Today’s Moron

Today’s moron is the high-school teacher who forgot his computer was hooked up to an overhead projector and began watching pornography while his students were working on an assignment.

“He forgot the projector screen was turned on and he started watching porn and we were all just like sitting there shocked that he was watching this in front of the class,” a student said. Some of them tried to get his attention, but to no avail: “He was just all into it, I don’t even think he was paying attention to us, he was just all in his computer.”

The teacher, based at Arcadia High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, is on leave.

The story is here.

End Times II

According to my blog stats, by far the most popular item I’ve written here so far has been End Times, by a margin of about four to one. It’s also the most-used search term used by people navigating toward Weather Station 1.

This worries me.

Are these people looking for even more online ‘evidence’ that the Book of Revelation is about to come true? Are they hoping to find a blogger who will tell them ‘yes, people, your time HAS come!’ I know there are a lot of believers out there – that book series about ‘armageddon’ is the best selling fiction of all time, and Kirk Cameron made some movies about them.

But is the world about to end? No. Not going to happen.

As I write this, Ike, the fourth big hurricane of the past few weeks, is spanking Texas something big. Wars are raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, and tensions between Russia and Georgia and Israel and its neighbours are still high. Africa is bubbling with hatred and death. The CERN supercollider is running. People are being killed all around the world, and it seems every week a new atrocity is revealed: families sealed in cellar dungeons, babies in microwaves.

This is nothing new.

Face it: we live in the best time to be alive. Health care has its problems, but new advances mean you and I will live longer than any generation before us. The weather is going wild, but the weather has always gone wild; google ‘hurricanes’ and take a look at death tolls 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 300 years ago. Jeez, google ‘black death’ or ‘holocaust’ or just the word ‘disaster.’ War is raging, but it’s less war, with fewer casualties. And despite what you may think based on today’s news headlines, there has not been a sudden rise in pedophile attacks in recent years. Like other crimes, assaults on children are on the decline, as most police department crime stats show.

Even if you don’t think the rapture is about to strike, you may believe things have gotten worse. That’s understandable, and let me tell you why:

You’re hearing about it.

As a newspapermaker, I can tell you that you are reading more explicit, more detailed coverage of man’s evils. A generation ago, when I started in this business, there were things we didn’t report on beyond the basics. Now we tell you everything. The Internet, the blogosphere, has meant everyone with an opinion is spreading news faster than the old media ever could. And you’re hearing more about it.

This is not the media trying to force this news down your throat.

This is the media giving you what you want.

Now, I am not anti-religion. I was raised in a church, and I still live my life by the things I learned there. My mind is open to the idea that there is a higher power, and I won’t deny that I said a few prayers when things went bad. I won’t criticize anyone for their faith. But I will criticize their logic. The two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

The world isn’t ending, people. There used to be dinosaurs, and we evolved from lower creatures. All of this has been proven, and will be proven again. A thousand years ago, end-timers said it was the end, based on signs around them. The same thing happened during the Second Great Awakening in the U.S. in the 1800s. Those Russians came out of their cave earlier this year.

Hundreds of years from now, people will be finding justifications to claim the world is about to end, but it won’t, and life will go on.

Some other thoughts on the subject can be found here and here.

Fight Club

Actual fight clubs – underground brawls, only slightly organized but very bloody – have likely been in action for generations. It’s part of human nature. On occasion, we like to howl up our savage ancestry and take out our aggressions on a rival.

Once in a while, though, fight clubs make the news, as this one did this week: The Dog Brothers Gathering of the Pack, held in Southern California, went beyond Brad Pitt and Edward Norton boxing bareknuckled in a bar basement; Reuters reported it as “anything goes -” a description offered up by one weekend warrior wanting to fight with “blunted knives,” whatever they are.

A reporter watched two assholes beat each other with heavy sticks and two more fight with electrically charged knives. Think about that for a second: an electrically charged knife.

“I’ve never felt better than when I’m doing this,” one of the knife fighters said.

His enemy combatant, with whom he likely shared a few beers afterward, said more: “Honestly, I wish I could find a church with the same spirit of support and love as I feel here.”

What the hell?

I have been beaten up in schoolyard scraps. That was kid stuff. I was a small kid with a big mouth, and the politics of the 70s meant that I was frequently put in my place by larger kids. I won only one of those contests, at 10, when I landed a lucky pop on the nose after taking a wailing from a guy named Claude, who was 13 and still in Grade 5 with me. I was the hero of the hour, until he found me later.

But as I got older, I became a big guy with a quiet mouth, and the scrapping subsided. Still, I have been in three real fights in my life. One was in late high school, which ended with the two of us exhausted and too tired to remember what we were fighting about. The second was a bad incident in my early 20s that ended up with someone taking a 2×4 to me, breaking my arm. The third was a fast exchange in a crowded bar, when I was 30, over something I had written.

Fighting has been a fringe element in my life. I know of a lot of people for whom it isn’t – the brawlers, the lugnuts who head out on Friday nights, beer-fuelled, meth-fired, looking to cause violence. There are the electric-knife fighters who brag to Reuters and the bullies waiting at home in the dark. For many, violence is a daily fact of life.

I’ve been thinking about this again lately, ever since a podcast I listen to called The Definitive Word did a humourous episode called Fight Club that saw Will and Rich ponder grudge matches between celebrities – Gordon Brown vs. Tony Blair, for instance.

This gave rise to a forum thread at simplysyndicated.com, one in which listeners came up with their own ideas for grudge matchups. At one point, I got into it with a joking suggestion to ‘fight’ another Canadian on the forum, which became a little running joke there for a while.

But you know what? My nine-year-old got into a fight on the schoolyard last year. With a girl. She’s a lot bigger than he is, and she hit him first, but he finished her off. This was not a good situation. He was disciplined, both by the school and by me, and I thought he’d learned a lesson.

Now he’s asking me to teach him Jedi-style fighting. And I don’t know what do do. I love the part of parenting that lets me share things like Star Wars and army men and Jackie Chan movies with him. But I worry that he’s not getting the point, and that the world around him is not helping him get that point. Am I contributing to that?

We will always fight. I will argue with coworkers. We are in the midst of a federal election, so there’s plenty of fighting going on there. Movies are full of it. My son will likely be in a fight this new school year, because he’s nine and that’s what happens.

No, I guess it’s all I can do to try to keep my kids balanced. Let them explore the world at their pace, with my guidance. Let them make their mistakes. Let them win some fights, and lose others, and find their way – a way that hopefully never leads to one of them comparing a hellhole like Gathering of the Pack to a religious experience.

Parenting is the toughest battle of all, and one I have to win.