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The Joke of the Day


The Joke of the Day

An idiot decided to start a chicken farm, so he bought a hundred chickens to start. A month later, he returned to the dealer for another hundred chickens because all of the first lot had died. A month later he was back at the dealers for another hundred chickens for the second lot had also died. “But I think I know where I’m going wrong,” said the idiot. “I think I am planting them too deep.”

 

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It’s Modern Parental Involvement – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com


It’s Modern Parental Involvement

Betsy Landers

Betsy Landers is the president of the National Parent-Teacher Association.

UPDATED JUNE 28, 2012, 4:42 PM

 

The use of new technology is a daily part of children’s lives, which means it should play a part in parents’ lives, too.

One cannot compare reading a child’s journal to accessing his or her conversations online. The Internet is a different paradigm.

While technology can open up new worlds of rich learning experiences for children, it can also expose them to harm. Today’s parents should be technology savvy and try to stay a step ahead — or at least keep up with — new media and technology to protect their children.

There are plenty of resources that teach parents how to keep their children safe from cyber-bullying, child predators and adult Web sites. It’s up to parents and families to decide which resources they feel are necessary, but ultimately, it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their children, at least until these children become adults. Parental use of all available resources, including electronic monitoring tools, should not be considered an invasion of privacy; it’s simply modern involvement.

One cannot compare reading a child’s journal to accessing his or her conversations online or through text messages. The Internet is a different paradigm and should not be treated the same as a diary or private letters. Anything that parents would not condone or allow in the real world should be forbidden online. Setting rules may not be enough. A perceived lack of trust lies not necessarily with the children, but rather with the yet-to-be-navigated waters of new technology.

Parents who are monitoring their children’s activities via technology are not crossing the line into invasion of privacy; they are cyber-savvy and involved.

 It’s Modern Parental Involvement – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.

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Tired Twins Ask If They Can Stop Swinging Bat All The Way Around | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source


Tired Twins Ask If They Can Stop Swinging Bat All The Way Around

JUNE 9, 2012

 

MINNEAPOLIS—Exhausted from months of trying, to little avail, to hit the ball, the last-place Minnesota Twins gathered around manager Ron Gardenhire in the clubhouse Friday afternoon to ask if they could be allowed to stop swinging their bats all the way around. “We can just do the one where you hold your bat out there halfway with both hands and see if the ball hits it,” suggested second baseman Alexi Casilla, who lately has been swinging all the way through a full 360 degrees but has yet to hit a home run this season. “Or we can just go up there and do nothing. Sometimes they let you go to first base if you just stand there for a while as the balls go by. That sounds like a good strategy to me.” The Twins also asked if they could discontinue running toward batted balls to field them, saying that if everyone just waits around long enough with their gloves out, eventually the ball is bound to fall into one of them.

 Tired Twins Ask If They Can Stop Swinging Bat All The Way Around | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

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Area Man Winded After Particularly Lengthy Wendy’s Order | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source


Area Man Winded After Particularly Lengthy Wendy’s Order

MAY 29, 2012

GLEN ALLEN, VA—Local man Brett Lussier, 43, was left fatigued and out of breath Thursday after placing a particularly long lunch order at the Wendy’s franchise location on Brook Road, sources reported. “I’ll have a Spicy Chicken Sandwich, large fries, baked potato, a root beer,” said the man, his voice slowing as his taxed lungs labored to produce each syllable of Junior Bacon Cheeseburger amid audible gasps for breath. “Cup of chili and…and… hegh, ugh.” According to onlookers, the puffing, pink-faced Lussier then hacked a single wet cough, braced his wearied frame against the counter, and required a full 10 seconds of repose before he was finally able to wheeze out the word “Frosty.”

 Area Man Winded After Particularly Lengthy Wendy’s Order | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

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Mandatory Service to Become an Adult – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com


Mandatory Service to Become an Adult

Michael Thompson

Michael Thompson, a consulting school psychologist, is the author, most recently, of “Homesick and Happy: How Time Away from Parents Can Help a Child Grow.” 

UPDATED MAY 28, 2012, 10:44 PM 

Children are so variable in their growth and the ways in which cultures understand child development are so different, it is futile to attempt to pin down the “right” age of majority. The Dutch, for example, allow children to drink at the age of 16 but not to drive until they are 19. Even if I thought it was a good idea to lower the drinking age and raise the driving age — and I do — I recognize that the U.S. would never embrace it.

We should require all 18-year-olds in America to leave home and give a year to society, either in the military or in community-based projects.

I am more concerned with the issue of maturity than I am with the technical age of majority. Researchers and observers have noted that while our children are getting brighter (I.Q. scores have been going up for the last two decades), they are relatively immature for their ages in comparison to earlier generations. Over-protected by their parents and spending vast amounts of time in front of TV, computers and cellphones (over 50 hours a week by middle adolescence, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation), they are less skilled in the world, less able to build friendships and function in groups, and more reliant on their parents.

Instead of fiddling with the age of majority, we should encourage our children to grow up, and mandatory service would do just that. We should require all 18-year-olds in America to leave home and give a year to society, either in the military or in community-based projects like tutoring younger children or working in retirement homes or the inner city. The result would be a cohort of more mature 19-year-olds who would make better workers and better citizens.

 Mandatory Service to Become an Adult – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.

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Nation’s Moms Invent New Recreational Drug To Worry About | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source


Nation’s Moms Invent New Recreational Drug To Worry About

MAY 10, 2012

Mothers across the country are speaking out against the entirely imagined scramp menace.

 

DENVER—A new illicit drug that is incredibly cheap, highly addictive, and extremely easy to produce is appearing in school yards across the country, the fevered imaginations of the nation’s mothers who need something to fret over confirmed today.

The totally contrived drug that in no way exists in any objective reality and is only real in the minds of mothers is known by its street name, “scramp,” and according to moms who previously did not have enough actual things to worry about, a batch can be made from everyday household supplies such as sugar, window cleaner, and petroleum jelly.

As recently as last week, the nation’s moms created a completely fictitious scenario—the sole purpose of which was to worry themselves sick—wherein household glue could also be used to create scramp.

“Right after my husband and I agreed our son was responsible enough to drive on his own, this scramp epidemic comes along,” 39-year-old mother of two Gayathri Bhowmik told reporters as she wrote a letter to her senator demanding stronger legislation against the scramp menace that grows each day in her mind. ”I’ve heard all the kids in his class are doing it. They have big ’scramping’ parties where they go to the house of someone whose parents are on vacation, and they take scramp all night and it turns into a big drug orgy.”

Three teenagers in a scramping session that exists only in the minds of worried mothers.

 

“It’s only going to get worse,” Bhowmik added of the scramp scourge that is not happening.

Mothers whose concerns for their children’s safety has veered into a mass hysteria said teenage users ingest scramp either by licking it, swallowing it, smoking it, snorting it, injecting it, or putting it under their eyelids in order to experience sensations of euphoria, bodily dissociation, dizziness, and a unique altered mind state that cannot be easily described because it is not a physiological reality.

 

Talking To Your Kids About Drugs

Additionally, mothers who feel the need to lose sleep at night say that any amount of scramp is capable of causing a fatal overdose at any time.

“My oldest has been coming home from school and going straight to his room,” said Dubuque, IA mother Debra Verhulst, who just last month began allowing her 15-year-old son Alex to date. ”He sits in there for hours on end, doing God knows what. Sometimes he’s really hungry, but sometimes he’s not hungry at all, and when I ask him if he’s scramping, he just rolls his eyes and tells me he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He never used to talk to me like that.”

“It must be the scramp,” added Verhulst, her eyes welling up with tears at the thought of her child’s fabricated problem with the fake drug. “My son is a scramp-head! What did I do wrong?”

Despite the shared delusion that scramp is virtually undetectable and that any young person could be on it at any time, mothers said there are still telltale signs your teen could be scramping, including lethargy, too much energy, untucked shirts, watching an hour or more of television a night, staying out past curfew, and questioning authority.

A recent poll found 95 percent of overprotective mothers with children between the ages of 12 and 18 are aware of the completely made-up drug, and 73 percent are ”pretty sure” at least one of their kid’s friends has tried it. In order to combat the fictional scourge, the recently formed group Mothers Against Scramp Abuse (MASA) has published a pamphlet titled ”Talk To Your Kids About Scramping” and sent it to hundreds of churches and youth organizations nationwide.

“We must work together to keep scramp out of our schools before our children become just another statistic,” said MASA founder Helen Perry, whose 14-year-old son died of scramp-related causes in her imagination three months ago and again last week. ”Just look at what happened to Tim Kepler, a 17-year old Boise boy who I heard jumped from a radio tower after trying scramp just once. These scramp pushers will stop at nothing to get your child to take their poison, and once they do, your kids are hooked for life.”

With incidents of scramping up 3,000 percent over the past year in the minds of thousands of American mothers, use of the nonexistent drug has prompted mothers to wonder if they can ever truly protect their children

“Today, it’s scramping; tomorrow, who knows?” Perry asked. ”Dooping? Frazzing? Heroin? Quockling? I just want my baby to be safe from these kinds of terrible drugs until he goes to college and I have all sorts of other things to worry about.”

 Nation’s Moms Invent New Recreational Drug To Worry About | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

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Living Apart and Together: The Optimum Balance – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com


A New American Experiment

Bella DePaulo

Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of “Singled Out.” She writes the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today.

UPDATED FEBRUARY 12, 2012

There are so many ways to live and love. The sentimentalized image of Mom, Dad and the kids gathered around the hearth has had its day. A new American experiment has begun. We’re not all going nuclear anymore.

Among the innovators are people of all ages who are single at heart. They are not single because they have issues or because they have not yet found a partner. They are not looking. Single is who they really are. Many are in the market for places of their own. So, too, are plenty of divorced and widowed people and single parents whose children have grown.

We’re not all going nuclear anymore. The results can be far more fulfilling than the same old boxes.

An unlikely demographic has also joined the quest for solo living – committed couples. In a trend dubbed “living apart together,” the two people maintain homes of their own not because far-flung jobs demand that but because they want it. A study of married couples at two different points in time showed that even living together under the same roof is not what it used to be. In 2000, the couples were less likely to eat together or work on projects together than they were in 1980. They also had fewer friends in common.

Are we all just crying out for more solitude and separation?

I think not. What we are really seeking is the optimum balance of time alone and time together. It is the social and personal quest that transcends marriage, family status, age, race and just about every other demographic characteristic.

Walk outside the door of the people living solo and you may just find a sibling or lifelong friend in the neighborhood or even in the same building. That’s not happenstance. In a variation on the same theme, people live in the same home with some private spaces and some shared.

Adults approaching the end of their working years are opting out of “retirement homes” and instead creating their own communities. Singles and couples, friends and family members, plan years in advance where and how they want to live. Rather than stepping into someone else’s vision of how to age, they are inventing their own, complete with roommates or neighbors of their own choosing.

Sometimes people are jolted into shared living by economic challenges or natural disasters. Young adults or parents with small children move in with their own parents. Friends welcome friends into their homes to ride out the rough patch. The new doubled-up arrangements can be experienced as little more than a hardship. Occasionally, though, the sailing is so smooth and warm that all agree to continue. When people organically develop their own experiments in living, the results can be far more fulfilling than the solutions unpacked from the same old boxes from the past.

Alongside all of the imaginative designs for living generated in free-wheeling conversations by a pair of friends here or a group of baby boomers there, are options that are becoming systematized. Co-housing, co-ops, pocket neighborhoods, co-parenting and condos with dual master bedrooms are just a few examples. Sometimes the community members share an identity – perhaps as artists or single parents or home-schoolers; other times, the main connection is affection. These living arrangements are the communes of the 21st century.

 Living Apart and Together: The Optimum Balance – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.

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