Bits & Bytes

• Demanding a Captive Audience--An openly homosexual teacher at Rio Bravo-Greely Union School (K-8) in Bakersfield, CA has demanded that the school not allow children to be transferred out of his class. Teacher James Merrick filed suit when, following an incident where Merrick denounced a public official critical of gays, the school removed several children from his class at their parents' request. Will the homosexual lobby wrest control over children from their parents?
• Geography lesson needed?--According to the January 20 Indiana Daily Student, Shakir Mustafa of the Bloomington Coalition for Peace in the Gulf claimed that U.N. sanctions in Iraq have caused "lack of power and gas [forcing] the destructive conversion of forests to fuel." So, they have depleted their supply of petroleum and are cutting down their bountiful trees instead?
• Outcome-based athletics?--The Associated Press reports that Boston schools have recently acknowledged reporting false sports scores to avoid embarassing teams who lose by a large margin. Perhaps they should not keep score at all, as an East Coast children's soccer league has done?
• Someone call Jerry Springer!--At an IUSA student congress meeting on January 21, off-campus senator Nathan Zapf deemed fellow off-campus senator Matthew Muterspaugh's reading of a resolution as too lengthy, and decided to express this by throwing a stapler at him. This understandably upset the rest of the congress who are training, as good bureaucrats, to throw money at problems.
• Bride of Flynt--In her January 22 IDS column, Angie Brunk--most ardent supporter of smut this side of Penthouse--denounced parents and others who advocate that libraries install porn-filtering software on Internet-connected computers. Apparently, this student of the School of Library and Information Science would turn her library into a free adult bookstore with no age restrictions.