In fact, between the end of June and September 2 the city offers free breakfasts and lunches to any child who asks at hundreds of locations across town, no ID or paperwork required. Only problem? This year there are 100 fewer locations available than there were last year!

The Daily News reports that as part of the DoE’s recent budget trimming, which included taking $10.8 million from its food budget, there are only 372 no-strings Summer Meals spots operating this year, down 22 percent from the 478 working in 2010 (there are more than 1,000 free summer meal locations around the city, but most are for kids affiliated with summer school and day camp programs).

So we’re supposed to feel terrible because the city is cutting back its free food locations during the summer when there’s no school?

This program makes no sense to me whatsoever.  If the kids are “hungry” and “poor,” then they’ve already been receiving some sort of government handout to feed themselves.  If they aren’t, and they still aren’t eating, is it our job to force-feed them?

It’s so annoying.  It’s one thing to feed the little freeloaders during the year when school is in session, but the idea that they should have to be fed during the summer too, to me, just smacks of the city saying “Don’t worry about being a parent; we got this!”

via City Slashes Free Food For Kids Program By 22 Percent: Gothamist.

I was thinking as I looked at her (and this picture doesn’t do her justice) that she’s doing something a lot of women try and fail at: pulling off the short hair.

I’ve seen so many women on the subway try and pull off this look and it so doesn’t work for them.  I’m not trying to be cruel or mean, either.  This woman can pull that look off.  It’s not by some magic or because she has a great stylist (although I’m sure, if she did, it helped), it’s because she has the right bone structure in her face, the right body type, and the right appearance for it.  Also, if you notice, her hair isn’t dyed or “highlighted,” another thing women tend to do because, well, it looked good on someone else.

Ladies, just a piece of advice; something that looks good on someone else won’t necessarily look good on you.  There’s a lot that goes in to “pulling off a look,” particularly one as unique as the “really short boyish hair.”  Is this one guy’s opinion?  Sure it is.  Does that matter much in the grand scheme of things?  Probably not, but take it for what it is: advice to reconsider something you’re planning on doing to hack up your appearance, particularly if you’re doing it because of how someone else appeared with a similar look.

You may want to start with the idiotic “white long sleeves under a short-sleeved tee” look if you’re looking to jettison something that looks dumb.

Just sayin’.

It seems snippy threats can get you places. After McDonald’s threatened to drop health coverage for 30,000 workers unless the government granted it an exemption from a mandate to spend 80 to 85 percent of premiums on benefits, the Department of Health and Human Services granted a waiver to the company and 29 others.

See, now, that’s all well and good, but that’s nowhere near the best part of the story.  The fact that the UFT actively campaigned for Obamacare and has no obligation to suffer through it, to me, is the big story.  I know Consumerist is all about talking about companies and such, but this story bothers me for some reason.

It also bothers me that they’re knocking McDonald’s but not a brother in arms in pro-healthcare sites.  Consumer Reports, the parent company of The Consumerist, was very active in campaigning for Obamacare and some of those posts made it onto Consumerist in various forms.  I would’ve liked to have seen more about the other companies that got a pass.

Not that I hold any grudges against Consumerist at all.  Ben is a friend of mine and has been for years; I’m just a little disappointed is all.

Too bad Derek Fenton didn’t burn an American flag instead of pages from the Koran. He might still have a job.

NJTransit fired the 39-year-old railroad worker this week after he was filmed setting fire to ripped pages from the Muslim holy book during a 9/11-anniversary protest at the site of the proposed mosque and Islamic center.

The transit agency said only that Fenton, an 11-year veteran, was terminated because he “violated New Jersey Transit’s code of ethics” and “his trust as a state employee.”

This, despite the fact that he was off-duty, not in uniform and not presenting or identifying himself as an NJTransit employee at the time. And, as the US Supreme Court has affirmed, had Fenton burned an American flag, he’d be fully protected under the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Which is why groups like the American Civil Liberties Union — traditionally zealous protectors of First Amendment rights — say that burning a Koran should qualify, as well.

Now, we don’t happen to think that public burnings are an appropriate, not to mention effective, means of political protest — whether they involve holy books or the American flag.

But there can’t be two standards.

If, as the courts have said, flag-burning is protected, then Fenton should be within his rights to burn pages of the Koran, however politically incorrect that might be. Certainly, it shouldn’t be grounds for losing his job — particularly since he wasn’t acting in any way that could identify him as an NJTransit employee.

Unfortunately, the transit agency’s code of ethics reportedly requires all employees to get advance clearance from an ethics liaison officer before participating in any political activity — which strikes us as an even more egregious violation of free-speech rights.

Gov. Chris Christie has endorsed Fenton’s firing — a rare and regrettable miscue from New Jersey’s governor.

Better sense was shown by Democratic state Sen. Ray Lesniak, who declared that Fenton “needs a good talking to by community and religious leaders — not a one-way ticket to unemployment.”

Source

A grandmother I know, Rochelle, went outside to read in her Manhattan neighborhood. The spot she chose was sentimental. “It was a park that my kids played in when they were little, so I was on a bench.” But when she looked up from her book, she saw the parents “glaring” at her. “I got uncomfortable, and I left,” Rochelle says. It was only then that she noticed the sign at the entrance: No unaccompanied adults allowed.

She was mortified to realize she disobeyed the rules. I’m mortified to realize these rules exist. Mortified to live in a society that thinks it is wise to always think the worst of every adult.

Read the rest. As usual, Lenore Skenazy is spot-on.

Source

So what do you do when you see his equipment?

Do you stand back in awe?

Are you struck by the power of the equipment you’re seeing?

Do you show it the respect and dignity you would think such a man has earned?

Not if you’re Robert Scoble…

Now here’s the thing… Do you think Robert would dare walk into Seagate’s clean rooms and start handling platters for hard drives or chips without a bunny suit?

Hell’s no.

But he has no problem shoving his shoes and fat ass into a developing tub while laughing along with the dopes he’s in there with.

Really classy, Robert.

No wonder the environmentalists stopped using “global warming” and started with the more generic “climate change.”

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change every recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Face it, the most we can do is take care of the planet and hope for the best. We don’t know what’s going on, we don’t understand it, and we probably never will. One thing’s for sure, though. Seeing as man hasn’t done much to change its ways, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that our impact isn’t quite as large as we were lead to initially believe.

I did this video last Friday but it still applies…

You would think that, knowing this, the person in question wouldn’t fall into that same trap after chucking me into the wood chipper, but it doesn’t work that way.

In Australia, a cockeyed judge made an idiotic ruling that a ten-year-old girl agreed to have sex with a group of people that were later charged with raping her, resulting in suspended sentences for the group.

Of course, the "she’s not white" card was played pretty much instaneously, along with the "woe is me, there’s no outrage, boo fucking hoo" card.

Sure she did you racist sack of shit your honour, all 10 year old girls have the capacity to make such a decision.

I’m not gonna bother asking if the judge would have arrived at the same conclusion if it had been a little white girl who was gang raped but somehow I can imagine it would be somewhat different than a bunch of suspended sentences

Now, I’m not arguing the validity of his gripe.  The idea that a ten-year-old can consent to sex in the first place is laughable, but is it racism or stupidity?

There’s something about the left that loves racism and it usually follows this mould.  Lately, we’ve seen it a lot with the "pretty white girl" crimes or the case where a white family had a bunch of kids and got a lot of attention while a black family that had the same number of kids got no attention.  It was, after all, because they were white.  And Natalie Holloway, of course, is only a story because she’s white.

It’s silly victimhood, and it’s annoying.  This judge, as Stageleft says, should be flogged in the public square for this idiotic opinion and the suspended sentencing of people who raped a little girl, but playing the race card is old, boring, and tiring.  Contrary to the left’s assertions, not everything in the world is the product of a racist biased culture.  Some things are better chalked up to good old fashioned stupidity.

The scene at the beginning of the post is endemic of a huge problem with “adults” in the year 2007. Every single person who has a kid finds the need to constantly update the world on every time the kid eats, sleeps, or takes a crap.

I have a lot of friends who have kids, and I consider it a burden. Why? Because every time you go out with them you have to hear about how Cody, Shyler, Coral, or some other stupid-assed name they picked because it looked good in a Lord of the Rings book had their first piss, fingerpainting lesson, bike ride, etc. Don’t even attempt to ask these experts on child-rearing to have a conversation that doesn’t involve telling you how unbelievably awesome their child is because the conversation will, as it did in the video above, inevitably changes to “Speaking of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, did I tell you that my Drew shaved the cat yesterday?”

I’m all for kids. I don’t blame them for their parents’ obsession with them. What I do blame their parents for, however, is their utter ability to have an adult conversation that doesn’t involve how to get the stains out that their little angel left on their shirt after breastfeeding from mom’s already overworked nipples.

Sorry, not interested folks.

Here’s a note to parents. Don’t tell us you want an adult conversation if your idea of an adult conversation involves talking about the effects of young Cassidy on your sex life. That’s not adult conversation in my book.

Take a read of this bit from an article I always keep handy because it pretty much sums up my feelings on the way parents have started acting in the last fifteen years (it could be longer; I’m just talking about the time since I started noticing these sorts of things)…

Today’s generation of children is the most closely observed, monitored, cherished and scheduled in our history. They are also the most praised. Families are smaller, and there are fewer children upon whom parents can beam their attention.

Today there are moms and dads who aren’t just parents — they believe in “parenting.” They read volumes and volumes about how to be good parents and view parenting as both an art and a science that must be studied and updated and practiced self-consciously. Letting children run around the neighborhood and be bored some of the time is anathema to them.

Many parents these days don’t expect their children to contribute much around the house, although they do expect them to achieve outside the house. They have strong beliefs about what makes children successful and happy-ever-after, and underpinning those beliefs is the concept that they — the parents — are all-important in this quest. Such parents believe that self-esteem is the key to lifetime success, and to this end they compliment their children a lot.

They are egalitarian, and they believe families should be democracies. Needless to say, they don’t give orders. They believe that children will do things when they are ready to. They ask their child politely if he or she will do something and are surprised and dismayed when the response is “no.”

It’s as if parents have rewritten the Fourth Commandment to read, “Honor thy children.”

As much as you may love your kids, please don’t constantly bore me with stories about them. One or two is okay, but frankly if your whole life involves what your oddly-named child did at school that day, and your first instinct is to introduce yourself as “Brecken’s Mommy” then you probably have an identity crisis you need to deal with before you can hang out with real-world adults.

Do yourself a favor… Iron those out, and then call me so we can talk about more than the difference between the Wiggles and Dora the Explorer.

First the title of the article:

iPod helps you to gear up for the SAT Test

Uh oh…

My parents always blame me for being an iPod-addict and are always on my case to surrender my dearest companion. But now I can give it back to them as its not only all-play-and no-work on iPod these days. More than just playing the videos and music, the 5th generation iPod is equipped to help high school students practice for their college entrance exams – SAT test.

What?

You don’t see the problem?

Maybe I should go to the ATM machine, put in my pin number, take out a few bucks and see if that’ll entice you to pay closer attention. And if you still don’t get it, I’ll go watch the Mets, my favorite MLB Baseball team.