Paulahmartin

The Port St. Lucie, Florida, mom was arrested on Saturday for letting her 7-year-old son, Dominic, walk alone — in the daytime, with a cellphone — a half-mile to a local park. “I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” she says. “I was letting him go play.”During his approximately 10-minute walk, the boy passed by a public pool, where a patron asked him where his mother was and other questions. As he told a local news station, “I got scared and ran off to the park, and that’s when they called the cops.” Police picked up the boy at the park, brought him home and arrested his mother for felony child neglect. In their report, police noted that “numerous sex offenders reside in the vicinity.” Gainey says the cops “just kept going over that, you know, there’s pedophiles,” which sounds to me like the kind of problem that perhaps there’s a better approach to than whisking kids off playgrounds and arresting mothers...

More at Salon, and an extended discussion thread at Reddit.

There is a Wikipedia page on slow parenting/free range parenting.  Years ago I wrote a post (which I frustratingly cannot locate this morning) which incorporated a map showing the range a man's father had wandered freely as a child compared to the range he wandered as a child compared to the neighborhood his child is allowed to wander.  The circles get smaller and smaller...

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging hat to reader Dan for finding the link I referred to above, which contained this image:


Addendum #2:  This Pearls Before Swine cartoon seems relevant -


Addendum #3:  It has happened again, to another family.

It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek — in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children...

The Meitivs say they believe in “free-range” parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of “helicopter” parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world...

Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them...

Danielle is a climate-science consultant, and Alexander is a physicist at the National Institutes of Health. Alexander said he had a tense time with police on Dec. 20 when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services, he said, which showed up a couple of hours after the police left...

The Meitivs say that on Dec. 20, a CPS worker required Alexander to sign a safety plan pledging he would not leave his children unsupervised until the following Monday, when CPS would follow up. At first he refused, saying he needed to talk to a lawyer, his wife said, but changed his mind when he was told his children would be removed if he did not comply...

The family has a meeting set for next week at CPS offices in Rockville.
“I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing,” Alexander said. “We feel we’re being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with.”

I don't have time to cover it now, but I would note here that the April 2014 issue of The Atlantic has an excellent article by Hanna Rosin entitled "Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone."

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A video came my way on Facebook the other day for a drop dead easy way of cooking corn on the cob. Like my favorite grilling method for cooking corn, you don’t shuck the corn first, but leave it in its husk. After a few minutes on high, you remove the corn from the microwave, cut off the bottom, and cleanly slip off the husk and silk. Perfectly cooked corn with no mess!

This I had to see for myself.

Continue reading "The Easiest Way to Microwave Corn on the Cob" »

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ThunderMoustache made this without stencils, all hand-drawn with black and silver Sharpies and a ruler.

via[TheSpriteStitchPinterestBoard]

Officials say the animal was someone's pet that was released

These two are best friends.

Emily Post’s Etiquette Daily, 23 July 2014:

Q: My nephew, who is gay, just got married in Massachusetts. do I send a card or a gift or both? How do I acknowledge the event?

Who even knows? Gay people are aliens, their customs may be very different from ours. Better not risk it.

Associated Press

Why would you spend millions of dollars sending troops to the border who can't actually detain anyone? That's what some Texas sheriffs of border towns are asking in the wake of Gov. Rick Perry's plan to send 1,000 National Guards members to the Texas/Mexico border in the next month, according to the Dallas Morning News. For them, it would be more useful to spend the money on hiring more deputies and police, aka people who are allowed to detain migrants. 

“I don’t know what good they can do,” Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio told the Dallas Morning News. “You just can’t come out here and be a police officer.” Lucio and other sheriffs said they weren't consulted before Perry's announcement and, in Lucio's opinion, the police and Border Patrol agents were handling the small uptick in crime. "At this time, a lot of people do things for political reasons. I don’t know that it helps,” Lucio said.

This isn't the first time people have questioned the wisdom of sending National Guard troops to the border. In 2010, President Obama sent over 1,000 troops to the border. They weren't allowed to pursue or detain immigrants, "or investigate crimes, make arrests, stop and search vehicles, or seize drugs," The Washington Post reported in 2011. "Nor do they check Mexico-bound vehicles for bulk cash or smuggled weapons headed to the drug cartels." Basically, they keep watch and radio in any suspicious activity. Critics also argued that the National Guard's help cost an estimated $6,271 per person caught. 

But defenders of sending the guard argue they are a deterrent. In the upcoming deployment, guard officials said they would have some medical training and be supplied with water. Still, the most immediate reward is political, and as The New York Times noted, Perry stands the most to gain for being tough on the border.

In 2012, one of his major gaffes was calling people "heartless" for panning his plan to give undocumented students in-state tuition. This time around he won't make the same mistake. “Drug cartels, human traffickers and individual criminals are exploiting this tragedy for their own criminal opportunities,” Perry said Monday. “I will not stand idly by while our citizens are under assault, and little children from Central America are detained in squalor.”

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Between all the fees and add-on charges that can come with a hotel reservation, just booking a room for the night can make you feel like you’ve been taken for a ride. But even when the hotel isn’t trying to nickel-and-dime you, there are scammers out there ready to steal your money by preying on common assumptions made by hotel guests.

The Federal Trade Commission recently posted a list of scams targeted at unsuspecting hotel guests:

1. The late night call from the “front desk”

You’ve checked in, showered, unpacked, and fallen asleep to the cruddy, standard-definition basic cable on your hotel’s TV. Then the room’s phone rings. It’s the front desk calling to say there was a problem with your credit card. Could you please just share that information again?

Credit card goofs aren’t uncommon; nor are calls from the front desk. So you might not think twice about giving out your card number over the phone, especially if you’ve been woken up by the call.

But the chances are that the person calling you isn’t working at the front desk, but is instead a scammer trying to trick you into sharing your card info.

Most hotels will ask you to come to the front desk to deal with a card issue. Even if they say it can be handled over the phone, it’s in your interest to insist that this be cleared up in person.

2. The pizza delivery “deal”

Room service can be prohibitively expensive, so when a local pizza place slides a flyer under your hotel room door, you might be tempted to go the cheaper route of ordering up a pie. And who doesn’t like pizza?

While the pizza flyer may be legitimate, there’s also the chance that it’s a complete fake, and that the only thing you’ll receive after placing a phone order with your credit card is a bunch of fraudulent charges to your account.

If you want to order food up to your hotel room, make sure you’re ordering from a legitimate business. And even if the name on the flyer belongs to an actual pizza place, check that the number matches the one listed with the real pizzeria. You can also check with the front desk for recommendations, or just go out and get some food.

3. The fake Wi-Fi network

As we pointed out recently in this story about public WiFi hotspots from Comcast and AT&T, it’s remarkably easy to fake a legitimate hotspot.

And if you’ve ever gone looking for your hotel’s WiFi network, you’ve probably seen a number of sound-alike hotspots available. Make sure you’re using the correct connection or your computer and all of its data could be compromised.

Additionally, while many hotel WiFi networks require you to enter a room number and last name so that any fees can be charged to your room’s account, you should be suspect of any hotel WiFi that asks you to enter credit card information. This could be a fake trying to steal your identity.

[via Credit.com]

Dear Hollywood, please find time between Spider-Man 4 and Scary Movie 37 to make another decent movie with dinosaurs.

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The Internet responds to goalkeeper Tim Howard's heroic performance during the U.S.' last game on the 2014 World Cup.




More - after the jump








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The Republican National Committee has finally found a metaphor to explain the party's perceived metamorphosis going into 2016: it is a man, in a squirrel suit. In a 2-minute YouTube video released on Tuesday — at least the second to feature the giant, Hillary Clinton-hating squirrel — the RNC develops an entire emotional storyline for the mascot. That storyline, beginning at the election of Barack Obama, tracks closely with the GOP's own perception that the American people will resurrect the conservative party in 2016, after two disappointing presidential elections.

In a statement, GOP chair  Reince Priebus described the 2-minute long film as an "in depth account" of the squirrel mascot's "past work, his hiatus from politics, and his return." As it turns out, the squirrel was really depressed as after Barack Obama won in 2008. That's because "his life's work was stopping the Obama campaign," as one RNC staffer said of the made-up conservative animal. The speaker adds, "kind of like when Hillary was struggling financially." After 2008, the squirrel disappeared for years. But then: "a few weeks ago, he just showed back up in the office." A miracle! Why? "This Hillary tour has him really worked up." And now, just like the GOP says of itself, the squirrel has "new energy." Also, he's going to "go after Hillary for Benghazi." Just like the House! 

In case you weren't aware, the squirrel, named in the tongue-in-cheek ad as "Theodore Birch Dogwood, " or TBD, has been stalking Hillary's book tour for the past few weeks wearing a t-shirt proclaiming "Another Clinton in the White House is Nuts." As Mother Jones points out, the squirrel was indeed used by the GOP in 2008 to protest against ACORN (get it?): 

And now he is back, possibly to stay on the trail for as long as Hillary Clinton might run for president. Which means we would be stuck with this squirrel guy for awhile: there are 861 days until the 2016 presidential elections. 

Missouri researchers say turtles are good indicators for the rest of the ecosystem.

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The guys from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon who make NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams rap are back with a new one: Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back.


The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Previously: Gin and Juice

A man left needing 80 stitches after he and two friends tried to tackle an 11-foot alligator which was blocking a road in Sulphur, Louisiana, says he's learned his lesson.



"I've always been the kind of guy who learns the hard way," said Glen Bonin. Bonin and three of his friends tried to move the alligator out of the way on Prater Road just south of Sulphur.

Raw footage.

YouTube link.

"(We) took our shirts off, threw it on his (the gator's) face, and we were going to come from behind it and jump on it... in the process of doing that, it spun around and grabbed my hand seconds before we jumped on it," Bonin said. The alligator then snapped at Bonin, biting his hand and sending him into a daze.

News video.

YouTube link.

"It felt like someone was pulling my arm out. I thought I was about to lose something. It felt like it lasted forever," Bonin said. "Hopefully with therapy I'll be able to straighten out my ring finger and pinky a little bit," Bonin added. Officials with the enforcement division of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries stress that if you come into contact with an alligator or any wildlife, do not try to handle it on your own. Instead, call local law enforcement or the local LDWF office.