Winning the 108-year-old vote

McCain apparently wasn't old or experienced enough for this Gaithersburg woman: "Woman, 108, votes in her 22nd presidential election."

From the article:

Though she predicted victory for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), in part because of his ability to mobilize young voters, she just couldn't get herself to buy into either Obama or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). So the 20-year Asbury resident — who moved to Annapolis in the 1920s and worked as a teacher — broke from the Republican ranks for the first time to vote for Ralph Nader.

Because there's a guy with gravitas.

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Teacher of the year

And quotation of the day:

"She's the best," said Chad Meyers, a sophomore at Virginia Tech, who graduated from Wootton in 2007. "Everyone loved her," he said. "She's such a sweetheart."

In my day you needed a parent's note to get aspirin.

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Airborne

Charities have a lot of ways of raising money. Governments have basically three.

First, taxes. Second, lotteries (defined as a tax on those who don't understand math). And third, of course, the inevitable speed cameras.

I read somewhere a few months ago that the District of Columbia had placed speed cameras in all sorts of obscure spots. Naturally, the cameras caught a lot of speeders and brought in some huge bucks as a result. Foolishly, however, the D.C. government budgeted for a similar amount the next year. What happened instead, you will hardly be surprised to learn, is that drivers figured out where the cameras were and slowed down. So the speed cameras brought in a lot less money the following year.

But, you say, they still accomplished their primary mission of getting people to drive within the speed limits.

Are you out of your freakin' mind? No local government cares whether people drive within the speed limits; its concern is with raising money through fines.

All of which makes it particularly amusing that in Silver Spring, a 68-year-old man, driving a Toyota Echo with his 76-year-old wife, was charged with driving 100 MPH (that's miles, not kilometers, per hours) on a hilly, winding, narrow street -- in order words, with doing the impossible.




The photo above is not, by the way, a Toyota Echo, but it's a car that might have done 100 MPH on that road.

This is an Echo.



You really should read the linked article, because the man and woman are apparently your typical good-government Montgomery County liberals:

"While the Brennans strongly endorse the county's photo enforcement efforts, they are baffled as to how Terence Brennan could be accused of driving their Toyota Echo economy car at 100 MPH."

And Mrs. Brennan was saddened, not outraged:

"'We and our neighbors, who know well that even 40 MPH would be dangerous at this stretch, wonder how the camera could come up with such a reading,' Helga Brennan wrote to The Washington Post. 'This speed would be impossible on the Beltway at the best of times, and we have never in our life driven at this speed.'"

If you think it's unfair of me to make fun of their political views without knowing anything about it, you're absolutely right. But I'm going to do it, anyway. Because there's even more evidence of it. According to the Washington Post:

Terence, 68, and Helga, 76, paid the $40 fine promptly after receiving the citation in the mail. Like many people, they felt it wasn't worth the hassle of contesting the ticket in district court. Like very few, they also thought the county needed the money.

But the story did end happily at last. Helga Brennan wrote to the Post; the Post got in touch with the county police; and the county police admitted error, refunded the fine, and apologized for having failed to respond to the Brennans' letter.

And as for the rest of us, so long as there are people who think the government needs more money and are willing to pay fines that are obviously undeserved, I say, "Good for them!" The more people there are like that, the longer we can go between tax increases.

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Al Qaeda imitates Woody Allen's "Bananas"

Remember the scene in Bananas where the successful guerrilla leader addresses the people and announces his new edicts?

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now 16 years old.

According to this article, Al Qaeda really ticked off the Iraqis by imposing similar edicts.

Besides the terrible killings inflicted by the fanatics on those who refuse to pledge allegiance to them, Al-Qa'eda has lost credibility for enforcing a series of rules imposing their way of thought on the most mundane aspects of everyday life.

They include a ban on women buying suggestively-shaped vegetables, according to one tribal leader in the western province of Anbar.

Sheikh Hameed al-Hayyes, a Sunni elder, told Reuters: "They even killed female goats because their private parts were not covered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram.

"They regarded the cucumber as male and tomato as female. Women were not allowed to buy cucumbers, only men."

Well, I guess if you had to choose the quintessential male and female vegetable, they chose the right ones. Cucumbers are obviously male; tomatoes are obviously female.

In fact, to quote Woody Allen again, the queen in a sketch in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex * But Were Afraid To Ask is shocked when the Woody Allen jester character touches her on the breasts. Woody Allen denies it, saying he would never lay his hands on "the royal tomatoes."

(hat tip: Soccer Dad, who writes, "Who knew that Al Qaeda operated in Montgomery County?")

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Who's minding the mint?

At first, this sounds like the symptoms of watching a presidential debate, but in all seriousness, it is truly scary.

When Satnam Singh's Indian American relatives gathered for dinner Tuesday night in Gaithersburg, they shared a typical meal, including a potato stew flavored with mint.

What happened later was far from typical. Singh woke to find six members of his extended family in medical distress: nauseated, disoriented and worsening quickly.

* * * * *
The six became lethargic, and as the night wore on, they experienced a variety of symptoms, including heart palpitations, vomiting, sweating and loss of consciousness.

Authorities suspect that the mint may have been sprayed with a pesticide and not properly washed. On the other hand, six other family members were not sick, so who knows?

When I was young, we used to drink homemade iced tea with homegrown mint. I guess we didn't spray it with pesticides. That wouldn't have done anything to stop the neighborhood dogs, anyway.

UPDATE (7/11): Probably, it wasn't mint, after all, but rather "a potential deadly weed that apparently was mistakenly used as a cooking ingredient."

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Backing discrimination

From the "What Media Bias?" files.

Several months ago, Montgomery County passed legislation to protect transgender people from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations. Some groups, citing problematic applications of the law to bathrooms and locker rooms, have tried to get the measure on the ballot in a referendum in November. That process is in litigation.

A local judge has now ruled that advocates for the law missed a deadline for challenging signatures. It's kind of a technical matter. But if you want to know what happened, check the Washington Post article.

On the other hand, if you feel like having a laugh at a less than neutral headline, check out page 11 at this PDF link (warning: large download) to the Washington Post Express, the free, junky -- er, even junkier -- version of the Post handed out at Metro stops.

The headline reads: "Judge Sides Against Transgenders," but the subhead is priceless: "Montgomery County judge rules in favor of discrimination backers."

Well, I guess if you oppose an anti-discrimination law, you're a discrimination backer. The same way, if you oppose a law restricting abortion, you're pro-abortion. I know the Post would agree.

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Drinking their breakfast

This is truly a two-DUDE story.

Nine students were caught yesterday in the gymnasium of a Montgomery County middle school in possession of a noxious brew, police said: vodka, wine, tequila and rum, mixed with various fruit juices and concealed in water and soft-drink bottles.

Of these nine students, eight of them seventh-graders and one a sixth-grader. So they were what? 11 or 12 years old?

That's the first DUDE.

Now, get this: They were caught drinking this brew the first thing in the morning.

[Carol] Weiss [the principal] said two students alerted her at 7:40 a.m. that they suspected that a group of students were drinking alcohol in the bleachers while waiting for classes to start. She rounded them up and alerted police.

DUDE the second.

That's some pretty serious stuff to be downing before classes start. The principal has recommended suspension or expulsion. I'd throw in a little A.A. for good measure. These kids have some serious issues they'd better deal with right away.

(Note: If you don't know what the "DUDE" thing is all about, you're obviously not reading HotAir often enough.)

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Just say yes

Students in high school are sometimes a bunch of twerps, and students who run high-school newspapers are sometimes twerps squared. But this doesn't mean they're always wrong.

This fact is a useful one to keep in mind when you're a high-school administrator who's considering whether to permit an article to be published in the high-school newspaper.

Case in point: Moreno Carrasco, the principal of Richard Montgomery High School, one of the county high schools located in Rockville, has come under scrutiny for possibly running a consulting business on school time (and allegedly plagiarizing promotional materials for his training program). Carrasco is now on medical leave for an unspecified condition. The allegations have been the talk of the town.

So naturally the kids who run the school newspaper wanted to write an article about it. Veronica McCall, the acting principal, told them they couldn't publish the article while the investigation of Carrasco was continuing. The kids took it upstairs to the "Community Superintendent," who allowed the article to be published.

Why would the acting principal try to stop an article on what seems like a perfectly reasonable subject to write about?

McCall said she still disagrees with printing the article and thinks it is a "disruption to the instructional environment" with year-end exams coming up.

"I am not in support of publishing the article in The Tide newspaper," she said. "I want the students and staff to be focused on education."

This explanation makes no sense whatsoever. The matter has been discussed repeatedly in the local press. And why shouldn't students read about it in the school newspaper, assuming they read the school newspaper at all? It hardly seems to be a disruption to the educational environment.

I've actually had the opportunity to meet Ms. McCall in a professional situation, and I was very impressed with her. So I chalk this up to a simple error in judgment based on the uncomfortable position she must feel she's in.

But there's always going to be something uncomfortable for a school administrator, and there will always be a sense that students working for the school newspaper are annoying twerps. It's at precisely those times that a school administrator needs to keep this fact in mind: Sometimes the simplest and most correct answer is Yes.

UPDATE (4/30): The article in the student newspaper has been published. For the record, it contains one allegation involving Ms. McCall similar to the one I edited out of the first comment to this post.

UPDATE (6/12): Carrasco cleared, moved to another job.

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Advocacy the Montgomery County way

Is it just me or is it somewhat odd for a parent to be arrested (second item) when discussing his kid's elementary school work with school officials?

I don't know. I've lived for over 20 years in Montgomery County, where helicopter parenting takes on a whole new meaning, and yet this still seems a little out of line.

Scott Rogers, an outspoken Damascus parent who is well known on parent Internet lists, has been banned from his son's elementary school for a year following an incident that he describes as a protest arrest this month.

And here's the funniest line of the month in the Post. I can't even tell whether it was meant to be funny, because the writing on education matters is so totally dead serious, just the way you'd expect in this county.

School system officials often disagree with parents on whether a gifted child is properly challenged, but such disputes seldom end in arrest.

But school officials apparently didn't see the humor; rather, they went promptly into lockdown mode:

According to Principal Linda Goldberg, Rogers raised his voice, pointed his finger at staff "in a threatening manner" and pursued them loudly into the main office, leading school officials to put the campus on Code Blue, an emergency procedure.

When Rogers refused to leave, police were summoned. According to an arrest document, the 6-foot-4 Rogers "stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed very loudly, 'I am Rosa Parks. I will not ride on the back of the bus.'"

So Mr. Rogers had to take his cardigan to jail, and while he was there, the next Rosa Parks probably followed Martin Luther King and wrote a letter from the county jail.

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Mission impossible

When I lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the early- to mid-1980s, it was the home base of frizzy leftists. Our congressman was Ted Weiss, and it would be unfair to call him a Stalinist. I think, technically, he was a Leninist, but I was never very good at taxonomy.

For me, the most infamous vote cast by Weiss in the House had nothing to do with economics or foreign policy. That vote, which was publicized by his opponent, was Weiss's lone "no" on a 400-1 vote for some bill restricting child p*rnography. True story: In 1984, if I remember correctly, I asked the guy who was handing out Weiss's literature why he'd voted against the bill, and the response was that there were "serious civil liberties issues" with it. Undoubtedly, that was why he was the only congressman to notice it. I suppose it might have had something to do with the Times Square p*rn dealers who were in the district, but who knows?

Anyway, Weiss used to win elections by roughly 85-15. If you were a Democrat, as I was at the time, that meant that you had two chances to cast a protest vote against the creep, once in the primary and once in the general election. Usually, the local Republicans, such as they were, would field some young guy who was running just for the fun of it.

A friend of mine told me a story I haven't independently verified, but it's amusing regardless of its authenticity. The story was that in one election cycle, the Republican running against Weiss got the usual 10-20 percent of the vote. Shortly thereafter, he committed suicide. They asked the local Republican chairman about it, and his response was that he should have known the candidate was mentally unstable, because he actually thought he could win.

I say this all in preface to my discussion of the Republican primary for the congressional seat in Maryland's 8th District, where I live now. The district is primarily in Montgomery County.

This is a very liberal, predominantly Democratic district. For quite a few years, we were represented by a liberal Republican named Connie ("Commie") Morella. I take credit for her nickname, which was widely used -- at least, among a small group of my friends. Morella was popular with Democrats, as well, for the most part, but finally, in 2002, after several near misses, the Democrats were able to unseat her. Most people attribute it to a gerrymandering of the district following the 2000 census. Bush Derangement Syndrome also played a part. In any case, we're in for Democrats in the 8th district for the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, there's rarely a shortage of Republicans willing to make the run for the seat. I'm sort of joking when I say this, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to make Republican candidates in this district pass a psychological test before allowing them to run in the primary.

Today, I received in the mail the voters' guide for next Tuesday's the Feb. 12 primary from the League of Leftwing Women Voters. There are five Republicans seeking the suicide mission of running against Congressman Chris Van Hollen. Each has his positions set forth on the issues in the questionnaire of the League. Most of it, you will not be surprised to learn, is generic boilerplate. On the other hand, sometimes you can learn a lot from boilerplate. Because there's boilerplate, and there's boilerplate. For example, a guy who says we must support our military as it does the hard work in Afghanistan and Iraq is different from the guy who says we must support our military by bringing our troops home as soon as possible. (Those are my made-up examples, by the way.)

The one issue on the questionnaire that intrigued me was "Civil Rights." What does that mean, you ask? Here's what the League says: "How would you balance individual liberties and national security?" Call me cynical, but if you responded that national security is the most important mission of the federal government and that, while individual liberties are essential, we have to be practical and not ideological in defining our liberties, you would be considered anti-civil rights.

The implication is that our rights have already been abridged, which I think is ludicrous. (If you disagree with me, put it in the comments, but only if you are not a Ron Paul supporter or a lefty suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome.) To me, we have done far less than we need to do to maintain our national security. In fact, every time we try, our national security secrets are disclosed on the front pages of major newspapers located in New York. (I'm not trying to provoke you. Really.)

And it goes without saying that all of the Republican congressional candidates stress the importance of our liberties, but you can learn a lot by the way they say it. One dude says, "First priority, the United States must uphold the Geneva Convention on human rights." Translation: We haven't been treating our detainees well in Guantanamo. (My heart bleeds.) Another dude says at his bare-bones website: "The result [of straying from the Constitution], as our Founding Fathers foresaw over 200 years ago, is an ever more powerful and unaccountable government trampling on individual freedoms while engaging in foreign adventurism and reckless fiscal policies." Translation: "Ron Paul is my God."

But on this psychological test, the other three guys seem basically sane, which is all you can ask for, really. Because whoever wins is going to get his butt kicked.

[2/1 Edited for typos.]

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How one college recruits by politics

The faculty at many colleges and universities tilts heavily leftward, as you know. But there's still a possibility that some admitted students won't share that political outlook. Here's how one college, with an excess of qualified applicants, tries to winnow out for admission those who see the world from the left.

According to this article in the New York Times's Education Life section, which Mrs. Attila pointed out to me, Tufts University offers applicants a chance to write an optional essay:

Tufts has a problem shared by most competitive universities: After it rejects the weak and admits the geniuses, too many decent applicants remain — about three for every spot. Recommendations and polished essays “all pretty much say the same things,” says Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admissions.

So for the second year, Tufts is inviting applicants to write an optional essay to help admissions officers pinpoint qualities the university values — practical intelligence, analytical ability, creativity and wisdom. These attributes make students intellectual leaders, according to Tufts’s dean of arts and sciences, Robert J. Sternberg, a psychologist whose work on measuring intelligence inspired the experiment. Applicants choose one of eight unlabeled questions, each designed to home in on a different attribute. Questions will change every year.

Now, just in case you're saying to yourself, "Hey, practical intelligence, analytical ability, creativity, and wisdom are all great, non-political qualities for an applicant to possess," the article disabuses you of that notion. Here's a good example of what I mean -- practicality. Note well what's a "good answer."

Practicality

Tufts’s Definition Can implement an idea — gather the necessary resources, attract others to the cause and lead them to a solution.

Question Describe a moment in which you took a risk and achieved an unexpected goal. How did you persuade others to follow your lead? What lessons do you draw from this experience?

Good Answer My family owns a vacant town home, so at our weekly family meeting I suggested we offer it to a Katrina family. When my father contacted the homeowners’ association, we received a certified letter from them stating that a Katrina family was prohibited from living in our town home because the bylaws prohibit “transients.” ... I called the local newspaper and talked to a reporter about the Katrina family. ... When the board considered their racist position being printed in the newspaper, the morality of the issue was forced on them.

What Tufts Said She does not sit back and watch life go by. Academically, she is not the strongest applicant from this school, but she has very compelling personal qualities, initiative and drive.

Coincidence? I think not. Here are questions and "good answers" for analytical ability and wisdom:

Question An American adage states that “curiosity killed the cat.” If that is correct, why do we celebrate people like Galileo, Lincoln and Gandhi, individuals who imagined longstanding problems in new ways or who defied conventional thinking to achieve great results?

Good answer While we celebrate the great thinkers who challenged predominant beliefs in the past, we hypocritically criticize those who do the same today. Gay marriage advocates are criticized today as threatening the institution of marriage. ...This ironic situation emanates from the fact that human nature finds comfort in conformity.

****************

Question A high school curriculum does not always afford much intellectual freedom. Describe one of your unsatisfied intellectual passions. How might you apply this interest to serve the common good and make a difference in society?

Good answer I love Shakespeare not only for the deliciousness of language, but for its applicability to current events. Political instability and rapidly changing leadership in the Congo? Macbeth draws shocking parallels. Race relations in South Africa causing unrest? Sounds like Othello. Since many people in India, and Africa, and Latin America can’t afford to read or attend plays, I want to take Shakespeare to them.

And I discovered again today that the kind of training that this writing reflects begins in high school.

In an article in the Rockville Gazette, entitled "B-CC students hit trail to activism," there's a description of a course given at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in which students are required to become "activists."

Danny McCarty and Mimi Ray are high school students who assumed nobody would heed their opinions — not when it came to politically divisive issues like mass transit, development and the environment.

But a class assignment in their Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School’s national, state and local government class converted them into energetic activists for a cause they barely knew about a few months ago. It tossed them into the middle of an effort to keep the Capital Crescent Trail unobstructed by Bethesda’s commercial growth and mass transit.

"It definitely has opened my eyes to take up any issue that I feel strongly about, to take initiative and do something about it," McCarty said.

Fine, and all that, but in school? For credit? As part of a class requirement?

And just why was this done? Ask the teacher: "The class’s teacher, Nathan Herchenroeder, said his motive was to convince students that citizen participation is necessary to a democracy."

It happens that I agree with their position on the Capital Crescent Trail, which remains a beauty of open space in our rapidly growing county that needs to stay open. I also oppose the Purple Line completely, which is a pet project of the anti-car left. But I hate the idea of some goofball high school teacher using class time to get kids to advocate for this.

"I said every kid had to take five public actions," like sending e-mails to local policymakers, interest groups or Gov. Martin O’Malley, Herchenroeder said. Some students interviewed walkers, joggers and bikers using the trail. Others made fliers or posters.

So for those of our kids who plan to apply to Tufts, never fear. You'll get good experience in becoming the right kind of thinker in high school.

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The end of democracy in Montgomery County?

"King picked for District 39’s Senate seat"

Headline, Rockville Gazette, Aug. 22, 2007

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Sign rage in Bethesda

Before you read this article ("The mysterious case of the disappearing plastic men / Driver warning signs are under fire in Bethesda"), let me interpret it for you.

In a rich, liberal Bethesda neighborhood, where at least one house has sold for over $2 million, the residents are trying to deal with concerns about traffic safety by putting up "little lime dudes" -- plastic men -- with signs asking drivers to slow down. One or more people have stolen or vandalized these little lime dudes. According to the article, most neighbors assume the vandals are teenagers or pranksters, even though there's no evidence why this is happening. But I don't need evidence. Because I'm willing to engage in rank speculation based on prejudice. Not that I support the vandals in any way, mind you. But I think someone simply resents being told by rich liberals how to drive through their neighborhood, even if it's the right way to drive. To me, this is a class thing and a nanny thing. People don't like to be told what to do, and they like it much less when it's a bunch of indignant and sanctimonious rich folks telling them how to behave.



It reminds me of something that happened about 20 years ago. A friend of ours wrote a column in the local section of the New York Times about his experience having a "Baby on Board" sign on his car. Remember those? He described how shocked he was at the vitriol directed at him because of the sign. People, I gather, interpreted the sign as a sanctimonious warning to them to behave around his precious cargo.

I think the response of those people was very similar to the behavior described in the article about the little lime dudes.

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World's most trivial con man

I was about to walk into the Metro this morning, when a 20-ish man standing near the pay phones approached me and asked, "Do you have four quarters for a dollar?" Sometimes in these situations, I just ignore the request and keep walking, but I had a lot of change in my pocket, and I figured I could help the guy out.

I pulled out my change and found four quarters. The man seemed happy and showed me a coin. Without waiting for my surprise to register, he said, "It's a dollar coin." My first thought was, "Oh, great! I hate dollar coins. It never pays to be nice." But then, I looked at the coin, which he was still holding, and it looked suspiciously like one of those quarters with states on the back.

The man pointed to the word "DOLLAR" on the back. Now, you probably won't be surprised to learn that just to the left of the word "DOLLAR" was the word "QUARTER." I said, "That's a quarter." He insisted, "It's a dollar." I walked off.

The amazing thing is that for about five seconds after that, I thought to myself, "This man is not very bright." And then, it dawned on me that he was trying to con me out of 75 cents. Which made him still not very bright -- and the author of one of the most trivial cons around. Thirty years ago, a guy would at least have tried to con you out of five bucks. This twerp couldn't even keep up with inflation.

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A toast for the "cucumber people"

I've been mining the fracas over the sex-ed curriculum in Montgomery County for humor for about two years (see this, this and links collected here), and, frankly, I'm sick of the whole thing.

It was amusing for a while to refer to the proponents as the "cucumber people" for their insistence on showing an MTV-style instructional video in which a condom was placed on a cucumber. (It's now placed on a wooden phallus, by the way, following extended negotiations. "It's almost like it's intentionally boring," [Jim] Kennedy said in an interview Friday. But that does not mean it will put students to sleep. "They're putting a condom over a fake penis," he said. "They're going to watch that.")

But yesterday, the county Board approved the curriculum, with a last-minute change on teaching homosexuality that unsurprisingly ticked off the curriculum opponents. And, sadly for me, the whole matter is all just totally boring now.

Except for this amazing news for the "cucumber people": Pepsi is offering cucumber-flavored soda in Japan, and it's called "Pepsi Ice Cucumber."

So to all the proponents of the new sex-ed curriculum, I say: Drink a toast with "Pepsi Ice Cucumber." And when you're finished, you can slip a condom over that bottle.

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Sex-ed curriculum moves forward

From today's Post: "Almost forgotten is the infamous 'cucumber video,' in which a youthful health educator unrolls a condom onto a cucumber." I know I haven't forgotten it, because I mined it for jokes for about a year and a half (see this and links collected here).

But the cucumber video is not my sex-ed topic for today.

Today, we deal with the other half of the disputed curriculum, the part covering homosexuality. When I last covered this topic, I argued that the curriculum had to be factual and scientific, and I noted:

If there's one thing you'd expect that everyone could agree upon, it's that anal sex, especially unprotected anal sex, poses a serious risk of transmission of HIV. What's very troubling is that a description of the new curriculum in the Post suggests that it omits any discussion of that risk. (The Post refers to it, delicately, as "potential health risks.") That anal sex is risky isn't religion; it isn't political correctness; it isn't opinion. It's objective fact. Teaching about homosexuality while refusing to tell kids about the risks involved in anal sex is simply insane.

From today's article in the Post, "Montgomery Starts Sex-Ed Pilot Program," there's no indication that the risk of HIV transmission is part of the pilot curriculum. Instead, the curriculum sounds as if it focuses on the touchy-feely:

The lessons, which require parental permission for students to take, are taught to two classes on alternating days and raise the topic of sexual orientation at grade 8 in a discussion that centers on tolerance, stereotyping and harassment. Grade 10 lessons define the terms in greater depth as part of a frank discussion about the search for sexual identity. These are the lessons that have stirred most of the rancor.

Now, I realize anal sex is a pretty raw subject to cover, but at least for most gay men, that subject is pretty central to life.

Tomorrow's Post is running an article "Sex-Ed Pilot Is Endorsed By Grasmick," which reports that the state superintendent has refused to stay the pilot program while the state Board of Education reaches a decision on a challenge filed by opponents of the program. So we can all look forward to more contention.

Followed by even more contention.

I wish we were still talking about condom videos.

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Clearing the snow

When we were looking to buy a house here, our kids were young, and we were very concerned about sidewalks. Many houses in Montgomery County have no sidewalks, and it's a lot harder for younger kids to walk to their friends' houses or just to play in front of their own. So we ended up in Rockville, where almost all the houses have sidewalks.

Of course, with a sidewalk, you have the responsibility for clearing snow. When we had the blizzard in 1996, this was a major job. Normally, however, it's not such a big deal, and you tend to become annoyed with neighbors who don't bother to clear the snow or ice from their sidewalks.

The good news is that aggressive local governments enforce the snow-clearing laws, which require removal within 24 hours. The bad news is that our local governments are incompetent.

Some poor shnook who lived in Gaithersburg (like Rockville, an incorporated, self-governing city) received a violation letter from Montgomery County. It wasn't bad enough that he had already cleared his snow. As a resident of Gaithersburg, he didn't even live within the county's jurisdiction. A total of 90 Gaithersburg residents received similar letters. A county spokesman explained:

The county sent the letters based on a complaint that did not give specific addresses for the alleged violations, only for the general area around the middle school. "In trying to be responsive to a citizen call, it backfired," Anderson said.

The county has apologized to these people, but it still has egg on its face, which by law it's required to remove within 24 hours.

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The "shared chewing gum" people get the boot

I've spent a lot of time making fun of the "cucumber people" (later re-named the "wooden phallus people") for their views on the sex ed curriculum in Montgomery County. But maybe it's time to make fun of someone else.

Saturday's Washington Post carries a front-page article on a different facet of the sex ed curriculum: the facet that involves getting kids to share chewing gum. I am absolutely not making this up.

The Post article says:

It was a novel class exercise: Ask a room full of Montgomery County high school students to take turns chewing the same piece of gum.

To demonstrate how sexually transmitted diseases are spread, a visiting speaker invited students to share gum in health classes at four county high schools in December and last month. School officials said a total of about 100 students participated in the lessons, although some declined to chew the gum.

Education and health officials say the gum exercise was unsanitary and should not have happened. The speaker and the clinic, a pregnancy counseling center with a religious orientation, are no longer welcome in Montgomery schools, school officials said.

"It was fine for me, because my best friend and me did it first," said Julia Bellefleur, 15, a Damascus High School sophomore who participated in the exercise. "But it was kind of gross for everyone else. I was just glad I did it first."

Got that?

I've often noted the similarity between sex and chewing gum, haven't you? I mean, you can imagine the following conversation.

Husband: Babe, you're looking great tonight. Wanna . . . chew?

Wife: Not tonight, I've got a headache.

Husband:

Wife: And besides, your gum is always too soft.

And the Post article has another interesting element of the course: an exercise that involves Russian Roulette, only with laxatives.

Julia said the speaker also asked for volunteers to sample squares of chocolate, one of which, they were told, was actually a laxative. The point was to illustrate the uncertainty of knowing whether one has contracted an STD after a sexual encounter. Four boys volunteered, she said.

Naturally, I checked this story out with my daughter, who took health a couple of years ago at another county high school, which was not named in the article. She confirmed for me that they did the same thing in her class.

The Post notes that the instructor was a representative of a religious pregnancy counseling organization -- people who really should be mature enough to know better -- and says: "One part of the site quotes extensively from the Bible and offers a test 'to see if you're going to Heaven.'" To spare you the trouble of finding this test, I've linked it here.

In case you were wondering, I flunked.

Extra: Here's how the exercise should work, though from a different perspective.

UPDATE: The shared chewing gum demonstration was used for 9 years. That gum must have been awfully moldy.

UPDATE (2/15): Marc Fisher gets it wrong. The problem is not "outsourcing" of sex-ed teaching, nor is the solution leaving it to the "professionals." The professionals are the people who wanted the condom-on-the-cucumber video and who wrote the outrageous anti-religious teacher guide on homosexuality, which the district court invalidated a couple of years ago. Here, the problem is not that a religious group had a "hidden agenda" and should be banned. The problem is simply that this religious group conducted a misguided exercise, about which it didn't inform the schools adequately, and it properly got the boot.

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