Kids n' stuff!

Well kids, I'm not saying that it couldn't happen here in Canada, but the fact that it happened at all is a sure sign of the strange times we live in:

Salem Oregon: An Oregon school district has rushed to soothe parents at a Salem elementary school who received a letter warning that children not picked up promptly might be turned over to the state.
The Salem Statesman Journal reports (http://is.gd/rTTiDo ) that a Salem-Keizer School District spokesman confirmed the letter about the upcoming school year was sent recently to Swegle Elementary School parents. However, district spokesman Jay Remy says it was sent in error because the school's principal had not reviewed it. Remy described the letter as neither accurate nor courteous and said an apology would follow.
The third paragraph begins: "Children must be picked up on time. If they are not picked up on time we will call DHS and you will then have to pick them up at court the next day." DHS is the Oregon Department of Human Services.
KPTV of Portland reports parents have been sent a phone message apology.

 http://www.elpasotimes.com/weird/ci_28462701/school-district-soothes-parents-over-school-warning-letter

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Folks I got a question for ya!

Would you rather get in a fight over a hockey game, or a baseball game?




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Sometimes it just doesn't pay to get out of bed in the morning bunky!!!!!

Police have identified a 30-year-old man who died Wednesday night after he ran into a street to get away from a gunman, was hit by a passing vehicle and then shot by the gunman.
The incident happened about 7 p.m. in the 9400 block of Cullen near Wilmington, according to the Houston Police Department.
Police said Durell Taylor was pumping gasoline into his car at a gas station when a man confronted him. The man was armed with an assault rifle. Taylor ran and the gunman chased him.
Police said Taylor ran into the street, where a vehicle hit him. The man then stood over Taylor and fired several gunshots at him.
The gunman sped away in a 2006 gold colored, four-door Chevrolet Impala.

 

http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/houston/article/Man-dies-in-strange-encounter-in-SE-Houston-6374928.php

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ANOTHER NOTE FROM COMIC-CON:

Who wouldn't want to feel just a little bit like Kirk or Mr. Spock? Here at Comic-Con 2015, the Wand Company is showing off a prototype of its upcoming Star Trek TOS Bluetooth Communicator, a working replica of the communicator Federation officers used on The Original Series. In truth, it's a glorified Bluetooth speaker. But holding makes you feel a little bit like you're on an away mission.
The little device was actually designed using one of the original props from Star Trek, and is composed of a combination of pressed metal, aluminum, and textured plastic. Without having actually lived through the 1960s, I thought it felt authentic — weighty and purposeful for people in Starfleet. The grill flips opens with the actual sound effects from the show, and the speaker and transceiver make it look truly like a 23rd century artifact.

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Using the device involves just pairing it to your smartphone. We tested it using an older iPhone, so tapping one of the bottom-most buttons activated voice control, from which you can simply say the contact you want to reach via the Communicator's receiver. Calls came in loud and clear, so it works pretty well for a prototype.
The Wand Company partnered with ThinkGeek to make the Communicator available to the public by early next year. Fans can preorder it right now for $149.99.

 http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/11/8933329/star-trek-tos-bluetooth-communicator-hands-on-sdcc-2015

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Now here's something your ever curious reporter found interesting! 

Did Rock and Roll Pacify America?

In 1964, an Atlantic writer argued that the new youth sound was anything but revolutionary. It’s exactly the kind of headline a modern-day reader might hope to find, flipping through old issues of The Atlantic: “What Do They Get From Rock ‘n’ Roll?” Seeing that title in the August 1964 edition of the magazine, my laughing-at-anachronisms alert went off—reading this will be as fun as watching Don Draper be perplexed by a revolutionary Volkswagen ad! And, well, Jeremy Larner’s article does perform a bit of handholding for Atlantic readers harrumphing at the new youth sound (“The most common instrument is the home-learned guitar played in one key only”). But the truth is that in the year that The Beatles broke out in America, The Atlantic ran a perceptive and subtly scathing indictment of rock, one that tried to counteract the popular narrative that three chords and a steady beat represented deep social change.

The story opens in April of 1956—a time, Larner was quick to note, “when the style of music known as rock ‘n’ roll had already established its present-day popularity.” At a Birmingham, Alabama, concert for Nat King Cole, who wasn’t really a rock singer, hood-wearing members of the White Citizen’s Council stormed the stage and beat Cole. “Rock ‘n’ roll is the basic, beat-heavy music of the Negroes,” the group’s spokesman said at the time. “It appeals to the base in man, brings out his animalism and vulgarity.” Larner compared that racist line of criticism with the anti-rock rhetoric of churches, community groups, and “various highbrows and middlebrows.” All of them, in various ways, saw this new music as socially disruptive and dangerous.
Larner saw it as exactly the opposite—rock as the sound of mass complacency. He attributed the genre’s rise to the fact that black jazz musicians after World War II ditched big band for bebop, an aggressive and experimental style that “the teen-age set found … nearly impossible to dance to.” Rock filled the sock-hop void through its defining feature: the beat. “When the listener submits himself to the beat, he loosens his mind from its moorings in space and time; no longer does he feel a separation between himself and his surroundings,” Larner wrote. “Rock ‘n’ roll is the only form in modern music which deliberately seeks these effects and no other.” Jazz could sometimes hypnotize an audience, he said, but not like rock could—to lose your mind to music, you need repetition, not improvisation.

Rock: “a clearly labeled, constant stream of facile stimulant, factory guaranteed to jazz you up, smooth you out, purge your violence.”

So powerful was the rock beat that all other attributes of the music were presented as secondary, or totally inconsequential. “‘Positive’ lyrics are mostly a sop to minds that do not want to know what they are thinking,” he wrote, before describing a rock-gospel vocalist futilely singing praises to God even as the “the music itself rocked on and out away from the words into a new wild night of nihilism.” This nihilism, he said, allowed rock to placate adolescent angst, not by channelling it toward the outer world but by making it a pleasure in itself: “Through exposure to rock ‘n’ roll, teen-agers learn to handle their aggressions and discontents—not through understanding, criticism, and self-conscious social rebellion, but through surrendering them to manufactured purgative.”
“Manufactured” is a key word here. Larner devoted a lot of words to the major-label songwriting machine, the practice of payola, and the trend of white artists making money by covering black songwriters. Rock wasn’t art, it was product, designed to transfix through its brute effect on human physiology. In the most devastating passage, he made the medium sound like aural toothpaste:

What teen-agers need in music is more or less what modern adults need too: not music to be listened to but background music as they hurry through their appointed activities. The background may be throbbing RnR or tinkly Muzak, but it all comes from the same package. On opening the package, the buyer finds a clearly labeled, constant stream of facile stimulant, factory guaranteed to jazz you up, smooth you out, purge your violence, and leave you kissing-sweet and ready for maudlin love.

Larner was writing in the year when The Beatles went on Ed Sullivan and scored their first slew of No. 1 U.S. hits; the Beach Boys had their first chart topper as well; Alan Freed, the DJ referenced by Larner as having coined the term “rock ‘n’ roll,” was charged with tax evasion in the wake of a huge payola scandal. Rock was by no means getting less corporate, but it was about to get more ambitious. In a few years, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds would be released, Bob Dylan would go electric, and the professional rock-critical establishment would rise, all positing rock as an art form whose worth was predicated not solely on the beat. The movement it soundtracked was not all that “kissing-sweet”—the hippies may have conformed with each other and preached about love but, as my colleague Jennie Rothenberg-Gritz detailed earlier this week, they did really defy the dominant culture.
Deep down, though, was all that progress merely cosmetic? Even now, does rock’s appeal rest solely on its ability to offer escape through catchy repetition for a few minutes? It seems clear that the answer in some cases is yes, and in some cases no. As music, rock can function as a source of meaning or as a source of abandon; the best songs do both. As a social signifier, it can help fight the power or cheerlead for it. Heavy metal excoriates the meaningless of existence but also provides an opportunity for cruise-ship camaraderie; the Sex Pistols created rebellious iconography that then became credit card designs; radio’s most empowering lyrics help package Max Martin make-’em-move formula.
And when visiting Coachella, Electric Daisy Carnival, or really any modern music festival, it’s easy to flash back to what Larner described as “the zombie hour”—Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. “The dancefloor is packed with adolescent Americans of all creeds and colors, jitterbugging with dead pans and trancelike movements, regular and lifeless as clockwork as they move to the big beat,” he wrote. “I can’t help thinking, as I watch them, that they are receiving the only logical preparation for becoming a grown-up in our society.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/rock-and-roll-opiate-of-the-masses-1964-atlantic-archive-piece/398180/