Kunj07/openwebtext · Datasets at Hugging Face

Wrote another mom: "The Play Garden is the best! My son attended preschool there for three years and I am so grateful for the Wild Zone. There was nothing dangerous about it. Nothing!"

Ah, but when you're a bureaucrat and you live in the world of what if thinking, danger is everywhere. Just imagine, "what if someone got hurt?" Look at the world that way and no play area wil seem safe enough.

This outlook seems to be sweeping Washington state. Recall that just a few weeks ago the Richland School District decided to phase out all swings because what if a child got hurt on them?

Too bad the bureaucrats never consider the reverse: What if kids never get a chance to climb a ladder, or hang from the monkey bars? What if kids with special needs know that after their doctor's appointment they will have to go straight home, because there's no place left for them to play?

At least they won't be exposed to the "extreme danger" of a tire swing.

Related: "Little Girl's Playset Is in Her Own Backyard, City Wants It Destroyed Anyway"0999283-dc88b917644d67bb4a73aa35c1ae4a47.txt0000644000000000000000000000354700000000000015223 0ustar 00000000000000This is why friends shouldn’t let friends drive drunk.

New Jersey cops scored a drunk-driving hat trick when they busted a motorist for DUI, then pinched her two sloshed friends who separately drove to the police station to pick her up.

It all started when a cop in Readington Township pulled over Carmen Reategui, 34, after he noticed her car swerving on Route 22 early one morning last week.

Charged with DUI, she was taken to the town’s police station, where she called a friend to come and get her.

But the friend wasn’t much help.

Nina Petracca, 23, who drove down to the station, was filling out necessary paperwork when a cop noticed that she, too, seemed a little tipsy.

She failed a sobriety test right in the station lobby and was charged with DUI.

So Petracca, too, was slapped with a DUI charge, as well as a drug charge for Vicodin tablets found in her purse, police said. Both women then reached out to another friend, Ryan Hogan, who, like Petracca before him, raced down to the police station to help his friends out of a jam.

But when he showed up, Police Sgt. Carlos Ferreiro thought he seemed off.

“When I was outside talking to him he displayed signs of intoxication,” he said.

Hogan also failed sobriety tests, police said.

“They finally got a sober adult to come pick up all three of them,” Ferreiro said.

“It’s the first time in nine years I’ve had something like this.”

All three friends are scheduled to appear in court next month.

Reategui vented about the ordeal on Facebook.

“Just getting home,” she posted to her page on Dec. 16. “ABSOLUTELY THE WORST NIGHT OF MY F–KING LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Petracca “liked” her lockup pal’s comment.

Later in the day she was wishing the whole thing had never happened, posting:

“Heavy, heavy heart. Wish there was an undo button in life.”0999291-8d7d91bd375501215610296885249ff4.txt0000644000000000000000000001102000000000000014503 0ustar 00000000000000Recently, education reporter Jay Mathews of The Washington Post has been writing about reading in the public schools, two of those pieces appearing here and here. One reason for doing so stems from a report issued by Renaissance Learning, a reading program that helps teachers and parents determine how well children understand the reading they do for homework and on their own.

Because of the popularity of the program, Renaissance Learning has a vast database on the books kids in public schools from kindergarten to 12th Grade actually read voluntarily and for class. The most recent findings, for the 2008-09 school year, are now released in a paper entitled “What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools” (here’s for the link).

The list of most popular titles for Grades 9 through 12 show just how powerful the social element of reading is at that age. The top four spots (!) are held by one author, Stephanie Meyer — Twilight, New Moon, Breaking Dawn, and Eclipse. (At Border’s Books yesterday, I asked for the jigsaw puzzles and the man directed me to a rear wall, adding, “We only have six or seven puzzles, and nearly all of them are New Moon stuff.”)

At No. 5 sits To Kill a Mockingbird, then comes Night (Wiesel), A Child Called “It” (Dave Pelzer), Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, Brisingr (Christopher Paolini), Romeo and Juliet, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Giver, and seven more works of literature.

That makes only two nonfiction works in the entire list, prompting Mathews to comment:

“Educators say nonfiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read nonfiction and they can’t read nonfiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.”

This dilemma is increasingly discussed in English Language Arts circles as more and more ELA standards are oriented toward abstract reading skills. Those standards will say things like “Students identify the main thesis in a text” and “Students detail the evidence used to support a contention in a text” — essential capacities, to be sure. To a decreasing degree, however, they ask for students to demonstrate specific “domain knowledge” such as “Students characterize, with examples, major periods of English and American literary history.”

As a result, the knowledge deficits proceed, and so does poor achievement in the higher grades. Mathews again:

“Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. insists this is what keeps many students from acquiring the communication skills they need for successful lives. “Language mastery is not some abstract skill,” he said in his latest book, The Making of Americans. “It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community.”

Hirsch’s new book may be found here.

Another voice on the issue is cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, who contributes an introductory note to the reading report above. There, Willingham maintains:

“Many people think of intelligence as comprised of mental skills that are independent of knowledge. That is, smart people think logically and analytically about problems, and they do that for pretty much any problem that comes along. If you’re a ‘good thinker’ you can apply those thinking skills quite broadly. This view is inaccurate. Thinking well is intertwined with knowledge.”

Why so? Willingham:

“We tend to think of reading as a skill that can be applied to any text. Indeed, describing a child as a good reader implies that she will be a good reader no matter what the content. That is true only for decoding — the process of turning written letters into sounds. Comprehending what you read depends heavily on what you already know about the topic.

“Here’s why that’s true. We all omit information when we speak. For example, imagine I said to a friend “I ate pasta when I wore my new sweater. Now I’m going to have to throw it out.” I don’t elaborate that I spilled pasta sauce on my sweater, or that stains are hard to remove from some fabrics, or that these fabrics are often used to make sweaters, or that I am the sort of person who would throw out a sweater if it were stained. I assume that my friend knows all this, and can fill in the gaps. If I didn’t omit information that the listener already knows, speech would be very long and very boring.”0999218-8cc5bd7846ebc69e5cb1e6eb7a8fb505.txt0000644000000000000000000000301500000000000015446 0ustar 00000000000000Frazer Brown writes,

At London Super Comic Con this weekend I stood in line to get some ‘Swamp Thing‘ stuff signed, to add to the growing pile of plastic and paper things I don’t quite know what to do with in my office (But somehow serve as creative stimuli in my peripheral vision whilst working)*

Naturally my first stop for ‘Swamp Goods’ was Yanick Paquette’s booth.

Whilst chatting with Yanick, young James (aged 6) arrived with his dad and nervously presented the artist with his own crayoned vision of Swamp Thing for Yanick to keep. In return Mr YP drafted a totally gratis Swampie for James to treasure for ever. It was all incredibly sweet.

I then proceeded to walk away from Yanick’s stall without paying for ANY of the stuff I had taken! Like a thieving Toe Rag**.

Contacting him on Twitter the same day to apologise this was the response I got:

I’d like to nominate Yanick Paquette for the ‘Nicest Artist at LSCC Award’***

*watching netflix

** Toe Rag noun, British, Informal /təʊraɡ/ a contemptible or worthless person.

***Award doesn’t actually exist

Frazer Brown is a lifelong fan of the ‘Swamp Creature’ genre of comics. So much so, he’s investing time and money on two projects that involve creatures of the ‘Slime’ or ‘Swamp’ variety in 2016. Funny how life turns out. You can follow him on twitter @frazerbrown

About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.