Trying out a Hulu embed

I've become a big fan of Hulu (after all, they have the full collection of Arrested Development for free), and for no reason other than the fact that I can, I am embedding this:

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Fa-reekin' Ridiculous

Found this article today:

Quebec girl goes on class trip after taking father to court

 By Matt Reeder

TORONTO (Reuters) - A Quebec father has decided to appeal a decision by a judge who ruled he had no right to stop his 12-year-old daughter from going on a school trip, even though the girl has already gone on the outing.

The dispute began in May when the girl had a disagreement with her stepmother. That prompted the father to forbid the girl to go on a three-day outing with her classmates to celebrate their last year in elementary school. The girl then moved to her mother's house.

The parents, who live in the Gatineau region of Quebec, are divorced, and the father has legal custody.

Last week, Quebec Superior Court Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier ruled the girl could attend the outing despite her father's wishes. She went on the trip this week.

Kim Beaudoin, a lawyer handling the father's case, said the judge's ruling raises unsettling questions for families.

"It's dangerous to let kids play their parents. They have to learn to respect rules," Beaudoin said in an interview on Thursday.

Beaudoin said her client feels the judge had undermined his authority over his daughter.

"He doesn't think a judge should be allowed to take away a punishment," she said. "And he doesn't think another parent should be allowed to say 'Well, come live at my house, and you won't have to live that punishment."'

Miriam Grassby, a family law attorney in Montreal, said it's not that simple.

"In Quebec, even if a parent has legal custody, both parents retain parental authority," she said. "If one parent has custody, the parents still have to make the decisions jointly."

The girl's lawyer, Lucie Fortin, maintained on Thursday that she exhausted all other avenues - including negotiating with Ms. Beaudoin - before presenting the petition to the court.

"This trip will not be possible next year," said Ms. Fortin. "It's the end of elementary school. It'll never come back. It's once in her life."

She also said it is an isolated case, and disagreed that the ruling would open the door for other children to rush to court whenever parents try to punish them.

"It's very, very rare," she said, adding that she finally decided to present the petition to the court last Friday because the girl's trip was planned for Monday

Ms. Beaudoin is preparing to file a formal appeal.

(Editing by Frank McGurty)

Despite how rare this situation might be to have any judge remove the punishment of a parent that is not abuse is outrageous.  It doesn't matter if kids  can't do this in our legal system, it builds on the message that the government is better at raising our kids then we are.  Which is the most dangerous ideology that exists in the world today.

I'm way overdue

After the flurry of comments I received over the weekend (thanks Dad and Kendra), I realized that I ought to finally post some thoughts over here.

Here's something funny, I actually cited myself from this blog for a paper I handed in this last semester.  I'm not sure how wise that was, but I got an A in the class so I figured it was fine.  I did the story about Spencer wearing a tiara in from of the A/C repairman.  I wanted to use the story for a paper, and I liked the way that I wrote it for the blog, so rather than put it in word for word and risk having it get picked up by one of those online plagiarism checkers, I just cited myself.  An idea to any college students out there.

Also, yesterday I gave my first lecture (of what I hope will be many throughout my life) on marriage relations to a church group.  I was invited in as a guest lecturer for the Elder's Quorum.  I based my discussion on the four predictors of divorce identified by Dr. John Gottman.  For anyone wondering the four predictors are:

1. Criticism: Turning complaints about a thing or situation into an personal attack.

2. Defensiveness: Denying your own problems when they're raised by bringing up unrelated problems

3. Contempt: The conscious decision that you are better than your partner, and disregarding all opinions he/she holds.

4. Stonewalling: Unwilling to engage in any discussion about problems though any means of communication (verbal or nonverbal), or disengaging from an argument using the same technique.

I took conference talks and Ensign articles to show that the Brethren have been saying the same thing for decades.  I think that it went well.

Soapbox Moment

On Friday morning I parking in the Institute parking lot at UNT and found various empty beer bottles and cans strewn all over our parking lot.  The Institute is surrounded by a bunch of old crappy town-homes that are filled with guys, so it isn't really a surprise. 

Of course I cleaned them all up, after all, you never outgrow your Aaronic Priesthood responsibilities.  I just have to ask whatever happened to teaching people respect.  We teach that we're supposed to be tolerant and open-minded, but somewhere along the way we missed the lesson on not dumping your trash into the church parking lot next door?

Daily Comic Strips

I've added a series of links to my favorite comic strips over on the side of the blog. These are all the ones that I check daily. They are, for the most part, in a rank order starting with the one I like the most first (FoxTrot is the exception since it is only published on Sundays, otherwise it would be #3).

If you're a comic fan feel free to stop by and take advantage of my links so that you don't have to waste time typing in web pages. (I'm desperate to get my pathetic hit counter going.)

If there are any over there that I failed to include that I should have please leave a comment.

One good economic indicator

I know that there is a lot of gloom and doom out there about the economy, but something has finally happened to me to improve my economic situation:  I CAN BUY GENERIC OTC ZYRTEC!!!

In order for me to survive, I require a daily antihistamine plus an intranasal spray.  Claritin has been OTC for a couple of years now, but doesn't work during my worst times of the year.  Allegra is still prescription, but did have a generic that only cost $10/month after my insurance made me jump through major hoops, but it still didn't work as good as Zyrtec.  In order for me to use Zyrtec, I would have had to pay full price, which up until January was about $2.33 a pill.  Then Zyrtec went OTC which dropped the price (at Sam's Club) to about $0.40 a pill.  Now it is available as a generic from Sam's Club in a 350 pill box for $17.14 which is less than $0.05 a pill!  Totaling an annual savings of $832.20 vs. the prescription price.

If you're an allergy sufferer like me, I'm sure you appreciate just how good this news is.

Shame Shame

Read this in the Dallas Morning News Yesterday:

Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO – University of Texas at San Antonio students wanted to draft an honor code that discouraged cheating and plagiarizing.

Unfortunately, it appears they copied another school's code without proper attribution.

The student in charge of drafting the code said it was an oversight, but cheating experts say it shows a sloppiness among Internet-era students who don't know how to cite sources properly and think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines.

"That's the consequence of the Internet and the availability of things," said Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. "It doesn't feel like what would be in a book. You Google it and here it comes."

Akshay Thusu said he took over the project a month ago and inherited a draft from students who came before him. He said he discovered that a group of students attended a conference five years ago put on by Clemson's Center for Academic Integrity.

Materials from the conference, which are used by many universities, were probably the main source of UTSA's code, Mr. Thusu said. That's why parts of the UTSA draft match word-for-word the online version of Brigham Young University's code.

BYU credited the Center for Academic Integrity, but UTSA didn't. That will change, Mr. Thusu said, who plans to submit a draft with proper citation to the faculty senate.

"We don't want to have an honor code that is stolen," Mr. Thusu said.

John Barrie co-founded a company that checks student papers for plagiarism. He said Turnitin.com screens about 125,000 student papers per day against Internet sources, library journals and a database of student term papers.

About 30 percent of papers are "less than original," Mr. Barrie said. About half of the cheating hits come from the Internet, and the other half from student papers. A fraction comes from library sources, he said.

Mr. Barrie said Wikipedia.org, where any user can write and edit entries, is the biggest source.

"You tell me: Is that a scary trend?" Mr. Barrie said.

It is so nice to know that my alma mater's code of conduct is so respected that other schools are gladly copying it word for word.