Teacher Accused Of Wizardry

LAND O' LAKES -- A Florida substitute teacher said his job disappeared after he did a magic trick in front of his students.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas made a toothpick disappear, then reappear, in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land O'Lakes.

The Pasco County School District said the trick is just one of the reasons Piculas was let go.

"I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, 'Jim, we have a huge issue. You can't take any more assignments. You need to come in right away.' I said, 'Well Pat, can you explain this to me?' 'You've been accused of wizardry.' Wizardry?" Piculas said.

Piculas says the parent of a traumatized student complained after he performed the toothpick trick.

The assistant superintendent said Piculas had other issues, such as not following lesson plans and allowing students to play on computers that were not approved....

Reading between the lines, my guess is that what happened is:

1. The substitute teacher was goofing around with the class a bit, either out of laziness or in an attempt to establish a rapport.

2. One of the parents complained about the act of "wizardry" that had "traumatized" (did they actually say that, or is this something that got interjected by the article writer?) their kid.

3. The superintendant took the path of least resistance and let the teacher go.

4. After the story got out and the ridicule started to come in, the superintendant raised point #1 (which normally would have been ignored as nothing ususual) as the real justification for the dismissal.

Marc Fisher's column in today's Washington Post begins with the question:

What would drive one of the nation's most successful and respected school systems to report which racial and ethnic groups demonstrate the soundest moral character and ethical judgment?

The answer, it appears, is a classic case of bureaucratic "thought" run amok:

But in Fairfax, and in schools across the land, the instinct -- no, the compulsion -- is to amass data points and "disaggregate," ed-lingo for looking at children not as individuals but as members of a group. The move to quantify grows from a religious devotion to test scores, a faith that the shaping of a mind can be mapped like a cancer cell and expressed as a number. And the resort to race stems from the balkanization of society, the self-destructive notion that we are a collection of groups rather than a nation of individuals who believe what it says on the coins in your pocket: e pluribus unum -- out of many, one.

"The superintendent told me that the reason they broke it down by race was that two years ago, the board decided to report all data by race," Hone says. "That was part of the No Child Left Behind frenzy. This is a classic case of a pendulum overswing."

Would-Be Robber Gives Victims His Phone Number

...Jose Velasquez's Mufflers 4 Less shop got more excitement than they bargained for Monday -- the first customer of the day was a masked man with a gun.
"He had his gun out, walking in the office," said mechanic Antonio Diaz.
The three mechanics on duty told him they didn't have any money and the owner would have to come in to open the safe. The man gave them his cell phone number.
"He just told us he would give us the number, and we would have to call when the owner was here and the money was going to get here," Diaz said....

They called the crook to pick up his loot... after arranging for plainclothes officers to set a trap for him.

Cemetery full, mayor tells locals not to die

BORDEAUX, France (Reuters) - The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.

In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish."

It added: "Offenders will be severely punished."

While doing some monitor shopping (like window shopping, but without having to get up and walk) for a case for my Wing, I stumbled upon a listing that stated at the end of the various bullet points:

* Phone not included.

The sad thing is that there probably are people out there who would feel ripped off (or claim to feel ripped off and launch a nuisance lawsuit) if they didn't get a new smartphone as part of a $15 purchase.... 

...if you can call it "encryption". From the description:

Max Moser and Philipp Schrödel say that decryption was very easy because the devices use a simple XOR mechanism for encryption and the keys are only one byte long.

WTF? I know Microsoft has gotten a reputation for inept security, but that inept?

The furnace quit working the other day. At first, turning it off long enough to reset the system seemed to fix the problem, but it quit again and stayed quit.

The repair guy discovered that the gas igniter had failed, and the motor and bearings were giving out (explaining that it sometimes ran pretty loudly when first starting up). We decided to replace everything; he replaced the igniter but said he'd need to order a part for the motor bearing.

The next day, the motor quit completely, so the furnace got hot enough to give off hot-metal odors and the house didn't get any heat. The repairman came back and put the new motor in (he'd intended to wait for the bearing part so the whole package could be done at once, but the situation couldn't be allowed to stand like that).

So far, so good.

Thursday morning soon after I went to work, starmalachite  got a call that the repairman was coming over "for your appointment". She explained that she hadn't heard of any appointment, and that we were waiting for a part to arrive for the final repair visit. The person at the other end of the phone said that was taken care of. starmalachite  asked the dispatcher to tell the repairman come in about half an hour so she could get ready.

After getting ready, and then waiting for an hour and a half, she called to ask what was going on. The answer: "The part hasn't come in yet".

It turned out that the repairman showed up late that afternoon with the part and finished the job. And so, several hundered dollars and thoroughly disrupted day for starmalachite later, we have the furnace back in shape.

I hope that the outfit's repair abilities are better than their organizational abilities. (On second thought, I can chalk this up as a confirmed fact. If the former were as bad as the latter, the furnace surely would have exploded the next time it turned on.)
 

By way of grayhawkfh 's LJ:

Camelot pulls scratchcard amid numerical anarchy

Camelot has withdrawn its short-lived "Cool Cash" scratchcard after it required a higher than absolute zero grasp of how numbers work to understand it.

According to the Manchester Evening News, to qualify for a prize, punters had to "scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card". Sadly, as the card had a decidedly wintery theme, this initially-shown figure was often below zero....

Among these was Levenshulme's Tina Farrel, a 23-year-old who admitted "she had left school without a maths GCSE". She explained: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I'm not having it....

One of my cow orkers just sent a blank test e-mail to everybody. Several dozen others replied asking what it was about. I know this because they used "Reply All".

Correction: It wasn't exactly a blank e-mail. It had a 2 MB attachment. I don't know what it is because I'm not stupid enough to open unfamiliar files sent to me for no apparent reason.

Aaaaargh.... 


PS: While cleaning the flood out of my inbox while watching out for any actual messages, I noticed that two of the inquiries about this message apparently came from a LOLcat and a profound cynic:

"Anybody has an answer??"
"I have no ideal."
 

An old story of a rather pathetic attempt to social-engineer access to a password, ganked from punkwalrus's LJ:

Over the past few years, starmalachite  was supposed to have been receiving money from an outfit that suffered a selective attack of inefficiency. Specifically, they didn't quite manage to send the money, or any communications concerning the money, to us. They were, however, effective at notifying the IRS that they had been doing so. Hilarity ensued. That part has been straightened out (i.e. we're square with the IRS, and the outfit has confirmed that they were supposed to have sent the money but didn't -- though they seem to need a few more nudges to actually get around to it).

Today, I found a couple of official IRS letters in the mail, addressed to starmalachite  and myself. After gritting my teeth a bit, I opened them and discovered that the IRS has retweaked its figures, and computed that they currently owe us the grand sum of $0.37.

How thirty-seven cents compares to 1)the cost of sending the two letters and 2)the value of not being aggravated by an apparent herald of (at best) ongoing annoyances is left as an exercise for the student.

From PC World, via fuzzface00 's journal:

...Appellate Judge Margaret McKeown responded by paraphrasing public comments by U.S. President George W. Bush, whom she reported as saying, "There is no surveillance of domestic phone calls without a warrant." 

The Bush comment came up again when AT&T attorney Michael Kellogg, also argued for dismissal on the Wonderland-like grounds that allowing the case to go forward, yet not violate state secrets, would prohibit AT&T from presenting a defense. 

"Any sort of program is a state secret," Kellogg said. 

"Even if the program doesn't exist?" McKeown replied, referencing the president's claim. 

"Whether or not it exists is a state secret," Kellogg answered. 

"But if President Bush said it's not happening, how could that be a secret?" the judge asked. 

These are some of the reasons the hearing lasted two and a half hours....

I think this guy testified as a character witness in the Knave of Hearts' trial.

The case of the $65,000,000 pants has gone to court:

Before trial began yesterday in the case of the D.C. judge who sued his neighborhood dry cleaners after they lost his pants, the most extraordinary fact was Roy Pearson's demand for $65 million in damages.

That was before Pearson, an administrative law judge, broke down while testifying about the emotional pain of having the cleaners give him the wrong pants. It was before an 89-year-old woman in a wheelchair told of being chased out of the cleaners by an angry owner. And it was before she compared the owners of Custom Cleaners in open court to Nazis....

I can't make this stuff up.