism is shown under a clear magnifying glass, in all its vicious cruelty.
(As a sidebar, to those of you who do not like reading -definitely see the movie. To Kill a Mockingbird is without question one of the greatest movies ever made. One of those rare times “the movie is equally as great as the book it is based upon.”)
7. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
The Harry Potter books are far and away the most banned books of the past decade. Extremely ironic in that the Harry Potter series has probably inspired more young people to read than all the Hooked on Phonics and Pizza Hut books in the world.
Also one other point for all those people who have worked so tirelessly to ban these highly-popular books: strip away the magic and the Dr. Seuss creatures and the wizards and sorcerers, and ultimately the series boils down to the message that love, understanding, and tolerance are the most important things in the world.
8. Little Red Riding Hood
(You can’t make this stuff up, folks!)
Little Red Riding Hood has been banned for the use of alcohol (one of the items in Red Riding Hood’s basket is a bottle of wine).
9. Sleeping Beauty
The fairy tale was banned for promoting witchcraft and magic.
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
This classic was banned for “vulgar language.”
11. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Why do I feel like I am writing a Monty Python sketch? Could there possibly be a more harmless, innocuous book than Harriet the Spy? O.K. this one was banned because it “teaches children to lie, spy, back-talk, and curse.”
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
This book was banned in the South during the Civil War because of its anti-slavery content. Well, heck, that was over 150 years ago. Fortunately, as we all know, man has come a long way since those days of ignorance.
Instead of asking "how much is that doggy in the window," you should be asking "how many years in jail?" if you live in San Francisco. See, the Bay Area city is weighing a ban on all pet sales, with exception of fish:
Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.
That’s the law under consideration by San Francisco’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.
That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.
"People buy small animals all the time as an impulse buy, don’t know what they’re getting into, and the animals end up at the shelter and often are euthanized," said commission Chairwoman Sally Stephens. "That’s what we’d like to stop."
What do you think? Is it a good idea to ban pet sales?
Danvers High School Principal Thomas Murray was not amused – I repeat, not amused – when kids in his school started saying the word "meep." Anyone caught uttering or displaying the word of choice of Beaker, the orange-haired muppet from The Muppet Show, will be – gasp – suspended!
It’s no surprise that using bad language in school can get you into hot water. But "meep"?
Danvers High parents recently got an automated call from the principal warning them that if students say or display the word "meep" at school, they could face suspension.
Meep doesn’t mean much, unless you are Beaker — the hapless, orange-haired assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on "The Muppet Show."
While meep may be nonsense, what it represented was no laughing matter to the high school’s administration. High school Principal Thomas Murray said students were using it and other words to disrupt school in a particular part of the building on Cabot Road.
Link | Article at ABC News | Apparently, you can’t even email the word "meep" to him, but one presumes that "Bork, bork, bork" is still safe.
A food fight is brewing in the school cafeteria, and this time, it’s promises to be much nastier than the one that got those kids jailed:
The milk industry clearly doesn’t want chocolate milk to go the way of the soda can in schools. Sure, a serving of chocolate milk has 60 more calories, but kids love it, so they’ll drink more milk if it’s an option instead of other sugary drinks, the campaign contends. The National Dairy Council and the Milk Processor Education Program are spending between $500,000 to $1 million to get the message across.
But no amount of money will convince people like Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, that chocolate milk needs to be in schools. She told the AP that kids get needed calcium elsewhere and do not need yet another source of sugar additives that contribute to obesity. Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services at the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, notes in the same story that kids "happily drink white milk" when it’s the only milk available at school. The "renegade lunch lady," as she calls herself, also said that the extra 40 to 60 calories on top of the 110 calories in a typical 8-ounce serving of white milk "could add up to 5 pounds of weight gain over the 180-day school year." Her district does not offer chocolate milk.
So, should schools ban chocolate milk? Will kids revolt if they did? Link
Sure, teenagers everywhere try to sneak in a beer or two. It’s practically a rite of passage, but the city of Milan, Italy is cracking down on teenage drinking because they have a bad problem of underage drinking.
How bad? Let’s put it this way: a third of 11-year-olds in the city have alcohol-related problems!
… the authorities are deeply concerned about the increase in consumption of alcohol by children as young as 11 in the country’s industrial and financial capital.
So as an experiment, supplying alcohol – either wine or spirits – to youths under the age of 16 in bars, restaurants, pizza shops and liquor stores will be banned. [...]
Some people are pessimistic that the city-wide ban will ever work:
A national law banning the sale of alcohol to under-16s is only loosely enforced, as Italian families are used to sometimes giving young children a teaspoon of wine as a family party treat.
In past centuries, Italian children would sometimes even be given wine to drink in preference to water which was often polluted.
It started in Lucca this week, when the town council banned any new ethnic food outlets from opening within the walls of the medieval city. And it quickly spread to Milan: a ban on ethnic foods, meaning foods that are not Italian. The Northern League party wants to protect regional specialties from the encroaching popularity of ethnic cuisines, like egg rolls and kebabs.
The Italian Minister of Agriculture, Luca Zaia, applauded the restrictions, saying ethnic restaurants should "stop importing container loads of meat and fish from who knows where" and use only Italian ingredients. Asked if he had ever tried a kebab, Mr. Zaia said no: "I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple."
Is it gastronomic racism, or a legitimate attempt to preserve authentic Italian cuisine?
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
