Too Stupid for Words category archive

Via Contradict Me.

My ex-local rag, the Wilmington News-Journal, makes having Facebook track your on-line behavior a feature not a bug of posting comments to newspaper stories.

We will be using Facebook comments on articles to create a more civil environment for conversation, and to give everyone an easier way to share with their friends.

The new system requires a Facebook account to participate in story comment threads.

Not that posting or reading comments at newspaper websites interests me. Something about that activity seems to attract the hate-full.

A woman shot pepper spray to keep shoppers from merchandise she wanted during a Black Friday sale, and 20 people suffered minor injuries, authorities said.

I understand that UC-Davis is recruiting her for the campus police force.

Honestly, wingers aren’t happy unless they are picking fights. If they can’t pick one, they just make one up.

If there is a war on Christmas, the primary combatants are the axis of advertisers, the multitudes of marketers, and the herds of hucksters equating Christmas with gadgets, geegaws, and gear.

When I was in high school, I went with other members of a club to a school-sanctioned convention which involved an overnight stay in the old Roanoke Hotel. Our old maid (sorry, that’s the only phrase that truly conveys what she was like) teacher/club sponsor/chaperon warned us that there should be no “promiscuous intermixing” (there wasn’t any, but we chuckled mightily over her phrasing for the duration of the stay).

Even she wouldn’t have pulled something like this:

A sheriff’s deputy was dispatched last week to a Florida elementary school after a girl kissed a boy during a physical education class.

School brass actually reported the impromptu buss as a possible sex crime, according to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office.

(snip)

The kiss apparently occurred after two girls debated over whom the boy liked more. That’s when one of the girls “went over and kissed” the boy. The redacted sheriff’s report notes that Haring “stated there were no new allegations of sexual abuse as far as she knew.”

And a spitball would likely be classified as assault.

Children cannot learn good judgment from adults who have none.

Aside:

At that conference, we somehow got into a discussion of guest behavior with one of the hotel managers, wondering if a hotel full of high school juniors and seniors was troublesome.

I recall his saying that we might be a little noisy, but otherwise no trouble at all. Then he said that the most troublesome conventions would surprise us: Teachers.

This was back when the state did not allow restaurants to sell liquor and the attendants at the state stores wore uniforms and kept their stock locked behind a counter. His theory was that teachers were under such scrutiny at home that, when they got a chance to cut loose, they damn well did.

Back to my teacher, I understand that my father dated her once or twice in high school. Narrow escape.

YR twits.

Officials have no idea when this happened, other than sometime this fall:

Thieves have taken a 3-foot-long copper sword atop Lincoln’s Tomb in what is believed to be the first theft at the site in more than a century.

My guess is that it was taken for its value as scrap. I know of a church that had its copper gutters stolen.

The trucked variety on trial.

Like Reality TV: silly, stupid, and tasteless.

There’s no friend like a Facebook friend.

Back on September 29th, a couple living on Robin Road in Wrightstown posted their vacation plans on Facebook.

“They put in there where they would be going on vacation and when they would be away and the friend just took advantage of it,” Newtown Police Department Lt. Glenn Forsyth said.

Knowing they were away, police say one of the couple’s Facebook friends, 36-year-old Steven Pieczynski of West Amwell, New Jersey, broke into the couple’s home and stole jewelry, gift cards, coins and DVDs.

A neighbor, a real human breathing person not in cyberspace, got suspicious and wrote down the mope’s license number.

Honestly, you can’t make this much stupid up.

Violating a electronic confidence is still violating a confidence.

As a bonus extra, this also illustrates the corrosiveness of the self-righteous bigotry sometimes fueled by religion.

Wingnut twits.

’nuff said.

Lake Stevens (Washington–ed.) police say officers arrested the 35-year-old man earlier this month after he tried to break into a home for a second time to retrieve the cell phone he left the first time he broke in.

Given that one’s date of birth is likely a matter of public record, this would seem rather frivolous.

An actress is suing Amazon.com in federal court in Seattle for more than $1 million for revealing her age on its Internet Movie Database website and refusing to remove the reference when asked.

The actress is not named in the lawsuit filed Thursday that refers to her as Jane Doe. It says she lives in Texas and is of Asian descent and has an Americanized stage name.

I’m certain that the lawyers will make out all right.

Putting down persons in public usually draws attention.

Officials in a New Jersey school district are investigating claims that a high school teacher who is faculty adviser to a prayer group posted anti-gay remarks on her Facebook page.

A lawyer who was contacted by a parent tells The Star-Ledger of Newark that he saw posts by Viki Knox before they were removed and that he alerted the Union Township district.

I have long wondered why persons will believe stuff they read on the innerwebs when they wouldn’t believe the same thing if someone said it to them in person.

A former Atlanta woman filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the Atlanta Police Department, contending an officer illegally seized her camera after she took pictures of officers kicking a man who was handcuffed and lying on the ground.

The suit said Felecia Anderson, 24, was living in the West End on Oct. 14, 2009, when she saw APD officers raiding her neighbor’s home. When she also saw officers kicking and dragging a man, she went home and got her camera.

As Anderson filmed the incident from the sidewalk, officers ordered her to stop, threatening to arrest her, the suit said. Anderson complied and began walking back to her house.

One of the officers came up behind Anderson and demanded that she turn over her camera, and he seized it when a startled Anderson dropped it on the ground, the lawsuit said.

They then deleted the pictures and arrested her for walking without a license. (Go read it yourself if you don’t believe me.)

This time, it involves students at Emmaus High School (Emmaus, Pennsylvania–ed.) and a specific website, a photo-image board packed with pornographic images of young women from all across the country.

Apparently, there were several young ladies from EHS texted naked photos to their boyfriends. The boyfriends then posted those photos on the internet without their girlfriends’ consent.

The story quotes a sophomore girl as saying, most wisely,

“I think a lot of the girls are really upset about it and wished they didn’t do it, but in my opinion, it’s like their own fault for sending the pictures to people, if they didn’t want them out, they shouldn’t send them in the first place,” sophomore Emily Sowers said.

Sure, the boys involved acted like scum.

This surprises you how? They are teen-aged boys, a demographic not renowned for good judgment. (Nor, for that matter, are teen-aged girls, or this would not have happened.)

Maureen Downey reports:

In one of the most contradictory conversations of my week, I fell into small talk with a woman at a sports field and it came up that I am from New Jersey. She told me she knows nothing about my home state except what she sees on “Jersey Shore,” which is her children’s favorite reality TV show. Later in the conversation, she told me that she would never would have allowed her kids to watch the Obama speech had it been shown at their private school.

OK, I thought, your kids can’t hear Obama talk about the power of education but they can watch a crass TV show that venerates drinking . . . .