Too Lazy to Fail

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8TO0QQO0&show_article=1

DECATUR, Ga. (AP) - A robbery suspect was shot and wounded by police in the parking lot outside a suburban Atlanta mall on Monday, authorities said.

Better than being shot and tickled, I suppose.

http://www.wftv.com/news/14858405/detail.html

A 10-year old Ocala girl brought her lunch to school and a small kitchen knife to cut it. She now faces a felony charge after being arrested. The school and the sheriff’s office disagree on the reason for the arrest.School officials say the 5th grader was brown-bagging it. She brought a piece of steak for her lunch, but she also brought a steak knife. That’s when deputies were called.

It happened in the cafeteria at Sunrise Elementary School. The 10-year-old used the knife to cut the meat.

“She did not use it inappropriately. She did not threaten anyone with it. She didn’t pull it out and brandish it. Nothing of that nature,” explained Marion County School Spokesman Kevin Christian.

But a couple of teachers took the utensil and called the sheriff. When deputies arrived, they were unable to get the child’s parents on the phone, so they arrested her and took her to the county’s juvenile assessment center.

“And we didn’t handcuff her or treat her like a criminal. But, we took her to the assessment center to be assessed,” said Capt. James Pogue, Marion County Sheriff’s Office.

School officials said it doesn’t matter what the knife was being used for. They said they had no choice.

“Anytime there’s a weapon on campus, yes, we have to report it and we aggressively report it because we don’t want to take any chances, regardless,” Christian said.

But the sheriff’s office said the extreme measures in what some may say was a harmless incident had to do with school policy, not theirs.

“But once we’re notified, we have to take some type of action,” Pogue explained.

The student now faces a felony charge for the possession of a weapon on school property and the principal suspended her for ten days. The parents of the girl could not be reached for comment.

The sheriff’s office has turned the case over to the State Attorney’s Office.

Unfortunately, school officials failed to confiscate thousands of other dangerous weapons found on the campus, including pencils, pens, scissors, forks, rulers, drafting compasses, yardsticks, combs, baseball bats, fire extinguishers, desks, chairs, textbooks, socks, chains, keyboards, cafeteria trays, wooden doorstops, staplers, jump ropes, purses, lunch boxes, full soda cans and bottles, dishes…

I mean, come on. I can *almost* understand taking it away from her, but taking her downtown, charging her with a felony, and suspending her for 10 days?

I’m 24. I never thought that at this age I’d be griping about “how things were in my day”, but here goes: I won my first pocketknife (a Barlow identical to the one on the left) during Sunday School with “points” I racked up by memorizing Bible verses. From about the third grade on I had a pocket knife in my pocket at school, and so did all my friends. I continued to carry progressively meaner-looking knives until high school, when I replaced my pocket knife with a multi-tool (including a knife). It was never a big deal, and the only times I remember actually thinking to put away or surrender a knife for safekeeping was when I was crossing a border or getting on an airplane for a short-term missions trip. Adults at school knew that most of the boys had pocket knives on them, but aside from a boy brandishing a knife at my school in fifth grade (he was expelled), it was never brought up.

Times change and our policies must change with them, but I think sometimes that we miss the forest for the trees.

What do you do when you’re running Karazhan and you have to wait for someone to go do something?

You have someone play an MP3 into Teamspeak and play musical chairs.

Warning: There’s some language in the video. Not cool for work or kids.

First marital aids, now this?

Product Description
Radioactive sample of uranium ore. Useful for testing Geiger Counters. License exempt. Uranium ore sample sizes vary. Shipped in labeled metal container as shown. Shipping Information: We are always in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations and Postal Service regulations specified in 49 CFR 173.421 for activity limits of low level radioactive materials. Item will be shipped in accordance with Postal Service activity limits specified in Publication 52. Radioactive minerals are for educational and scientific use only.

This would be a great way to make sure that, should you ever get raided for any offense real or imaginary, the authorities would have to go to the time and trouble of getting a haz-mat team to come clear the premises. Don’t send me the bill for the stuff they break in the process, though.

End of the line for CompUSA.

Consumer electronics retailer CompUSA said Friday that it will go out of business after the holidays following sale of the company to Gordon Brothers Group LLC, a restructuring firm. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Called it:

Circuit City, at least in my area, wasn’t able to differentiate enough to prevent hemorrhaging of customers when better prices and selection came along, and seems to exist nationally only as a shell of its former self. CompUSA appears to have held on longer, perhaps having a business model that allows for a comparable selection of consumer electronics, plus a greater corporate appreciation for the geek hobbyist (who desires to build his own computer from components) than Best Buy. But when was the last time you heard of someone building a computer from components bought from a retail store? The online retailer has taken away one of the last advantages CompUSA had, and now it dangles by a thread in the shadow of Best Buy.

“Based on changing conditions in the consumer retail electronics markets, the company identified the need to close and sell stores with low performance or nonstrategic, old store layouts and locations faced with market saturation,” is equivalent to saying “We can’t compete toe to toe with our competition, but we hope to survive by being everywhere that they aren’t.”

Which is the desperate plea of a doomed business model. I declare Best Buy the winner of the consumer electronics war of the previous ten years. We’ll see how the Best Buy vs. Wal-mart vs. The Internet war of the next decade goes.

Sorry for the lack of posting. I was walking down the street a few weeks ago, heard something, and turned just in time to see someone swinging a Maglite at my head. When I came to, I found that I had been turned into a homeowner. Will blog about it soon.