If Cream Cheese Is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna Be Right

Unless you reside beneath large deposits of granite or perhaps are a subscriber to Us magazine, you are probably aware of the scourge of fanatical evil that everybody is coalitioning about these days.  No, I am not referring to the menace of NFL players loose on our public streets; this problem is much more malevolent and has even our legislative and executive branches grafted into a single trunk of governmental topiary oneness in an endeavor to disrupt and destroy perhaps the single greatest threat to our American well-being:  the bake sale.

I noticed this subtle cultural change when Thing 2 recently brought home her annual choir fundraising product.  Instead of the box of assorted and enchanting selection of chocolate candy-bars upon which I tend to invest my annual September salary, she thrust into my hand something called Continue reading

We Need a Zero-Tolerance Zero-Tolerance Policy

OK, so I was on Facebook this week and couldn’t help but notice that all the ice buckets have been replaced with enough first-day-of-school photos that I’m actually beginning to miss cat pictures.  This can only mean one thing:  ‘Tis that special season when everyone under the age of 18 has a permanent shoulder slump and every one of their parents is high-fiving and rediscovering the lunch date.  ‘Back to School’ ain’t just a sale at Wal-Mart.

I look forward to this TIMe of year, not only for the lunch dates, but because I get to read all about the zero-tolerant administrators and their vigorous tolerance for zero-tolerance policies, which has them doling out more suspensions than a bridge-builder because at some point along their 100k graduate education they found that teaching rules is easier than teaching character.  Perhaps you are familiar with the famous ‘Pop-Tart gun’ incident I wrote about here.  Turns out this incident is just the tip of the iceberg lettuce wedge. With bacon bits.  And bleu cheese crumbles.

For example, Continue reading

Suspended Over a Pop-Tart? One Cannoli Hope

What with my big family vacation and then coming home to take down all my Cesar Chavez Easter decorations—not to mention getting geared up for National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month this month—I totally missed the story out of Maryland a while back in which a 7-year old boy was suspended from school after eating his Pop-Tart into a shape kind of maybe resembling a sort of handgun and then, in a fit of imagination imitating media inundation, going “bang bang.”

Supposedly, the second-grader’s intent was to shape the pastry into a mountain; kind of a three-dimensional monochrome post-impressionist landscape piece.  But a slight, rather amateurish design miscalculation resulted in the boy mistakenly creating a fearsome profile resembling a treacherous terroristic armament capable of dropping sprinkles all over the cafeteria floor at up to 9.8 meters per second per second. Continue reading