Absolutely ridiculous: And these people are supposed to be helping our education system?

2 teachers union lobbyists teach for a day to qualify for hefty pensions.

I love the TSA even more after reading this story

Again, joking… kind of.

Jill Filipovic, Blogger, Finds Sexual Note Written On TSA Document Inside Her Luggage

After a weekend flight to Dublin, Ireland from Newark, New Jersey, blogger Jill Filipovic opened her suitcase to unpack her belongings when she found a handwritten note on a TSA form encouraging her to “Get [her] freak on girl.”

[...]

A Forbes staff member, who claims to know Filipovic, reached out to the TSA for comment regrading the sexually-indicative note that supposedly refers to a vibrator.

In response, the TSA issued a statement saying, “TSA takes all allegations of inappropriate conduct seriously and is investigating this claim,” Forbes reports.

In her Feministe blog post titled “Your tax dollars at work”, Filipovic acknowledged that the note was “wildly inappropriate,” but she also pokes fun at the incident writing that she “just died laughing in [her] hotel room.”

“I’m grossed out, but it’s also hilarious,” Filipovic told Forbes. “I’ve had that Missy Elliott song stuck in my head all day,” she told Wired.com.

It is still uncertain who scribbled the message on the agency’s document, but the blogger told ABC News that she plans on filing a complaint with the TSA after she gets home. “I hope they do see the complaint, they’ll look into it and remind their staff that going through people’s personal belongings is a responsibility that should be treated with some modicum of professionalism,” Filipovic added to ABC.

 

Another reason to stop allowing your overweight kids chug Diet Cokes all day:

Just kidding… I think.  

Study: Drinking Soda May Cause Teen Violence

Teenagers who drink lots of soft drinks get into more fights and carry more weapons than their peers who drink less, found a new study.

And while the study couldn’t determine whether soft drinks actually cause violence, the findings add to a growing – yet still controversial – body of research on the effects of nutrition on behavior.

“We were surprised at how large the effect was,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center in Boston.

“It was maintained even when we controlled for alcohol and tobacco and family stuff like eating dinners together,” he said. “There was a very strong, stable relationship between more soft drinks that people said they drank and more fights with things like pushing and shoving.”

There has long been interest in how diet affects behavior, not just among scientists, but also among legal experts. In a notorious 1979 San Francisco murder trial, lawyers blamed the killer’s actions on his recent switch from a health-food diet to one filled with Coca-Cola and other junk food.

Their argument worked. Instead of a homicide ruling, the defendant was convicted of a lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter. The legal strategy became known as the “Twinkie Defense,” and the precedent raised a number of questions that persist, despite years of research on the subject.

A 2006 study in Norway found that teens who drank lots of soft drinks suffered from worse mental health compared to those who drank fewer. And a study published earlier this year found higher levels of antisocial behavior in American college students who drank the most soda.

For the latest study, Hemenway and colleague Sara Solnick surveyed more than 1,800 students in Boston public schools. During 40-minute sessions that covered a range of topics, kids answered questions about how much non-diet soda they had gulped down in the past seven days, whether they had been violent towards others, and if they had carried around a knife or gun in the previous year.

Nearly 30 percent of respondents reported consuming more than five cans of soda each week, the researchers reported in Injury Prevention. Heavy soda drinkers didn’t seem to get less sleep than anyone else, but they were more likely to have indulged in alcohol and tobacco over the previous month.

Even when the researchers controlled for alcohol, tobacco, BMI and other details, though, they found a steady rise in violence alongside higher levels of soda drinking. Twenty-three percent of teens who drank fewer than one soft drink a week reported carrying a weapon, for example, compared to 43 percent who drank five or more cans a week. And violence towards peers rose from 35 percent in the low-consumption group to 59 percent in the heaviest soda-drinkers.

It’s far too soon to claim that soda causes violence, and the new study only shows a correlation, said Bernard Gesch, who researchers diet and behavior at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Still, there is growing evidence that sugar might deserve at least some of the blame. Some research has shown that willpower is directly related to how the brain metabolizes glucose, Gesch said. There is also good evidence that people who perpetrate violence tend to have abnormalities in that glucose-digesting process. And consuming massive amounts of sugar could set those people up to commit violent acts.

In his own research, Gesch found a 26 percent drop in discipline-worthy offenses among prisoners who were given nutritional supplements, while behavior stayed the same in a group that was randomly assigned to take placebo pills. A similar study by Dutch researchers showed a 48 percent drop in bad acts with supplementation.

“The evidence that links diet with heart disease could easily fill a warehouse,” he added. “The evidence that links diet and brain function could fill two or three filing cabinets. If the brain is the crown jewels of our species, why is it receiving so little research?”

If you have absolutely nothing to do today…

…you can spend your day doing what I did yesterday: reading the hilarious tweets from the escaped Zanesville, Ohio exotic animals. You have so many animals to choose from… @herpesmonkey, @zanesvillewolf , @zanesvillelion … I promise you will be entertained for quite a while.

 

Something tells me that this guy is going to lose the race…

Alleged sign stealer to stay in Covington mayor’s race

By Joel Provano

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Bobby Sigman, the Covington mayoral candidate who was arrested and charged with stealing his opponent’s campaign signs, now say he’s staying in the race.

He said earlier this week that he was quitting the race, telling Channel 2 Action news he was “tired of seeing my supporters raked over the coals for nothing.”

Sigman denied having done anything with criminal intent, “although I made some bad decisions.”

Covington police set up a videotaped sting after receiving a complaint that mayoral candidate Ronnie Johnston’s signs were being stolen.

The 70-year-old Sigman said the video showing him picking up a pile of signs “were signs I found on the right-of-way, and I planned to return them” to Johnston. “I did not steal any of his signs,” Sigman said.

Sigman was arrested Oct. 12 and charged with making false statements within a political subdivision, theft by taking and criminal trespass, all misdemeanors. He is free on $3,500 bond while awaiting trial.

Sigman told the Newton Citizen that when he said he was withdrawing, “I meant I was withdrawing from the campaign, not the office.”

The newspaper also quoted Sigman as saying, “I’m going to lose. I know it. It’s not going to be a big deal.”

Thanks for the XXX gifts, China

School scrambles to retrieve X-rated prizes.

Best site of the day:

This website is awesome.

Thanks for making my day.

The soon-to-be famous Scrabble Battle of 2011?

Don’t get me wrong — I love Scrabble. I’ve been known to waste hours upon hours trying to outsmart my opponents on Words With Friends. But this has got to be the ultimate nerd war.

This is apparently what the Huffington Post took from last night’s GOP debate:

Cain actually said that Occupy Wall Street protestors should be in front of the White House, not businesses in New York, since it is truly the government that has failed them. He also said that personal responsibility was important, so yes, some unemployed Americans should be held accountable for their problems. Sensationalize much, HuffPo?

Huh. These are the same journalists that claim that Republicans are racist, sexist, etc. I don’t think that the Huffington Post would feature an article about the fingernails of a male candidate, though… do you? The only news-worthy story about Bachmann last night were her long fingernails? (I don’t think very highly of her as a political figure, mind you, but I still find the coverage of her sexist and pretty ridiculous.) You guys must really be grasping for things to criticize. First SimCity, then this?

There are several things wrong with this story…

First off:

FOX, maybe you need to check on who is editing your stories. Is this a Michigan school? Or is this an Illinois school? The title is saying one thing, the article is saying another. I really don’t know how you get those two confused, but whatever.

Then:

Who are these monsters that run this school? Three restroom visits per semester? That’s ridiculous. Of course, letting a student go to the bathroom every day in the same class period does not make sense, but come on! I’m pretty sure that I remember running down the halls in high school just to get to my next class — and that’s without taking time out to stop at the bathroom. You know that may be worse than a student missing three minutes of your incredibly interesting calculus class? A student peeing himself at his desk because he doesn’t want to make up the time after school.