Eideard

A US teenager has been ordered to say sorry to his home town after running across stage dressed as a giant penis during graduation.

Calvin Morett, 19, of Saratoga Springs, New York state, has to pay for an ad apologising for the stunt in his local newspaper.

Morett donned the 6ft penis costume and then ran onto the stage in the middle of the Saratoga Performing Arts Centre’s graduation ceremony.

He then sprayed some of the 5,000 people in the crowd with Silly String, reports the Albany Times Union.

Certainly, a creative lad. Perhaps not the brightest.

This is an Opinion piece about Los Angeles. Just as California leads the way in much that is progressive and positive, the state sets style and substance for some of the deadliest trends in American society:

We’ve all become so inured to the unending stream of dreary and dispiriting news produced by the Los Angeles Unified School District that Thursday’s horrific report on the high-school dropout rate came and went with barely a civic whimper.

The statewide numbers were stunning; the figures for Los Angeles were tragic. According to the California Department of Education, one in every four of the state’s students fails to finish high school. In the LAUSD — which is supposed to educate 10% of all California’s school-age children — a third of all students drop out…

Now, it’s probably true that the LAUSD deserves to be ranked among the American republic’s most incompetent public agencies. The people who run it might as well have learned their managerial skills at the Myanmar generals’ military staff college. It’s hard to know which of the multiple examples of their failure deserves to be designated “Exhibit A” in the case for their fecklessness, but somehow the fact that these are state numbers stands out. That’s because the LAUSD has never been able to develop a reliable way of its own to keep track of how many students actually graduate.

You would think that a group of people charged with managing a budget of nearly $20 billion for the nation’s second-largest school district might have a kind of rudimentary interest in whether they’re succeeding or failing — or, perhaps, a simple intellectual curiosity about what was occurring in the world around them. Not this bunch. The philosophical category “invincibly ignorant” might as well have been created to describe them…

Does anybody really think it’s an accident that these schools draw their students from the neighborhoods in which the city’s gang problem is most serious and most intractable?

There are a lot of failing marks to be passed out here, and they shouldn’t go only to our children.

RTFA – and think of how it applies to the urban centers of education in your own state.

Ahead of the summer Olympics, Apple on Saturday will open the doors to its first retail store in China, a glass-enclosed high-profile shop situated in Beijing’s newest retail development: the Village at Sanlitun.

Keeping with his tradition of attending Apple’s gala international retail launches, our friend Gary Allen from ifoAppleStore has made the grueling journey across the Pacific to be on hand for the store’s grand opening.

Allen reports that Apple’s space within the Sanlitun complex “is nearly invisible from the street,” because it sits within the center’s inner courtyard. “But once you see it, it’s impressive — a three-story glass façade covering two visible floors, and a level covered with stainless steel…”

Inside, customers will find the usual array of Mac and iPod products, as well as a sprawling Genius Bar staffed with technical support specialists. However, one thing they won’t find is the iPhone, as Apple’s negotiations with Chinese wireless carriers remain a work-in-progress.

A good time will be had by all. No doubt.

Stephanie Lenz is an angry Pennsylvania mother who refuses to back down from the music industry.

Lenz’s attorneys were in federal district court on Friday morning, trying to thwart a motion to dismiss her lawsuit against Universal Music Group. A year ago, the music label ordered YouTube to pull down a 30-second video she shot of her infant son dancing to Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy.”

Lenz, who resides in a rural Pennsylvania area, claims that her video is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Fair Use provision in copyright law. She fought the order, and eventually, Universal Music abandoned any claim that she violated Prince’s copyright. YouTube has since reposted her clip.

Now Lenz is out to teach the music industry a lesson.

What Lenz and her attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation want are for media companies to stop sending take-down notices in a “willy nilly” fashion and to make sure that they have a legitimate claim of copyright violation before acting.

These schmuck bureaucrats should learn not to mess with Mom…

An Indian man who took an impersonator to court to get a divorce faces legal action after his real wife found out.

Sanjib Saha presented a woman as his wife in a lower court in the eastern city of Kolkata this month. Both said they sought a mutual divorce, something the court granted immediately.

Saha’s real wife was then asked to leave the marital home. She has since appealed the ruling at a higher court, charged her husband with cheating and the original divorce was suspended.

Uh, maybe I’m missing something here. Wasn’t it likely his wife would notice she wasn’t present for the divorce hearing?

The Mexican navy says it has seized nearly six tonnes of cocaine found inside a 10m-long (31ft) makeshift submarine in the Pacific Ocean.

A naval spokesman said they had known about such submarines but this was the first time they had seen one. US intelligence helped in the operation.

The submarine had been carrying its cargo from Colombia towards the coast of Mexico when it was intercepted on Wednesday. It took the navy two days to tow it to shore.

Vice-Admiral Cisneros said, “This is going to force us to intensify our aerial surveillance, because the freeboard (distance from the deck to the water) of this sub is not detected by radars or any type of electronic detection device.”

Uh, like when it’s underwater. Eh?

Moments after AT&T posted a message on its site saying it would provide free Wi-Fi services to iPhone users, the company took it back. And AT&T spokespeople are keeping their lips sealed as to who or what caused the “error” — or whether free AT&T Wi-Fi is ever going to become a reality.

At approximately 9 a.m. PDT, Friday, AT&T removed the message from its site, which read, “AT&T knows Wi-Fi is hot, and free Wi-Fi even hotter, which is why we are proud to offer iPhone customers free access to the nation’s largest Wi-Fi hotspot network with more than 17,000 hotspots.

“It was posted in error and was removed shortly thereafter, so it should not have been up,” said Seth Bloom, an AT&T spokesperson, in a phone interview. “We know how important Wi-Fi is and we intend to make it available to as many people as we can, but nothing can be announced today.”

My guess is they thought their lawsuit by T-Mobile over the Starbucks Wi-Fi was sorted out. And it wasn’t. And isn’t – yet.

Looks pretty good… for a cheese grater.

“Hotel of Doom” Refuses To Die

Once dubbed by Esquire magazine as “the worst building in the history of mankind”, the 105-storey Ryugyong Hotel is back under construction after a 16-year lull in the capital of one of the world’s most reclusive and destitute countries….

The communist North started construction in 1987, in a possible fit of jealousy at South Korea, which was about to host the 1988 Summer Olympics and show off to the world the success of its rapidly developing economy.

A concrete shell built by North Korea’s Paektu Mountain Architects & Engineers emerged over the next few years. A proud North Korea put a likeness of the hotel on postage stamps and boasted about the structure in official media.

According to intelligence sources, then North Korean leader Kim Il-sung saw the hotel as a symbol of his big dreams for the state he founded, while his son and current leader Kim Jong-il was a driving force in its construction.

Well, it’s become a symbol, I guess ….

A spacecraft sent on a mission to inspect comets has filmed the Earth and its moon from 31 million miles away, making an alien’s-eye view of our world.

The two brief sequences show the Moon passing in front of the Earth as it orbits.

Here’s video 1 and here’s video 2:

“Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the Universe by giving insights into how a distant, Earth-like alien world would appear to us,” said University of Maryland astronomer Michael A’Hearn, who leads the project using NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft.

I’ve been following this stuff since before most of you were born. Certainly, since before we could do it!

Learn about it, folks. A lot more fun than Unreality TV.