Passport Stamps ~ On The Lighter Side

"Yes, I'd like the Reality entree with the special Common Sense Sauce, a side of Snark, lightly grilled, the Wild Side Salad but please hold the Stupid Nuts, bring the Spice of Life dressing on the side and Chocolate Covered Dreams for dessert, please."
~ Wanderlust Scarlett

Momentary Pause For A Trainwreck

Normally I only post quality material on this blog.

I'm going to make an exception today because Halloween just didn't scare me enough and one of my friends directed me to a very scary website; a recommendation which just may have earned him a smack in the back of the head.

As with any trainwreck, it's one of those seriously disturbing things that draws you in and you just can't look away, even when you know you should.

Fair warning & disclaimer given.  Welcome to People of Walmart.com.  Don't eat or drink anything while you are at this site; it will not end well.

http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/

It is astounding to me that people like this exist on our planet, and may I just say how grateful I am that so far our paths have not crossed often. Sometimes there are just no words... and yet, somehow, the commentator on this website is witty enough to find a fitting & oftentimes humorous caption for every single photo.

If you click on the photo tab, be sure you scroll down each page... you won't believe what you'll see. 

Here are some of the more TAME demo shots from the site... Don't say we didn't warn you:

When Will We Ever Learn

California isn't in a golden state, when it comes to hitting the books.  TIME did a story on several teachers in several towns who are paying for their own supplies and going to every creative and extreme measure they can imagine, in order to come up with not only the tools they need to teach, but even basics like pencils and paper to run the classroom and their own vacuums to keep it clean. 

Almost $17 billion was cut from California's education system in the last 2 years.  $17 BILLION. 

That is an appalling number.

It is estimated that an additional $2.4 billion will be taken in the coming year. 

When teachers resort to cleaning their own classrooms after a day of teaching because the janitorial staff has been let go or had hours cut back, when they have paper curtains held together with duct tape, when they have to have car washes or bake sales to raise money for supplies and go to garage sales to come up with tools to teach children, things have gone severely wrong.  This state of affairs isn't isolated to California; it's happening all over our country.

Where is this train wreck headed?

What happens to the most powerful nation in the world when the bulk of the children who will run it in varying positions and degrees in 3 decades have almost no education? Even now, the national rate of high school dropouts is stunning - Diplomas Count showed statistics at 68.8% graduation rate in 2007.  There is no indication that it has improved since then.

This is not an issue.

This is a crisis that needs immediate attention and change. It is not only crucial on an individual level for each student that loses the opportunity to reach their full potential through better education, but that domino effect winds it's way up through the community into a national level and then it affects the world. If the U.S. does not have citizens with the knowledge to further this nation in every capacity then it falls behind other nations and a sociological revolution becomes probable, if history is any indication at all.

Knowledge is indeed power.  Without it, we are crippling our future, the future of our nation, and the delicate balance of relations with the nations we share this world with.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said, "The world will be a better place when our schools have all the money they need and the military has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." 

If only.

I've said before that George Bush's education strategy was 'no child left behind... the platoon.' Uneducated people who have no idea how to think critically are easily controlled, and give far too much power to those few who would use it for their own gain and purpose.  This is not the ideal of our nation, nor of our forefathers who fought and died to make it what it could be.  Masses of ignorant citizens become sheep, are expendable, and the integrity of our future is lost because we cannot contribute to furthering the progress of mankind or even ourselves.


It is not with power in might that we could reach unimaginable realities, but with minds fueled by knowledge that have the capability of attaining limitless possibility.
 

In Which I Become The Muse Of Irony & Serendipity

Scarlett: I'll have a chicken salad, please.

Waitress: We don't have chicken salad.

Scarlett: Fine.  I'll have a chicken burrito with lettuce and tomato and hold the tortilla.

Waitress: No problem, that will be right out.

Scarlett:  :/

Mike The Headless Chicken

I really wish I was kidding about this one.

Let's go back to September 10th, 1945 in the very small rural town of Fruita, Colorado.  Lloyd Olsen's wife, Clara, sends him out to kill a chicken for dinner.   Lloyd fells the axe on the chicken's neck.  The head comes off and the chicken, oblivious to the loss of his head, keeps right on going about his bird business.  When Lloyd found him alive and well, sans head, the next morning, he decided to let the bird live and fed him with an eye dropper to keep him going.  

They named him Mike and Mike became so famous that for the remaining 18 months of his headless life, he hit celebrity status; he even wound up in both Time and Life Magazine.

 

That celebrity status became legend and now there is an annual Mike the Headless Chicken festival in Fruita, during the third weekend of May.  The festival features a lawn mower race, chicken dance contest, eating contests, chicken games (like pin the head on the chicken and an egg toss), 5k run, a car show and a 'Good Egg' award, among several other interests.   

If you would like to know more about it, he has his own website:

Mike's website.

Alternate titles for this post:
the afterlife of a chicken
it just wouldn't die
and in other news... chicken defies death

axe me again

life after death

stranger than fiction

My Brother's Keeper

Matthew and Marcus Mauceri are twin brothers. 

Matthew Mauceri (age 40) was flying in to Clearwater, Florida on Tuesday morning to attend his court trial, in which he is charged with scheming to defraud. 

Apparently he hasn't figured out yet that scheming to defraud is illegal, because he perpetuated yet another instance of it when he schemed to defraud the court he was supposed to be attending for scheming to defraud. 

I'll expound.

He realized en route that he would not make his trial on time and asked his twin brother to go to court for him in his stead ~ and by 'in his stead' I mean literally pretending to be him.   

Matthew's own attorney (who'd defended both men previously ~ note, repeat offenders) realized that things were 'one juror short of a full jury', and tipped the judge off.  Marcus swore under oath that he was Matthew, then the judge had a fingerprint test done on Marcus and the truth was discovered.

Marcus is now serving 179 days for criminal contempt of court and his brother Matthew (who finally showed up) now has charges of failure to appear and contempt of court to answer for in addition to his trial for scheming to defraud.

Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying that 'the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over again, expecting different results'. 

Forest Gump was quoted as saying 'Stupid is as stupid does'.

I'm going with Forest on this one.