hey look! it’s wee macduff and his buddy j. what’cha doing mac?

“look! look! is mine kite!”

wow mac, your kite is flying great!

uh-oh, macduff is sad. why are you so sad?

“hey! where mine kite go? mac want mine kite!”

fin

yep, it’s these little gestures that show they care and that remind me i work for a fortune 100 company.

[joy]

“I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)”

for this she was sent to the principal’s office, who then called the fucking cops and had her arrested. not a detention. arrested.

i’m not that old. high school was over a decade ago, sure, but damn, it would have taken a fucking lot to get arrested. even if you got in a fight, you’d just get detention and maybe suspended for a few days. maybe if you were selling drugs in the school, but even then it was iffy. if you fucked up in school you got punished according to the severity of the infraction. detention, kicked off a team, parents called in: all the normal stuff. yes, i know there is now DANGER! in schools, and yes, there are schools that are rightly concerned about weapons and violence. there are plenty of parents who don’t give a fuck about their kids (part of the problem, of course). none of this, however, justifies “zero tolerance” policies. why? here is the single most telling quote from the article:

Kenneth Trump, a security expert who founded the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, said focusing on security is essential to the safety of other students. He said zero tolerance policies can work if “common sense is applied.”

that statement should be enough to convince anyone with half a brain that zero tolerance policies are fatally flawed and that mr. trump is either dishonest or just stupid.

zero tolerance means just that: zero tolerance. if one starts to apply the ever nebulous “common sense” to interpreting said policy, it is no longer zero tolerance. you’ve just introduced tolerance. you are making distinctions between the severity of infractions. you are taking a person’s background and prior behavior into consideration. you are admitting there is a marked difference between writing a) “i’m going to kill my friends” and b) “i love my friends” and responding to the intent behind the infraction, not the simple physical action. sure, good old common sense tells us that a) is a cause for concern and means the kid’s parents should be called, as well as the school psychatrist and, as a last resort, the cops. whereas b) means you stay after class and clean all the desks.

we continue to see these stories: kids suspended for bringing nail clippers to school, honor roll student suspended for giving a friend an advil, etc.. they all end the same way: school apologizes, says it was a mistake and the parents wind up suing. as long as we continue to have zero tolerance policies they’ll keep showing up in the news. considering our laws for adults allow for tolerance, to such an extent that we recognize there are situations where it is justifiable to kill another person, it make little sense to have no leniency for children. after all, there is a reason we do not try children as adults. as a society, we seem to recognize that kids are, well, kids. even the best kid is going to fuck up, particularly once they hit their teens. certainly we should keep an eye to security, but let’s try and avoid turning schools into psuedo-prisons and let kids make ordinary mistakes.

alas, too often remakes are spawned by the “hey, let’s update a classic (or at least, a good film)!” school of thought. “you’ve got mail” is the sort of neferious result you get. these films are a bad idea. there is no reason to remake a good movie, because the original does not vanish into the ether after a few years. even the idea of “updating” a film tends to be misguided, at best. on the face of it, remaking “guess who’s coming to dinner” as “guess who” and reversing the race roles is not that bad of an idea. replacing spencer tracy with bernie mac and sidney poitier with ashton kucher however, was that bad of an idea.

all of this rambling is a roundabout way to ask just who the fuck thought remaking “akira” as a live action film was a remotely good idea? seriously, who thought that?

the way to help a friend touched by grief is to take some on yourself. we share the load, so when we must bear the brunt, there are others, too, to share with us. it’s the only way to get through. so, read another’s tale, share the grief, the loss and the joy too, however brief it may have been. you have no reason to, and that’s the best reason there is.

it is worth remember that, at mission outset, NASA was hoping the rovers would last for 90 days. that was 6 years ago. really, this has to have been one of the most successful NASA missions ever. even stuck, if spirit can get a charge from its solar panels, it can keep studying the spot it is in. if you’re wonder what these bots have been up to, head here for the latest.

UPDATE: awwww…poor spirit. let’s go pick him up.

 UPDATE:

seems the weather gods were moderately pleased with my sacrifice.  alas, i am out of goats.