Raging Red

For a variety of reasons, I recently developed the urge to delete my entire blog and start over from scratch. This morning, I just realized that I accidentally let my upgrade to Custom CSS expire (hence the unintentional site redesign). That may have given me just the push I need to actually go through with the reincarnation.

I’m on one.

[post updated below]

Sit back and let me tell you a story about a little girl. She’s five years old and she’s in kindergarten at Bonham Elementary School in Sissonville, West Virginia. One day, her teacher handed out scissors to the class. Did they look like this?

No, they looked more like this:

When the teacher wasn’t looking, someone cut the lip of a boy in the class. Luckily, he didn’t require any medical attention, and he didn’t have to go home. Despite the fact that the teacher had not seen it happen, the girl was accused of cutting the boy’s lip. The school held a disciplinary hearing, and the girl was found guilty of possession of a deadly weapon and threatening to injure another student. She was expelled from school for ONE YEAR. If the parents agree to send their five-year-old daughter to a psychiatrist and the girl receives a “favorable report,” she may be able to return to school sooner.

The story’s so nuts that Dr. Phil has already asked the girl’s parents to appear on his show. They haven’t decided yet if they’ll do it, but from what the father is saying, it sounds like their decision might depend on whether or not they can get the school to reverse its decision.

His wife is pregnant and dealing with a lot right now, so Harper is not sure what they’ll do in terms of appearing on television.

“If I’ve got to go nationally about it, then I will,” he said.

Here’s a question: Is the school planning to punish the kindergarten teacher for furnishing a student with a deadly weapon? HA! Of course not.

The school system’s attorney says:

When a student uses an instrument to intentionally injure another child, we take that seriously.

When a teacher gives students sharp, pointy instruments and allows them to use the sharp, pointy instruments without supervision, do they take that seriously? Silly me, I thought the point of schools handing out rounded safety scissors to children was to make sure no children would be injured. How is the school’s/teacher’s negligence the fault of a five-year-old girl? And why on earth does she require psychiatric care (assuming she’s even the one who did it)?

Here’s another question: If a gym teacher gave a bunch of five-year-olds baseballs and a boy hit another kid with one, causing only minor injury, would the school expel him and recommend psychiatric treatment? HA! Silly rabbit, don’t you know boys will be boys? Oh, and I should add in my example that the gym teacher was busy organizing kickballs or something, so nobody actually saw the boy do it, so nobody can be sure it was even him, and if it was him, nobody can be sure whether or not he hit the other kid on purpose. Expulsion? Psychiatric treatment?

Unless there’s some major detail that is being left out of this story, I’m flabbergasted.

UPDATE, 10/23/07: After being evaluated by a psychologist who said she’s not a danger to other students, the girl is back in school today, after being out for six weeks. I hope her parents didn’t have to pay for the visit to the psychologist.

If only I spent as much time blogging as I spend tweaking the design. I think I’m done tweaking, though (for now). Blogging to resume soon.

I’ve been screwing with the page design, so if the blog looks funny, it’s only temporary. I should have it fixed soon.

I’ve learned that some people have been having trouble viewing my blog. They say it appears for a split second, then all of the text and pictures disappear. I haven’t had any trouble seeing my blog on my computer at home or at work. (Wait! Scratch that — I never check my blog at work! Who would do such a thing?) I always use Firefox, so when I heard there was a problem, I checked my blog on Internet Explorer, and I still have no problem seeing the blog. I have the newest version of IE, if that’s at all relevant.

Why am I boring you with my blog woes? I have a favor to ask those of you who can read this post. Would you mind checking all of the browsers you may have on your computer and letting me know in which ones you either can or can’t see my blog? I’m just trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. I emailed Blogger support, but I have no idea when or whether I’ll hear back from them.

By the way, what is up with the new version of IE? On my computer, Windows automatically updated to version 7 whenever it was released, but since I always use Firefox, I hadn’t used IE 7 until this issue with my blog came up. It’s obvious that they’ve adopted lots of the features from Firefox, like tabbed browsing, but from what I can tell, Firefox still kicks IE’s ass. But the really awful thing I noticed about IE 7 is that the text on web pages appears fuzzy. The way it displays is as if they took a picture of the web page, then displayed that. What’s up with that? I don’t really care, since I’m sticking with Firefox, but I’m just curious what the deal is, because the fuzziness of the text makes IE practically unusable.

I’ve been really busy with work-related stuff (the stuff I never blog about), hence the lack of posting. I’ve also been a tad preoccupied with launching a new blog with Hippie Killer. We call it The Surbinator. It’s devoted to our favorite local wingnut (sorry, William). I figured that since I’ve blogged about The Surb enough times here that he has his own category, and since some people might get sick of my Surb-blogging (especially those who ain’t from around these parts), maybe I should relegate all things Surber to a separate blog. He gives me so much material to work with. Since HK is banned from commenting on Surb’s Daily Mail blog, I’ll show some solidarity by refraining from commenting there too, despite the fact that Don says he loves my comments. (I’m still trying to figure out why.) Besides, I’m sure once he caught wind of The Surbinator, I’d be summarily banned anyway. So, if you enjoy Surb-blogging, go visit the new site. If you don’t, well, this is now a Surb-free blog.

Well, the culmination of this whole “hide the HPV post” game with William Stewart is that he has shown his true colors. I used to think he was mostly harmless — just an immature, inexperienced, annoying young Republican with an over-inflated ego. But it turns out that when someone hurts his little fee-fees, his lying, vindictive dark side comes out.

Rumor is (from Republicans even!) that Will doesn’t really handle it well when people challenge him, and that whenever he enters a room, people have to step aside to get out of the way of his swelled head. Moving on to William’s dark side. . .

First, there were the insults he hurled at Jim McKay for being, well, basically just for being a father.

One of the liberals [who hurt his fee-fees] is an unemployed dad and has plenty of time on his hands, so I can understand his angst: it’s either write about me or dust furniture.

It turns out that Jim McKay is very much employed. After being corrected, Will only concedes that Jim “claims he is employed,” which is pretty damn irresponsible of him, since if he wanted to verify the fact that Jim works where he says he works, all he has to do is check the web site of the organization Jim says he works for.

So when Will thought Jim was what normal people call a “stay-at-home dad” (but William calls an “unemployed dad”) he thought that was worthy of denigration. I’m sure all of the stay-at-home parents out there would be pretty incensed if Will reduced the work they do in taking care of their children and their households to merely “dusting furniture.” I thought Republicans were into traditional family values. I guess that only applies when those values are maintained by parents who fulfill traditional gender roles. Will probably thinks it’s “unmanly” to be a stay-at-home dad.

And apparently Will believes that men who dare take care of their children at all — whether they stay home or not — are worthy of ridicule. After learning that Jim is employed, Will later made this disparaging comment:

It never ceases to amaze me how you say I’m a nobody with an inflated ego, yet you spend your free moments from burping the baby gracing my blog.

Can’t you feel the scorn and ridicule just dripping from that comment? This is the same Will who once wrote:

On a side note, if Logan’s Law had passed in the regular legislative session, it would have taken affect 5 days ago on June 11th. But because of the Democrat’s delay, Logan’s Law The “Child Protection Act of 2006” will now go into affect on October 1st. Let us hope our children can hang on until then.

Oh, spare me. It’s all politics to William. He doesn’t actually care about helping children, unlike people like Jim McKay, who devote their careers to it.

Will has now deleted all of the comments and closed off commenting altogether on that post, probably because he got scared when I told him I thought he may have committed libel. But thanks to a screenshot, they are not forgotten. He accused Jim’s wife, a Methodist pastor, of calling him something so obscene that he had to censor the comment.

I happened to read the comment before he censored it, so I knew he was lying. The way Will routinely handles comments that do contain profanity is to simply delete them, pursuant to his commenting rules. Hippie Killer has a habit of going over to Will’s place and dropping f-bombs, but those comments just disappear; they aren’t censored. Will explained his deletion and closing of the comments on that post thusly:

Because the comments on this article have turned from actually discussing the issue to pettiness and name calling by a liberal minister and her husband, I have turned off the comments for this article. For those of you wondering what she called me, it is too crude to actually post up here or even link to the definition. After the comment was posted by the minister’s husband, he asked me to take it down. Because I know if I were in her position I would hate to have this reputation, I have agreed to his request.

This site remains dedicated to free discourse as long as all parties remain civil. However it remains my site and I will delete and edit comments as I see fit. Those not willing to accept the totalitarianism inherent with blogs are welcome to go here.

Emphasis mine. Why he couldn’t just delete the “offensive” comments and let the comments that were discussing the issue stand, only William knows.

So what word did Will have to censor from Jim’s comment? What word is so crude that he can’t bring himself to type it out or even link to the definition? What word can he not believe a minister would utter, even in private?

I kid you not. Apparently “[Jack nut] is a pet phrase offered by the character of Judy Miller (Jami Gertz) on the CBS family sitcom ‘Still Standing‘. “ It’s a piece of hardware. When hurled as an insult, it’s in the same family as “wing nut,” which is also a piece of hardware. If Will thinks “jack nut” is so offensive that he won’t even publish it on his blog, then I suggest he put in a call to the FCC to report this obscenity that is repeatedly being uttered on a so-called “family sitcom” so that CBS can be properly punished.

Apparently Will got the notion that he was being called something crude by consulting the Urban Dictionary, that oh-so-reliable source of information. The term “jack nut” isn’t in there, but he discovered that the definition of “jack nuts” is “when a gentleman has very small testicles (or possibly humongously large ones).” For example, one might say: “Check out the jack nuts on him!” Based on Urban Dictionary’s definition, “jack nuts” isn’t the same thing as “jack nut;” it’s not even the same part of speech. Jim’s wife said that William Stewart is a Jack Nut, not that he has jack nuts. But those super-conservative, moralizing Republicans’ minds are always in the gutter, aren’t they?

I swear this is the last time I’ll be writing about this little blog dust-up, but after all of this bullshit, I am left with one great big, glaring question that is just begging to be answered: If the topic that started this whole mess had been some other kind of vaccine for something that is not sexually transmitted, would William even have written about it?

William Stewart’s anti-HPV vaccine post has now shown up in Google cache. You can’t read the whole post or the comments, but here’s the beginning of it:

Contrary to rumors, I have not died of old age. To be honest, I temporarily lost my enthusiasm for blogging. Gasp. It happens from time to time. I became more absorbed with reading other blogs than thinking about my own. I was getting sick of looking at it, frankly. I considered switching to WordPress just to spruce things up around here, but I didn’t have the enthusiasm to go to the trouble of relocating the blog and learning a new blogging program. Then, poof! Along came the New and Improved! version of Blogger. I didn’t want to switch while it was still in Beta, because I couldn’t have kept my super spiffy custom template — I would’ve had to revert to a Blogger template and rebuild it from scratch. Again, not enthusiastic about that. So finally Blogger 2.0 is up and running with the oh-so-convenient feature of allowing me to maintain my existing template.

The blog looks a little different (better, I think) and it now has categories. Fancy! (It’ll take me a while to finish categorizing all of my old posts.) Also, I’m switching back to Blogger commenting. I’m honestly sorry to lose all of my old Haloscan comments (cause y’all can be pretty funny), but Blogger has really improved its commenting set-up since the time I first decided to switch to Haloscan, way back when, so I’m just going to go with Blogger.

I’m back, baby! Better than ever.