Must post link while anger still fresh.

NJ girl, 14, arrested after posting nude pics

...of herself.

Granted, posting nude photos of yourself on your MySpace page is pretty retarded. Even more so when you're fourteen.

However, the getting arrested part is the worst part. This girl might have to register as a sex offender if she's convicted. Doesn't that mean that this fourteen year old girl's photo, name, and address will be placed online for anyone to look up? Where real sex offenders can find her?

(This girl lives in the same county I do. Sigh.)

Teaching highs and lows (with stolen pizazz)

There are days I love helping students learn, and other days where I wonder what the point is.

There are projects from Spanish classes plastered all over my school right now. it's basic vocab stuff, "Me gusta" fill in the blank here and then draw a picture.

This was actually put up on a school building wall.

Not only does the poster say "I don't like school," but the kid misspelled "escuela."

However, the other day I was working with my fifth grade general music class. I'd given them a worksheet about Mozart's early life. The point of the worksheet was that some words in the story were written in musical notation, so they had to read the pitches to identify the missing words. Unfortunately, since there are only seven musical letters, there are limited choices for your word selection. We had been laughing over the sentence "No doubt, Wolfgang loved beef burgers for his feed" when one kid did the math and realized Mozart died at age 35.

Kid #1: What did he die of?

Me: We can't know for sure. It doesn't help that we don't know where he was buried, so they can't dig him up to do tests and find out.

All kids: Ew! Can they do that?

Me: Well, this is a bit off topic, but it was rumored that our 12th president, Zachary Taylor, was poisoned and murdered, but scientists dug him up about 20 years ago and proved he wasn't.

Kid #2: So what did he die of?

Me: Really, really bad food poisoning.

Kid #3: Aha! So he was poisoned!

Kid #4: Don't you mean feed poisoning?

Pretty sharp for fifth graders, I think. And just for fun, another fifth grader the next day:

Kid (whining to me about another kid): She stole my pizazz! (Upon noticing my puzzled look) I just wanted to say that.

Two Unrelated Links

From the New York Daily News, we have custom made babies.

Gat-ta-ca! Gat-ta-ca! Gat-ta-ca!

And from the New York Times, the man who went about town in a Snuggie.

"She handed me a flier for the show, which I was able to take easily because Snuggie has sleeves. I did not have anywhere to put it, however, because Snuggie does not have pockets."