this is our future and it is coming for us. with a pacifier.

I know very well this is for cheap laughs, but I am cheap and I laughed.

Bestiality Law? Florida Takes Another Shot At Passing Bill

As everyone who has ever reported this story will tell you, "Florida is one of only a dozen or so states that don't have a law against bestiality on the books." So, Democratic State Senator Nan Rich is taking her second shot at getting a law passed that would criminalize this sort of thing. This past Monday, the State Senate, by unanimous vote, passed a law that would make this sort of thing "a first-degree misdemeanor... with a penalty of up to a year in jail." It now goes to the State House, where a similar measure spurred by Rich and passed by the Florida State Senate last year failed to pass, despite the fact that it was pretty clear about how it was about people in Florida copulating with dogs and goats and whatnot

I'll be honest. This is not a law I would think anyone would really like, need to debate that much. Should you or should you not have sex with Fluffy the Hamster or Polly the Pig? That is not what I'd call a difficult question, okay?

Via meret: 21-Foot-Tall Robot Baby To Defend People's Republic - exactly what it says.

From comments: It has been three years since the descent of Glorious-
Heavensent-Infant-Who-Walks-In-Grace. Three years since the Eyes, ever-watching. We creep between its soft fleshy toes and pray, and when prayer is not enough we weep. For the People's Republic is no more. We are the Infant-Ruled and the Infant-Born, and we live in the shadow of the Eyes, ever-watching.

I am not saying this is how skynet started; skynet isn't this scary. I don't even want to know what happens to small villages if diapers aren't changed in time.

At Last, A Family Movie About Children Going to Hell which the only reason I am posting this, besides the sheer curiosity about Lizzie Borden teaching Home Economics, is a comment that yet again wonders why kids just can't read like, the fantasy classics made famous by Lord of The Rings and Dante's Inferno and why create dumbed-down versions?

My argument: because classics are classics because they are old and stylistically sometimes pretty goddamn boring.

Long version is like, five pages long and I removed it because apparently, I am surprisingly adamant on like, why literacy is not the same as reading and teaching one does not bestow understanding the second with an intersection into classism in literature, which is just kind of weirdly unsettling to read now. With anecdotes, even.

I will leave with this--kid's version of Moby Dick? Not better than the long version, but so much shorter.

Comments

[seperis.livejournal.com]

This.

I agree with that post, but also had this in my--not a rant.

*****

See, reading is one thing and reading for enjoyment is another, but reading a novel is a different skillset entirely, and not one that's introduced to kids in a pleasant, non-threatening way, but with like, here is your first novel, do a book report, wtf? Reading a novel is not like reading a short story, which is not like reading a poem, which is not like reading a script, which is not like reading a play, which is not like--you see where I am going with this? Literacy is like, the least of it. The big, difficult, and for a lot of people, insurmountable issue with reading is that if your first major experience with a novel was to be handed like, A Wrinkle in Time and told to do a book report on theme, honestly to God I am surprised we are still a literate society when you're eleven years old and your exposure up to now has been ten page short stories with neatly wrapped endings.

I can only speak from experience and manipulation tactics with my son, nieces and nephew to teach them to appreciate something that takes a while not only to read, but to absorb and understand, and much more importantly, to learn to love the fact that it does take time, sometimes a lot of time, to do those things. We're taught to read in increments of ten minutes, twenty, thirty, attention span, bah, but there's rarely a slow introduction to learning to read something that you can't finish in one sitting but will still draw you back to read more, and maybe re-read what you already read.

*****

And you know, the fact that a lot of the 'classics' are stylistically not only outdated but seriously, the sheer difference in social context is boggling when you hand a kid David Copperfield and expect him to get what the story is actually about.

[trinity_clare]

It's really interesting that you bring up time like that, because one of the things that's really hindered me in school is that as a kid I was such a fast reader that I never learned how to put a book down and pick it back up later. If I can't read it in one sitting, I'm not interested, and it's really hard for me to wrench myself out of a mindset and come back to it some other time. Mind you, I consider anything under 4 hours to be "one sitting," and for me that covers books up to about 450 pages long, depending on how dense they are, but still.