Daily Archives: April 27, 2007

With Virginia Tech Fresh in Our Memory

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…So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did…

– Allen Lee, Carly-Grove High School Student

 Allen Lee wrote some seriously disturbed crap during a “Free Writing” assignment in his high school English class this week.  Apparently the instructions on the assignment made clear that the students were not to censor themselves and should instead write whatever came to mind.  The point was to keep writing and not to stop until the time ran out.  Allen's essay begins “Blood sex and Booze. Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab, S…t…a…b…, poke.“  The end of the essay concludes with a message to his teacher: “No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting.” The “cg” refers to “Carly-Grove”, the name of Allen's school.

It is evident from his essay that he has an extremely low opinion of his teacher, and English in general.  So I suppose it's possible he selected subject matter most calculated to upset the teacher.  If so, the calculations were spot-on.  Allen's teacher apparently called the police, and now he is charged with disorderly conduct according to the Chicago Tribune.  You can read Allen's entire essay here.

I read the last sentence of Allen's essay as a threat, and therefore I am not at all surprised that some sort of discipline is in order, and I fail to see why Allen would be surprised.  But apparently a lot of people are surprised because they seem to be leaping to his defense and claiming that the teacher/school are overreacting.

In the meantime Allen is planning to join the Marines.

The questions here are, are these the ravings of a deranged mind, or a normal high school student attempting to undertake a free writing assignment and making a poor choice of subject matter?  Was arresting him an appropriate reaction or an overreaction?

What do you think?

Ponder a Puddle

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It has been a long time since I posted a contemplative picture, and I'd like to do it more often.  These are the kind of pictures I like the most.

It is a gloomy wet day today.  I took this picture of my reflection in a puddle on my office parking lot during a short break.  The humps to the left and right are my knees, I squatted down to take the shot.

Just Call Me Jaws

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Here's an x-ray I had done while I was at the dentist's office awhile back.  As you can see all of the molars on my lower jaw are gone, leaving only the two wisdom teeth in the back, whereas every tooth in my mouth except the frontmost has fillings.  The bright white spots are fillings folks.

The black space between two of the front teeth on the top there is where an old filling fell out and the tooth and it's neighbor are rotting away.  The nurse said this spot (and a couple others) were a likely cause of my recent spate of illnesses.

They don't take tooth xrays like they used to.  When I was younger you would hold a flat piece of plastic between your teeth, and on the inside edge would be attached a perpendicular piece of x-ray film encased in plastic.  Now they have you stand up inside a machine where a pair of x-ray emitters revolve around your head and take a complete image of your jaw.

One thing to note about the above image is that it is mirrored.  Although that dark space on the top front appears to be on the right side, it is actually on the left side.

I See You!

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A nice fluffy blanket makes a great cat-magnet.  When I was sick in bed for all those weeks, my kitties would come, sit, and visit with me.  It was very nice to have a fuzzy cuddlebuddy when I was feeling down.  Cherokee loved to play with me or play in the blankets while I was resting.  I snapped this picture with my cellphone months ago and just came across it now.

More Good News

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New Hampshire legalizes civil unions!  I found this particular comment extremely amusing:

…Several senators described civil unions as unnatural and warned that the partnerships would harm heterosexual marriage. “We don't allow our cousins to marry, you can't marry your brother, you can't marry your sister,” said Sen. Robert Letourneau, a Derry Republican. “We don't allow blind people to drive or felons to vote, all for good and obvious reasons.”…

Thank you for comparing a healthy loving relationship between two people of the same gender to blind people driving, criminals voting, and incest.  What an ass.  What, pray tell, are the “good and obvious” reasons for disallowing gay marriage?  I've yet to hear any, and I've been listening for a long time.  Besides, these are civil unions we are talking about.  Oh yeah, and on that note, Letourneau has more to say…

…Despite the efforts of Democratic senators to distinguish civil unions from same-sex marriage, Republicans cast civil unions as marriage in all but name. “Let's call it what it really is,” Letourneau said. “This creates same-sex marriage.”…

I'm sorry I was laughing too hard to follow that.  Do you mean to tell me after all the tooth and nail fighting deny gay people marriage and the offering of civil unions as a substitute, now we're going to say that civil unions are the same as gay marriage?  Then what was the point of making the differentiation before we banned gay marriage?  You gays can't have X, why can't you settle for Y?  Okay now we passed a law saying you can't have X.  What you want Y now?  No way!  It's as bad as X!

Good for you New Hampshire.  I'd rather it was same-sex marriage, but at least this is a step in the right direction.

New Interesting Articles Sidebar

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So as long as I am stealing ideas from James, I might as well go for broke.  Aces Full of Links has a great sidebar where James can list links to articles he's recently read, would like to share, but might not have time to write about.  This is a feature of Google Reader and it is very slick.  While reading articles in the reader, there's a button one can click to share the article, and this causes it to immediately show up in a “clip” you can install on your blog.

I really like this idea, so I'm stealing it from James.  Unbecoming Levity now includes a new sidebar called “Interesting Articles I've Read”.  It appears at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, right beneath the blogroll.

I often come across something I want to share but just don't have the time to write an article.  I used to use some third party sites for this in the past, but got tired of my blog failing to load because the third party server was down.  I have a feeling Google would be a lot more reliable, so I'll give it another shot.

PhoNETic

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This is kind of cool.  Punch a phone number into PhoNETic and it will try to find a word phrase or partial word phrase for your phone number based on the conversion of digits to letters on a standard pushbutton phone keypad.  There wasn't anything good for mine, and even if there was I wouldn't post it because duh, then I'd be putting my phone number online!  But it was a little fun to play with so, enjoy.