This theme is recurring so often I think I’m going to have to create a new category link for it.  Once again a bunch of school administrators are showing they don’t have alot of common sense going for them.  This time it happened in South Carolina (story from WIStv.com):

(Rock Hill-AP) May 7, 2005 – An
11-year-old boy was arrested this week for carrying ten nails in his
pocket at a Rock Hill middle school and charged with carrying an
unlawful weapon.

Dianne McCray, assistant principal at Rawlinson
Road Middle School, asked the child Wednesday what was jingling in his
pocket and the student gave her the 3.5" long nails.

A school resource officer arrested him. His father picked him up and he was not taken to the police station.

The
father said the nails were left in his pocket after a Boy Scout outing.
He says it is ridiculous that his son faces an unlawful weapon charge.
He says the boy threatened no one.

This zero-tolerance crap has to stop.

Mother’s Day, to me, was always a "Hallmark Holiday" created by said company to sell more cards.  I actually got that idea from my Mom, so I feel comfortable in sharing it publicly here.  That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to learn of the true genesis of the holiday from Billy the Blogging Poet’s post "Mother’s Day in America":

In the beginning, the American celebration of Mother’s Day was an
effort on the part of the mothers of dead American soldiers to morn (sic) the
loss of their sons in war and to protest the wartime actions of the
United States during and after the American Civil War.

Mothers’ Day was first suggested in the United States by Julia Ward Howe, writer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic..
She suggested that Mothers’ Day be dedicated to peace. Miss Howe
organized Mothers’ Day meetings in Boston every year and was influenced
by Anna Jarvis, but like Mrs. Jarvis, failed in her attempt to get
formal recognition of a “Mothers’ Day for Peace.”

Anna Jarvis– a young Appalachian homemaker who began work in 1858 to
improve sanitation using what she called Mothers’ Work Days– organized
women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions
for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and
Confederate neighbors, but neither of these women– Anna Jarvis or
Julia Howe– sought to make Mothers’ Day a celebration of motherhood as
it is celebrated today.

It ends up that Anna Jarvis’s daughter spearheaded the effort to get Mother’s Day officially recognized as a national holiday.  President Wilson did so in 1914.

Visit Billy’s post to read the whole piece.  It’s very interesting.

So a 17 year old kid is at school and gets a call on his cell phone from his mom, who is stationed in Iraq.  The kid is ordered to hang up by a teacher because it is against the rules to use the phone during school hours.  The kid apparently informs the teacher that his mom is calling from Iraq and he isn’t going to hang up. 

Let’s keep in mind that this is a 17 year old boy, who is probably a little excited, so we can probably stipulate that the kid didn’t articulate his situation in the nicest way.  So the kid is taken, cursing, to the office where the school administration can choose between a 10 day suspension or arrest.  They opt for a 10 day suspension and then release this quote:

Parham said the teen’s suspension was based on his reaction to the
teacher’s request. He said the teen used profanity when taken to the
office.

"Kevin got defiant and disorderly," Parham said. "When a
kid becomes out of control like that they can either be arrested or
suspended for 10 days. Now being that his mother is in Iraq, we’re not
trying to cause her any undue hardship; he was suspended for 10 days."

Nope, not a hardship at all.

***Update: According to CNN the school officials have shortened the suspension to two days, or time served.  Think it had anything to do with the wave of negative publicity and torrent of angry email they received?***

From the same issue of Cool News of the Day referenced in the previous post, here’s another luxury category they’ve identified:

These days, at least in Geoffrey’s neighborhood, goatskin gardeners would be appalled by anything less than Smith & Hawken
brand "implements … even these have lost a little cache lately. The
real status tools are made by a Dutch concern called Sneeboer &
Sons, sneeboer.com. They are
stainless steel and hand forged, and you pay a premium for them that
you would for a Lexus." Of course, as Geoffrey points out: "I believe
my dirt will not notice whether it is being turned by a True Value fork
or a Sneeboer." Ha! Oh, but about that dirt — it’s not dirt, actually.
It’s soil. And for fertilizer, well, it "must have passed through some
creature’s large intestine — or have been composted from organic
material," available commercially as "MooDoo", "ZooDoo", and "The Real Poop."

If that’s too pedestrian, you can spring for some Peruvian Seabird Guano or Indonesian Bat Guano
— at $4 a pound. How long before Starbucks is selling this stuff? Then
there’s the matter of the seeds: "A few packages of Burpee’s best, burpee.com,
bought at the local fuel and feed, might have been all right for your
parents’ generation, but they just won’t do now," writes Geoffrey, who
went online to order heirloom tomato seeds called "Brandywine from
Johnny’s Selected Seeds, johnnyseeds.com, in Winslow, Maine.

Methinks armageddon is upon us.

I read an article in Cool News of the Day today (which referenced a New York Times article in the April 21, 2005 issue) about some companies that have targeted the luxury jeans market.  Now if you thought that we children of the 80s were silly with our designer jeans, check this out:

 …Technically, "luxury jeans" is any pair priced at $75 or
more. In reality, the heart of the market seems to reside above the
$200 point, with some jeans, such as the Evisu brand, evisu.com,
from Japan, commanding $635. What’s intriguing is that the allure jeans
like Evisu seems to have perhaps less to do with the price or even how
they’re designed than with their relative obscurity. Listen to Collette
Leonard, who says she would buy a $500 pair of jeans in a blink: "It’s
just a pair of jeans, I realize that," she says, adding: "But … I’d
much rather go out and find something unique that you’re not going to
see on every girl in New York." Which means, obviously, that she’d
better not see those jeans on Jennifer Aniston, either.

The key, then, is to make sure that the jeans are instantly
recognizable as unrecognizable. Oddly, most jeanmakers go about this
the same way: "Everybody adds a story, a trick, a gimmick, a hook, a
twisted seam, a nontwisted seam, a selvage detail, chasing the next
thing out there that is that much better," says Thomas George of E
Street Denim, estreetdenim.com, a retailer.  "But the reality is that there’s nothing left to design in a jean." So, take your pick of Tsubi ($319) or True Religion ($359) or  Chip & Pepper
($275).

I don’t know where to begin, so I won’t.

Perspective is a funny thing in that it changes all the time.  For much of my adult life I’ve always felt fortunate to have lived during a time that I thought must be the most enlightened of all human history.  After all we have the benefit of lessons learned from all the generations of humans that preceded us.

Then I read, see or hear something that makes me question our enlightenment.  Here’s just one such event, a Frontline profile of the genocide in Rwanda back in the mid-90s.

I remember vividly reading about the genocide in the paper, as it was happening.  I remember thinking, "How can we, that is human beings, allow something like this to happen?"

When reading about the Holocaust I used to think the reason the Nazi’s were able to pull it off is that most of humanity was ignorant of what was going on.  People still argue about that, but I KNOW that the genocide in Rwanda was not a deep dark secret, and yet we let it happen.  I read about it in the Washington Post every day.

Given that the Holocaust occured only 50 years before the genocide in Rwanda we can’t even claim that something like this had not happened in recent times so we could not expect to be prepared to respond to such an event. No, we simply allowed it to happen.  Again.

You may wonder why I keep saying we.  It’s really very simple.  My theory is that we allow atrocities to happen because we think they happen to others.  We allow them to happen because they are really not like us.  They are Jewish, they are African, they are Cambodian, they are not us.  Until we begin to think of ourselves as members of the same extended family on this little life raft we call Earth, then we will never avoid repeating the sins of our past.  We will never attain enlightenment.

Much of my liberal arts education in the late ’80s could have been accurately categorized as the study of "old, dead, white guys."  Sure I had a course or two in what was then thought of as alternative fine-arts education (African American Literature, History of Middle Eastern Literature, etc.), but by and large it was the now-much-derided classics curriculum.

Well, from Ed Cone’s blog comes a link to an article in The Independent (UK) about a new technique being used by scholars at Oxford University (interestingly with help from some scientists at Brigham Young University) to read the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a treasure trove of ancient Greek and Roman literature that was discovered in the late 19th century.  It seems that the stuff was illegible until now, and with the help of new technology the scholars are now able to read long-lost works from the likes of Sophocles, a very dead, very old, maybe not-so-white guy.

Obviously this opens up a whole lot of possiblities for understanding the ancient world, but the part that intrigued me most was this:

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make
a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles,
Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost
for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian
gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the
earliest books of the New Testament.

With all the flack that Dan Brown is getting from mainstream Christian scholars about his fictional work, The Da Vinci Code, wouldn’t it be a hoot if they found some biblical texts that supported even one of his fictional assertions?  Even better wouldn’t it be very interesting to see how the church deals with any new revelations that might be had if new gospels are discovered?

Personally I think that so many leaders of the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches are beholden to the tradition developed, passed down, modified and enforced by generation after generation of men (and a few women) that it’s good to have a fundamental shake-up every once in a while.  Too often the answer to a flock member’s question is, "Because that is the way it has always been." Which is why now is as good a time as any to ask, "Why?" 

Could make for an interesting first year for the new Pope don’t you think?

Looks like the tipplers beat the teetotallers in the NC House.  Alcohol content going up in beer…I knew something positive had to eventually come out of those chambers.

I haven’t been blogging much during the last week because I’ve been VERY busy working at my client’s annual conference in Chicago.  This post, and I’m sure many posts that will follow, is inspired by some observations and experiences I had last week. That’s what happens when you spend a week with literally hundreds of people who are smarter than you’ll ever be.

The opening keynoter for the conference was Bob Galvin, whose father started Motorola in 1928 and who took the company over in the late 50’s and grew it to the behemoth it is today.

Many of the folks involved in putting the conference together, myself included, were a little nervous about having Mr. Galvin as the opening keynoter.  The opening act is vital because he or she sets the tone for the conference.  The fact that Mr. Galvin is an octogenarian, and not a current business superstar, had us wondering if we’d made a wise choice.  Despite the fact that we’d all been reassured that he is actually a very good speaker, we were sure he’d get the conference off to a snoozing start. Of course not one of us is over 45!

None of us would categorize ourselves as ageists, or any -ist for that matter.  The fact is, however, that we were definitely biased by Mr. Galvin’s classification as an old man. 

Sure it took Mr. Galvin an inordinate amount of time to get to the podium, and maybe he wasn’t the most dynamic speaker in the world, but he was captivating. For 1 1/2 hours you could have heard a pin drop.  There were 800 or so people in that room and no one made a sound.  No one ran out to check their messages, no one’s cell phone went off, no one fell asleep.  It was as if we were in the town square listening to the sage advice of a village elder. 

Everything Mr. Galvin had to say was on topic, was well thought out, and most importantly was wise.  His body was stooped, his mannerisms were lethargic, but his mind was as sharp as a tack.

It was easily one of the most amazing business experiences I’ve had, and it was definitely a moment of personal discovery.  I’d never thought of myself as biased but I realize now that I had shown the most fundamental symptom of bias when I judged a man not by his achievements or his being, but by a classification.  Shame on me. Hopefully it is a lesson I’ll remember and not repeat.