Remember the Fallen

Happy Memorial Day, everyone.

Gary Coleman RIP

Dead at the age of 42.

He had a lot of problems after his show Diff'rent Strokes went off the air, although he seemed to fair better than his fellow child co-stars.  Hopefully he's now at peace.

       

Hey, Guess What, Folks?

It's Everybody Draw Mohammad Day!

I didn't get any entries for this, but I did draw a really bad MSPaint portrait of him.

I'll update this post with other examples I've seen throughout the day.

Update: Granite Grok has a few examples up.

What the Hell Is Going On In Manchester?

Are the kids at Hillside THAT bad?

This makes the third teacher from Hillside that has had issues with drugs or alcohol in the past few months.  The district almost didn't want to say anything until they found out the cops publicized the arrest.

Most of my past field experience has been with middle schoolers.  My stepdaughter is a middle schooler.  They can be difficult at times.  But this is just bad.  I could understand if it was spread out over schools, but three in one school?

Where is the oversight?

Breaking: Explosion at Plant in Colebrook

A plant in Colebrook that makes muzzleloading guns has experienced a series of explosions, killing two people.

More can be found at Fox News and WMUR.

You Find the Weirdest Stuff When You Google Yourself

I was looking to see if any papers had any announcements from my graduation from Keene State College online, and after not having luck with my search string I just decided to put my maiden name in.

Some of the entries were from my days at The Citizen.  Others were when I was more active in the anti-Scientology movement in the 1990s.  And others were just from random boards I've been on over the years.

Then there was this entry.

It's an academic book on the history of erotic thrillers called The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema.  You can imagine my rather amused surprised when I discovered that she had footnoted a very brief review I wrote on IMDB for a direct to DVD film called Night Eyes 3.  My husband (then my boyfriend) had rented this movie one night, and I had almost forgotten about it until I saw that citation.

I thought that someday I might get cited in an academic book, but not for a movie THAT stupid. :-)

Another Great Moment in Censorship

Doesn't surprise me that this is in Florida.

Longwood parent Tina Harden was so disturbed by references to sex and drugs and foul language in the world of fictional teenager Jenny Humphrey that she is ignoring overdue notices and phone calls from her neighborhood library and its bill collector.

Harden refuses to return several books connected to the Gossip Girl series that detail Humphrey's life, even though she's had them since 2008.

"If I turn them in, they will be put back into circulation and they'll be available for more young girls to read," said the mother of three, who keeps the four books hidden in a closet. "Some material is inappropriate for minors."

Harden said she doesn't want them banned, but she does want the library to put a warning label on the four titles — one in theGossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar, and three in a spin-off series called It Girl — and make them unavailable to minors. The library refused but has agreed to re-shelve them in the adult-reading section.

"If we denied access to this particular title, it would be censoring," said Jane Peterson, the county's library services manager.

Moving them to the adult shelves wasn't good enough for Harden, and she wants "more say" as a taxpayer on what books are allowed on the shelves.  Sounds like censorship to me.

When it comes to free speech, I've always taken a libertarian stance on it.  And especially with the fact that I'm going to be an English teacher, this is one battle I'm sure that I might have to face at some point in my career.

I also believe that parents should be the gatekeepers on the type of material for their children.  However, they shouldn't be the gatekeepers for everyone else's children, as well.  What this woman is doing is stupid.  She should just give the books back and not deprive other people from reading them.

Although, to be fair, I shouldn't have made the Florida reference -- recently here in NH we had a case of a teacher getting in trouble for some books that parents considered inappropriate for their students in an elective class.  And several years ago a woman from Alexandria had issues with the Bristol Elementary School doing a read-aloud of "Harry Potter" books in the classroom, citing "witchcraft."

Update: Harden returned the books, but not before people offered to pay to replace them and sent their own copies of the books.

Guest Bloggers Wanted

The next rest of the year is going to be a busy time for me -- in July I'm taking three teaching writing workshops, in August I'm putting together costumes for an anime convention that I'm taking the stepkids to in Nashua, and I'm starting my internship at Franklin High School for a 12 week stint.  Because of that, I'm putting out another call for guest bloggers for Franklin TEA Party and for ConChrist to try to get some more original content in.

Requirements:

Franklin TEA Party: a Franklin resident who can keep up with the local issues affecting Franklin, particularly when it comes to the budget and the school district.

ConChrist: someone who can write about politics on both the local and national level as well as pop culture.  If you prefer one over the other I have no problem with that.

Both blogs are right-leaning political wise.  Neither position is paid (I don't even get paid to do this) but it can look good on a resume.  If interested, let me know at scooppc11@yahoo.com.

Now An Amazon Associate

You might have noticed all the Amazon links in my posts recently.

I'm still trying to find a way to integrate them into the posts in a way that don't make them look too obvious, but basically the last couple of posts have been experiments with what us Blogger.com writers can do on the site to try to raise some money for ourselves.

I've always had the GoogleAds, which haven't generated too much revenue for me so far.  So when they added the option of being an Amazon Associate I jumped at the chance.

Right now I'm leaning towards doing just links, but for those who might be associates themselves, how did you manage to integrate it in your posts?

"Nightmare on Elm Street" (2010) Review

Not terrible, but it didn't give me any nightmares last night.

Teenagers in Springwood are getting killed off one by one by a mysterious killer by the name of Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), and it's up to Nancy (Rooney Mara) and her friend Quentin (Kyle Gallner) to stop him.  But can they survive the night?

On Haley's performance as Freddy -- there was something "off" that I couldn't place.  Which was surprising since I liked him in "Watchman" as Rorschach.  It was like he was holding back from the potential of being Freddy.  The new look for the character was interesting, since they were able to make him look more like a burn victim in this version with the help of CGI.  The teenagers were standard fare -- no one particularly stood out to me as far as performance.

1984

2010

The story itself could have been interesting with a better execution -- in this version, they have the kids who have been awake too long start hallucinating in "micro naps," so they can never really escape Freddy.  Plus they went back to Freddy's original roots of being a child molester (in the movies, he was a child killer).  And they did do a call back to some of the more memorable moments from the original, such as the death of Tina and the claw coming out of the bathtub.

Judging from the audience last night, the teenagers will be more likely to go for this one -- they are the ones who didn't see the original when it was first released, so they have no real history with the franchise.  Those of us who grew up with Freddy being the ultimate badass, however, will want to stay away.

For those interested in collecting items for your horror collection, here are a few items from Amazon.com on the 2010 version that you might be interested in.