I’m never going to be able to move and/or have children
I really love living in the New York metro area, but it’s so expensive here. I have lived in much cheaper places and loved it (Montreal, how I miss thee!), but this is always going to be my home. I would love to be able to live somewhere else for a while, not only to give my wallet a bit of a break, but also because I like to experience new people and places. The South seems like a worthwhile region to consider, since it’s cheap and I have a lot of relatives there, but it’s stories like this one that make me believe that maybe I’m better off staying here and paying the Northeast Premium.
Why would a middle school arrange the student elections so that only students of certain races can hold office? What student government positions are available to those children who are neither white nor black? How could anybody think that this would be okay? This is why people still find it okay to make jokes about Mississippi.
As somebody on Gawker pointed out, it’s good to see that the school practices what it preaches (scroll down)…
Smoking baby 2.0: Now with 100% more beer
How does a 3 year old, even one with a possible traumatic brain injury, just take up smoking and drinking? And who just gives a kid that age cigarettes on credit? Bonkers.
For comparison’s sake: Smoking baby 1.0
Please help keep me in books and yarn* – Permanent for now
I know that this isn’t about me at all, but I feel that a little selfishness is allowed, as I will be directly affected if Governor Christie’s proposed budget is passed. As it stands, this budget would cut 74% of New Jersey library funding. By any accounting, that is an insane amount of money, even though the $10 million in library programs cut from the Governor’s budget represents little more than $1 per person in state funds.
What you can do:
- Become a NJ library champion
- Become a BCCLS (Bergen County) library champion
- Contact your legislators online (scroll down)
- Send a letter to your legislators Related: Find out who your legislators are
- Who doesn’t like a good rally? Join the May 6 rally for libraries in sexy Trenton, NJ
- Join the “Save New Jersey Libraries” Facebook Group. This is one of the most visible and least useful ways to support something, so make sure you do at least one or two of the other things, as well.
* Those are my vices, although I will admit that they’re not nearly as exciting as hookers and blow.
An 8 year old kid + a loaded Uzi = Bad, bad things
From the article:
A Massachusetts sporting club is donating $10,000 to children’s charities as part of a deal settling criminal charges in the death of an 8-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the head with an Uzi during a gun fair.
There were so many points of failure in this story (the organizers’, the former police chief’s, the gun club’s, the father’s, and the poor 15 year old boy who was supervising Christopher) that it’s hard to know where to begin casting the blame. Christopher Bizilj deserved so much better than what happened to him. Mistakes and lapses in judgment happen all the time, but I honestly don’t know how his mother, Suzanne Bizilj can stand the knowledge that when their child was handed a loaded Uzi, her husband was preparing to take pictures, rather than to help his son hold the firearm.
Craziness
I’m wonder if yesterday’s post made it sound like I hate children, which actually couldn’t be further from the truth. I like kids, and kids really like me. I’m the Baby Whisperer. You give me a fussy kid and me holding them generally quiets them down pretty quickly (note: this only works on babies who don’t know me very well – I guess my charm is in my newness). I just try not to be all, “Won’t somebody think about the children??” when it comes to a everything. I think that sometimes people give up too much in the name of protecting children, to nobody’s benefit.
Unless, of course, protecting children is exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. In which case, you’d better earn your keep. I just read the most horrific story about Our Little Rugratz, a daycare center in Jersey City that left behind a two-year-old after a field trip to New York City. Are you kidding me? My 19-year-old cousin was in Manhattan on Saturday and wouldn’t even let me leave him in Chinatown, where he was supposed to meet up with his friends.
How is it possible that people in charge of multiple children didn’t count obsessively to see if they had everybody? Kids wander off all the time, so if they’d known that they were missing one child, that would have been more understandable. But they didn’t. They left Emily Grogan in New York, and didn’t realize it until several hours had passed. Oh. My. God. And the first indication that parents Amy and Joseph Grogan had that something was wrong was when Amy went to pick up Emily. I’m so sorry that her parents had to go through that, and completely understand why the Grogans have pressed charges against Iris and Luis Pietri, the owners of the daycare center.
Thanks, TSA
I think the TSA keeps doing really stupid things because they know I’m too lazy to look for good posting material. Anyway, this time they detained a college student who was set to board a flight for having Arabic-language flash cards. How do they think that native English speakers are going to learn Arabic? Magic?
Let’s all sigh and shake our heads sadly.
Ouch
I thought my high school volleyball coach was a jerk (and he was), but at least he never hit any of us in the head with a volleyball.
Eeeeeevil
Dating site BeautifulPeople.com just shoved a bunch of its members back into the rating process, after other “vigilant members” noticed that these people had gained weight. That seems pretty cold to me, but what does the site’s owner have to say?
“As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said site founder Robert Hintze. “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”
Jesus. That’s cold. The professional first half of that quote left me completely unprepared for the part where he thought that using the term “fatties” was a good idea.
Ya think??
“We tend to believe Zhang’s death was caused primarily by unknown health problems. But there’s still a possibility that the freezing contributed to his death.“
Wow. To call this sentence an understatement would be doing a disservice to all the mere understatements people have uttered throughout recorded history. I mean, it doesn’t even assume as much responsibility as that classic, passive-voiced cop-out, “Mistakes were made.”
Also, happy Monday!
I may never eat again
Below you will find an email that I received from UrbanDaddy. I just joined this site, and I’m pretty sure that I will be unsubscribing rather soon, if this is their idea of something that MUST be shared. I left the contact info at the end, though, in case what makes me vomit in my mouth actually makes you salivate. I simply do not understand why you’d want sausage that tasted like a bacon cheeseburger, instead of just having a bacon cheeseburger.
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Think back to your early days.