Target: Kids?

Urp.  Its Wednesday, January 25, 2012, its all my fault, and this is The Side.  Grabbed a drink yesterday morning from the market.  The market has a deli which is pretty much the only lunch option in Sandbridge.  I asked what the special was going to be that day.  The lady asked me what I wanted.  I said hamburgers, because I miss burger day all the time.


Fast forward through me shoveling wet sand for hours.  I head up to the market to grab another drink and a bit to eat.  Sure enough the special was hamburgers.  Big old quarter pounders.  Guy in line in front of me looked at it and said, "Burgers, hunh?"


And then the lady behind the counter replied "That's right..." Then she pointed right at me, "... AND ITS ALL HIS FAULT!"

JERKS!!

This story broke late last week, and when I posted the news story on G+ it led to a few good and pretty heated discussion.  Its about the parents who finally revealed the gender of their five year old.  They parents are all about keeping things gender neutral under the pretense that they don't want their child stifled by gender roles.  On the surface it sounds all enlightened and well meaning.  Really, its something really despicable.

This is a case of parents using their child to push their agenda.


Let's be plain: there's nothing wrong with a little boy having an interest in things that society typically considers a girl's thing, and vice versa.  I've got a little girl who loves trains, Legos, super heroes, and thinks Jackie Chan is really cool.  Got another little girl who like dolls and her little tea set.  That's how they roll.  So if this little boy wants to play with a doll, it seems a little weird to me, but that's how he rolls, and he's not hurting anybody.


But here we have parents who are encouraging the boy to play with dolls, as long as it isn't a Barbie, because she's "horrible".  And they're oh so happy to put him in dresses and a tutu.  I really wonder how much is this kid's choice, or are his folks coaching him into cross dressing.  He's not allowed to wear "hyper masculine" things like shirts with skulls, or cargo pants.


I really need someone to explain the cargo pants thing to me.  Those are "hyper masculine"?  What?


Now the kid's gender is revealed because he's going to school.  Here's the part that really is telling.  They're sending the kid to a school that requires uniforms.  So they're having the boy wear boy's pants, but a girl's shirt.  So, they're looking to have things their way even thought the rules are specific.


The parents are using the boy to make a statement.  Just like when those parents sent their poor kid to confront Michelle Bachmann.  Sure, Bachmann is a kook, but you don't coach your child to confront people like that and then send them out in front of a camera for that "gotcha" moment.  I don't care if you've got he best point in the world.  You could be advocating protecting kittens.  YOU DON'T PUT A BULLSEYE ON YOUR CHILD AND SEND THEM OUT IN PUBLIC JUST TO MAKE A POINT!


I want to say I can't believe that some people are this self absorbed, but here we are again.


We have societal norms.  Those do need to get challenged from time to time.  Some people, like these idiot parents, think there won't be a blowback against a kid.  This is failing to consider all of the other kids, not to mention a serious nutters who have no qualms about hurting a child.  Standing out can easily make you a target of unpleasantness.  As a parent you have to teach your child about the world, and society so they can eventually find his or her own place in it.


Let's say hypothetically that this little boy just likes dolls and dresses all on his own without being pushed in that direction by his parents.  The parents should let the boy know that there's nothing wrong with it, but other little boys don't do that, so wearing a dress out in public might not be a good idea.


Now, I'm sure there are people who are upset by this, and aren't happy with me not going along with the gender neutral thing.  There are those people who view gender roles as a "box" which confines a person, and who would want to do that to a child?  Those boxes label "boy" and "girl" are very large and have plenty of room and company.  That gender neutral box is very small and the label is easily mistaken for one that says "freak".  Kids are going to like what they like, and in couple years they'll like something else.


If those parents really gave a damn about letting their child enjoy what he wants to enjoy then those rules about "hyper masculine" things and barbie wouldn't be their.  I just hope those hypocrites have the money for the mountains of therapy this poor kid will need later.

MUSIC!!

Couldn't resist.  Well, I could have, but I thought it was funny.





That's it for me. I'll see y'all Friday.

Student Bodies

I'm trapped!  Its Wednesday, January 10, 2012, there's no way out, and this is the Side.  OK, right now I'm not actually trapped, but I was yesterday.  Sandbridge has one road in and out unless there's an emergency and they allow people to go through the adjacent Naval Base.  Well, when a truck decided to go off the road and it took wreckers and firetrucks to clear everything, I was pretty much stranded for a bit.


I did get out in time to pick up my daughters.  This led to a discovery of an hours long black out affecting a good chunk of Virginia Beach.  Another truck had backed into a power pole, breaking it.  The pole then fell on the truck.  The power had been off for about four hours by the time I got out of Sandbridge.


I retrieved the kids, the sun is setting.  I grab a couple of Happy meals because its going to be just about bedtime by the time we get home.  Sure enough a school bus got in an accident tying up the entire area.  We finally got out of that, and were amid the blackened stores when I heard two voices from the back seat.


"Daddy, I have to pee."


"Me too."


That was a tough commute.

PARENTS!!!

Stuff is afoot and with some kids in schools.  It is some pretty stunning stuff, but what gets me more is how their parents are dealing with thing.


First up is the case of the eighth grader getting shot by police.  The eight grader was wielding a pellet gun.  Officers told him to put it down.  He didn't and he got shot.  Now, here's the breakdown.  This kid was 15 and in the eighth grade.  Probably not good at following directions.  I've seen a picture of the pellet gun in question, and it is easily mistakable for a real gun.  Witnesses heard the boy being told to put the gun down.  He was shot twice in the torso.  Two officers were involved.  I don't know if each officer shot once, or if one fired both shots.


The boy was given an order to put down the gun.  When a police officer tells you to put down a weapon, you damn well better put down the weapon.  Officers are trained to aim center mass.  That's exactly what they did.  I fell really bad for the officers, because they have to live with what happened.  that's some rough baggage.


There's been some serious blowback from a lot of stupid people.  Some people are asking why the officers didn't shot the gun out of his hand, or just wound him.  The answer is simple: THIS IS REAL LIFE, AND NOT A TV SHOW.  If I'm armed and someone is pointing a gun at me and aiming for the biggest target and that is the torso.  The fancy shooting we see in the movies and on TV is Hollywood make-believe.  Then there are those people who are demanding to know why the officers didn't use non-lethal methods to subdue the boy.  The range they were at has not been made clear so it may not have been in a good tazer range.  It was too far for pepper spray or other gas weapons, and those are not what you are going to us when suddenly you are faced with someone with a gun.  You pop smoke and you'll be eating lead before they even start coughing.


The parents of the boy are really leading the charge here.  I fully understand where they are coming from.  Their boy snapped, made some horrible decisions, and is now dead.  These parents are angry and grieving. They want answers.  They want someone to blame.  There very well might not be anyone to blame.  Its tragic.  The parents are wrong trying to go after the police for this, but I can't judge them too harshly.  They've lost their son.


So we have a set of parents who really want to see the best of their child that they've lost.  Its put blinders on them a bit.  On the other hand we have a case of parents who seem to want everyone to see all there is to see of their child and are willing to court to make it so.

Sydney Spies is all ticked off that her school yearbook won't use the picture here.  The girl is 18, so for my pervo readers, you needn't feel too horrible about yourselves this time around.  Yep, this girl wanted to use this picture for her senior picture.  She's an aspiring model and all that.  The yearbook staff shot it down.  The reason: they have standards.  There's awards for yearbooks, and this school has won a few for theirs.  They put out a quality, award winning yearbook, so they weren't exactly thrilled with the notion of a senior wanting to look like a Slutty McSlutslut in there.


The school administration backed the yearbook staff.  Then the parents pitched a fit saying that the school was infringing on their daughter's right to Freedom of Expression.


I want to smack the living fuck out of these people.


What really sucks is that since the administration of a public school backed the yearbook staff's decision Colorado's law about schools not infringing on Freedom of Expression can be used to make the staff use the picture.  The parents are actually taking this to court.  They have to be completely off the rails.  They want pictures of their daughter in suggestive poses wearing some sexy clothes for the her senior portrait?  I remember my senior picture.  All us guys put on tux jackets.  We had these little clip on shirt things and bow ties.  The girls had these nice wraps that they put on.  We looked classy.  It was actually a decent picture of me (after the air brushing), and those are hard to come by.  So I really don't get why they'd even be allowing her to even try to use these pictures in the yearbook.  I know she's legal, but its still creepy.  


If she was going to put those photos in her modelling portfolio, that's fine.  That's her portfolio.  That's her business.  Her now, her and her idiot parents are looking to impose their will upon the yearbook staff.  Forget what they want.  Forget that they're trying to put out the best product possible.  Forget their offer to compromise and let the picture run in the advertisement section of the book.  Now you've got an attention whore and her folks (and I doubt that apple fell far from the tree) getting national exposure on the news.


People wonder what the hell is wrong with kids nowadays, but I have to say, I'm wondering what's wrong with the parents.  Kids make bad choices, it happens every day.  It happens due to lack of experience at this thing called life.  They're developing something called judgement, and until they've got that down, they need parents to look out for them and let them know when they're making bad choices.  With the first case the parents didn't have much warning that something was going to go wrong, but defending their deceased son by placing blame on the police is a mistake.  In the case of Spies, those parents are borderline creepy, and anyone who is willing to go to court to defend their daughter's whims is flat out bad parenting.


I'm taking a lot of note, because I know full well I'm going to have my hands full once my loin-spawn reach their teens.  One thing all parents should know: kids are kinda stupid.  Even the smart ones are kind of stupid.  They make bad choices from time to time.  You've got to tell them when they do.

MUSIC!!!

Everyone hopes their kids will end up alright.  Doesn't happen by itself.





That'll do it for me today. See y'all Friday.

Boys will be girls?

Wasabi? Its Friday, November 18, 2011, I'm going to get beat up tonight, and this is The Side. I'm holding a women's self defense class tonight. These are one night crash courses which usually include me ending up very sore for the next few days. The things I do for a good cause. Ah well, I could certainly use the karma.

KIDS!

Anderson Cooper was talking to family on his show that are raising their six year old son as a girl. I didn't see the actual show because there's no power on earth that could make me sit down to watch Anderson Cooper's show. However, this show got some new traction because apparently its like a Transgender Memorial Week or some such. The Missus is actually the one who spotted this story, and it caught her eye because the kid was being picked on for being a boy who brought a princess backpack to school. Of course the solution was simple, raise the boy as a girl.

Does this mean that if a child likes something that we typically consider to be preferred by the opposite gender that this kid is transgender? Is my daughter transgender because she's a little tomboy and likes Spider-man and Ironman stuff and refuses to wear cute, "girly" clothes?

Perhaps, and this is just me going out on the limb here, its just a phase and the kid will grow out of it. My kids are four. The kid on the Cooper TV show was six. Kids change. They can be totally into something one week and the next its something different. What these parents are doing to their kids is completely nuts. All this is going to lead to is serious therapy down the road. I'm not talking about teenagers or older who have done some serious introspection and seen therapists. They know what and how they feel. They can hopefully articulate it. I'm talking about pre-sexual kids.

What happens when they get older and hit puberty? Let's leave the complications of what could happen in a public school out for right now, because it doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to realize the special hell that would be. Let's say this little boy who is now being raised as a girl gets older and starts liking girls. Does that make him a transgender lesbian, or just a straight guy who maybe likes to wear a dress on occasion? I do hear the air flow this those is quite nice. Back to topic, once you slap this label on a kid, its not something you can take off easy peasy.

It just seems like some people have lost their marbles when it comes to gender roles. There's couples who are actively trying to keep everything "gender neutral". There's been couple who give little boys dolls for whatever reason. There's been this weird movement to try to make guys more "sensitive". So if there's a little boy who actually likes some things girls like he's supposed to be treated like a girl? That's stupid. The Missus actually looked at a few stories about transgender kids and the vast majority of them were little boys who were going to be raised as girls.

I know transgenderism is the vogue cause right now with Lady Gaga rambling on about it and Chaz Bono being on Dancing with the Stars. Chaz Bono is an adult and can make his own decisions. Lady Gaga is a vapid caricature who shouldn't be asked about her opinion on anything aside from piano playing. Leave the kids out of it. People want to say that they're wanting these kids to be able to just be themselves. Bullshit. They're slapping a label on kids because they can't grasp the concept of just letting kids like what they like, and that's just flat out wrong.

MUSIC!

Yeah, they editted this version. Damned Vevo.



That's the ballgame for today. Have a good weekend and I'll see y'all Sunday.

"r u a raper?"

We hear a lot that the kids nowadays are a lot more computer savvy and more equipped to handle life in the internet age. I actually just saw an AT&T ad saying that people who have the internet are somehow made smarter. This makes me wonder if the people who have made these claims have spent any time at all online.

Having information accessible to you does not make you smarter. If you sit in a library all day long and play Rock Band on your cell phone, you will not become smarter. If anything the internet just makes it easier to appear smarted. Nothing like a little cut and paste from Wikipedia onto a forum to make you seem intelligent, right?

Which brings us right to what's got me annoyed. Kids on social networking platforms. There are forums that are designed specifically for kids. Facebook is not one of them. In fact its quite amusing to see kids trying to be cool online only to have their parents "friend" them thus utterly destroying their reason for being on that site.

But I've been away from Facebook for a quite while, so what has me annoyed? Google Buzz it seems has had growth in the number of kids using it. Buzz is handy because to can feed in things like this blog, twitter or other sites into one easy to follow bundle. People can follow you for your content and of course you can follow other people. You can also post things independently on there, like Twitter, but without the character limit. So with people able to feed in things like articles, artwork and the like into Buzz its a handy tool for growing a fanbase and getting your work out there.

Now, there's two ways of going about this. First is leaving comments on people's posts that are interesting and maybe they'll decide to follow you. That's my method and I'm just shy of 100 followers. The other method is to follow as many people as you can. When someone new follows you, you get a message and the option to follow them back. So, if you follow 2000 people and half of them follow you back... well, you get the idea.

Well, the problem with mass following people is that you don't really know what you're in for. So when someone who was networking out her movie reviews site over Buzz started following me and I followed her I stumbled upon something truly stupid: kids freaking out, wondering who this person is following them. "Who r u? Y r u following me? Stop following me? R u a raper?"

Now, here's why it's stupid:

First: if you are followed on Buzz, you can follow them back, meaning you can see each others posts, not follow them so they can see your posts but you don't have to see theirs, or you can just block them and they can't see your stuff. Its not hard the stop someone from following you.

Second: Odds are these kids actually followed the person back to leave the comments.

Third: Google profiles are easily accessible through Buzz, so wondering who a person is is pretty pointless when the answer is a click away.

For a demographic that's supposed to be internet savvy, they aren't showing it. In fact, I'm really starting to give credit to the people lobbying for better means of protection for kids online. Ultimately, its about being smart, which these kids aren't. If someone follows you and or friends you that you don't know and can find information about, or just seems sketchy, almost every social networking site has easy means to block those people. The first thing I do when I get a new follower on Buzz is check their Buzz Roll, and then probably they're profiles. I have not had an instance yet where I felt I needed to block someone on there, but I've done it on other sites. So far on Buzz my only decision was whether or not to follow them back.

For parents, if your kid is on a social networking site, then you need to be on there as well. Yeah, giving children their own space is all well and good, but that's why they have a bedroom. If parents don't start monitoring what their children are doing, then Big brother will eventually do it for them, and that's just one big load of bad. "We're doing it for the children." will be the battle cry and then the internet gets boiled and homogenized.

And if that happens I'm blaming every parent who was too busy and/or stupid to know that their 10 year old was sending dirty pictures out on the internet.

Sometime you get that reminder that kids are still kids. And most kids ain't that bright.