SPITBULL

Over the course of the next year, the [New York] Department of Education will introduce into all of its elementary and middle schools “Operation Respect: Don’t Laugh at Me,” an intensive curriculum in character development. The program, which is the brainchild and heart’s desire of Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary, aims to combat bullying by emphasizing the moral lessons of folk music.

The [outreach video] included accounts of book-slamming, sandwich-spitting, and shin-kicking, as well as footage of a rendition of “Don’t Laugh at Me” that Yarrow had performed at the United Nations. “A ridicule-free world,” a soothing voice intoned. “It’s possible, but only with everyone’s help.”

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Next up was “The Big Betrayal Conflict Script,” a skit about two friends, Terry and Sasha, who get into a fight at a basketball game. The exercise emphasized using “I messages,” as opposed to those that begin with “you” and, therefore, can put their targets on the defensive. (DLAM also recommends having students simulate the sound of a rainstorm and discuss a story called “The Maligned Wolf.”)

“Just make sure they’re sticking to the formula,” Hurdle-Price advised. “I often get students who say, ‘I feel that you are stupid.’ ”

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn. This is not a book virtually anyone will be able to read without the incentive of potentially embarrassing class discussion and a grade hanging over one's head. I had the benefit of those incentives and I'm glad I was forced to read the book. It was perhaps the first that influenced me to think about stuff that happened outside of class using the framework I had learned from class.
  
• The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, by Judith Rich Harris. This book also influenced the way I thought about non-book phenomenon, but it's far more accessible than the Structure book. The author is fully aware that her ideas are (or were, when written) highly controversial so she lays out her case painstakingly. I bought it wholesale, and this book is an important reason my kids go/are going to parochial school. (King has other reasons).
• The Corrections: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen. Yes, of course I enjoyed it, but the reason it means a lot to me is that I read it when my youngest child was about one and a half, and it was the first book that I was able to read all the way through without losing the plot line and having to start over. A tribute to the exciting story (just force yourself to slog through the first section with the pompous and annoying protagonist, it's worth it), and the decreasing sleep interruption. Whatever, this book marks my return to grownup reading after a years long diet of Pat the Bunny and mediocre magazine articles.
• E.F. Benson's Lucia series (here's the first one). I have read this series, set in England between the two world wars, over and over. I began my honeymoon in the town that is its setting. Why? Somehow I find it immensely comforting to read about this small society of English gentry, having conniptions about pretty much nothing at all.
  
• And, at last and of course, Eloise, by Kay Thompson.
  

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Dick Durbin
Jacques Chirac
Paris Hilton
Jimmy Carter

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

Potato farmers held a noisy protest outside Parliament today to get the term "couch potato" removed from the Oxford English dictionary, claiming it harms the vegetable's image.

Finally, all the students shouted the Positive Pledge: "I am somebody. I'm capable and lovable. I am teachable; therefore I can learn. I can do anything when I try. I will respect myself and others. I will be the best I can be each day. I will not waste time because it's valuable. I'm so precious and bright. I am somebody."

In the West toilets are a national disgrace, in the Far East there has been a restroom revolution and public toilets are seen as an essential and integral component of good urban design and a cultured, civilised society. A nation can be judged by its toilets.

What was your gut feeling the first time you came face to face with President Bush?

He was very funny and quick. Just quick-witted.

...

We get on very well. I couldn’t come from a more different place. We disagree on so many things. But he was moved by my account of what was happening in Africa. He was engaged.

I think, when I’m sitting two feet from someone, I could tell if this was just politics. This was personal. I think, for all the swagger, this Texan thing, he has a religious instinct that keeps him humble.

You mean that right-wing fundamentalist neocon scary stuff?

Actually, he’s a Methodist. It has to be said that most of the people in the cabinet are not religious extremists.

To journalists ten or twenty years older than me, this is the long-awaited end to a grand mystery. To people my age or younger, it just doesn't matter that much. Baby boomers, many of whom seem to have trouble accepting the fact that time has passed, often seem incredulous that the major formulating events of their lives simply aren't that interesting to everyone else. Vietnam and Watergate have become the language of public debate, even though both ended over thirty years ago.

• In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time - reveals John Sears to be the man


• Deep Throat: The Watergate Informant - no, it's Joseph Lowther!


• Unmasking Deep Throat - Author and convicted felon John W. Dean hopes he still has the credibility to to sell his his most recent book: Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.
  


• At least the author of I Am Not Deep Throat: A Watergate Memoir can breathe a sigh of relief.