More FaceBook Mayhem

At least this one involves FB only indirectly. Sure, people are always warned not to post things that might incriminate them later, or might cause a potential employer to look askance at certain behaviors.

But in this case, a school demanded a student's login information and then shared otherwise private posts with other teachers. I don't blame the student's family one bit for suing and I hope they win big.

A pdf of the complaint is posted here.

The thing I don't get is how in the hell it is the business of a school district what its students do on their own time? The teacher had no right to ask for such personal information as a student's FB login info. What is the teacher's info? If she has the right to ask it, surely others have the right to demand same of her.

E-books and the Fate of Paper

Here is an interesting blog post that illustrates so well my feelings about e-books. I think I told someone essentially what this post does (but way back in library school when the discussion was really about digital texts in general back in the olden days before everyone and his brother's dog had a Kindle or a Blackberry).

Yeah, yeah, I get that digital is cheap and easily disseminated and manipulated. But IMO it will never take the place of snuggling up with the sort of book that you would want to snuggle up with, drinking a cup of hot chocolate.

Beyond the Sea

I'm the first to admit that younger I was not a fan of Bobby Darin. For one thing he was a generation or so ahead of me. He was born 5 years after my mother. But as I cruised DishNetwork's lineup Saturday I saw a biopic with KEVIN SPACEY as the lead and I watched most, but not all, of it. As an eternal fan of American Beauty, I bit. And was not disappointed.

I totally dug the big band arrangements (yes, total orchestra/stage band geek here, in the 70's I grooved to Led Zep AND Glenn Miller), and Kevin Spacey..how the hell can you go wrong? The script could have been better, but on the whole I thought it was decent. I never really did get "Mack the Knife," even though I know it was from Weill's Threepenny Opera.

When I looked at Bobby Darin's wikipedia entry at first I thought it seemed lame to go toward folk music and assumed that this was purely a marketing decision. But when I heard his "Simple Song of Freedom," I changed my mind. This man was a songwriting genius...as is the case with so many Italians. (I had a huge crush on my flute teacher in high school, Phil Baldino. My fiance, an Italian, is a music loser but his brother teaches piano).

Too bad that he did not have more personal fulfillment. But when I look for music to download, this is an area I will definitely consider in the future.

Thanks to Kevin for giving me one more reason to appreciate his work and vision.

Palin Resignation Update

He said/she said...

Whatever else I may think about Palin and her political/executive abilities (or demonstrated lack thereof) she has pretty much screwed the pooch re: her perceived professionalism by entering into a pissing contest with her daughter's baby daddy.

"It is interesting to learn Levi is working on a piece of fiction while honing his acting skills," Palin family spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

You can't really fault Levi for this. Apparently he learned at the knee of the Mother of All Fairy Tales.

"Obviously she's stressed out as governor. I mean moving up to the vice president or president is huge. I just don't think anymore that she's cut out for the job." Don't worry Levi. She doesn't really seem to be cut out as MIL material, either. She may be qualified as MILF material, however.

Perhaps Palin's strategy here could be referred to as a "Reverse Franken." She left politics to go into comedy.

Some Things Just Bear Repeating

The 4 Steps to becoming a Drag Queen

1. Let Good Thoughts be your Sword and Shield
2. Ignore Adversity
3. Abide by the Rules of Love
4. Larger Than Life is Just the Right Size

Ouch! A Career Summed Up in 2 Words

This from Wonkette:
"sex person John Ensign"

To be fair, my career could also be said to have been reduced to 2 words...but at least it isn't these 2. Hey, take smug moral superiority where you can, I say!

Oh Christ, the Porn Spam Has Got to Stop!

Does spamming people really help sell a product? Why don't spammers realize that when they send this crap out all it does it create a negative impression in the mind of the potential customer. Lately I've been getting lots of porn spam trying to get me to buy penis enhancement drugs.

Sorry kids, but since I'm a woman your product won't do me any good (and frankly my honey doesn't need it anyway). So now I'm doing whois lookups on these instead of merely adding the sending addresses to my Spambot™ page so that bots will spam these people in turn. Hey poetic justice and all...Anyhoo, when I do the whois lookup I see the email of the person who registered the spamming domain. Now I am adding that email to the Spambot™ page as well. I guess the next step would be to contact the admin of the hosting service and complain.

The last 6 domains that sent me this crap were registered to 2 emails: wiangd@126.com and uyamlegb@yeah.net

Palin Resigns

"'I'm not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual,' she said in Wasilla Friday."

"Palin, who was elected governor in 2006 and has widely been seen as a leading 2012 presidential contender, said she had tired of 'superficial, wasteful political blood sport.'"

I thought that the beauty queen who could field dress a moose was into blood sport.

Wow. The funny thing is that she did not do this earlier...like before John McCain picked her as running mate. She could have easily spared him the embarrassment, not to mention the election...

Poor Sarah. Were those pesky ethics investigations getting in the way?