smorg

Le sigh

Sadly, they will eventually learn what it is…

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. Thecontroversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

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Mummified body found in front of blaring TV

Another reason that automatic bill pay is not for everyone…

Police called to a Long Island man’s house discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set.

The 70-year-old Hampton Bays, New York, resident, identified as Vincenzo Ricardo, appeared to have died of natural causes. Police said on Saturday his body was discovered on Thursday when they went to the house to investigate a report of a burst water pipe.

“You could see his face. He still had hair on his head,” Newsday quoted morgue assistant Jeff Bacchus as saying. The home’s low humidity had preserved the body.

Officials could not explain why the electricity had not been turned off, considering Ricardo had not been heard from since December 2005.

Neighbors said when they had not seen Ricardo, who was diabetic and had been blind for years, they assumed he was in the hospital or a long-term care facility.

I’ve owned my domain McDev.com for almost 10 years now. Over those years, I’ve used numerous email addresses for it, including some created just for specific places (web site logins, storefronts, people to send to me).

For the past couple of years though, I have used Googles ‘hosted apps for your domain‘ feature, which allows me to access my mcdev email via a gmail interface.

Any email that goes to mcdev (minus a few personal accounts) goes to a ‘catch-all’ address, meaning one big fat mailbox.

Today I noticed that my Spam box was a little large. This is what happens when spammers get their scumbag on, aww yeah.
:)

Teacher exposes kids to porn via spyware - to be jailed

Until recently, Julie Amero says, she lived the quiet life of a small-town substitute teacher, with little knowledge of computers and even less about porn.

Now she is in the middle of a criminal case that hinges on the intricacies of both, and it could put her behind bars for up to 40 years.

She was convicted last month of exposing seventh-grade students to pornography on her classroom computer.

She contended the images were inadvertently thrust onto the screen by pornographers’ unseen spyware and adware programs.

Prosecutors dispute that. But her argument has made her a cause celebre among some technology experts, who say what happened to her could happen to anyone.

No joke. This happens EVERYDAY to millions of people. It’s unfortunate that she didn’t have the training to know what was happening, or the common sense to turn the monitor off, or even the wherewithal to turn off the system despite her ‘orders’.

Rest of the article after the jump…
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Seriously. This warrants a touching honorarium and subtle memorial graphic? The woman was absolutely worthless. She accomplished not a single thing in her life that was worthwhile.

God forbid that Paris Hilton were to die. We’d have to shut down the schools and Post Offices.