Crazy Criminals, Pregnant Teens, And the Rest

I was going to post when I got home yesterday, but I ended up zoning out and not feeling too well. I've rounded up some of the more interesting news bits today, and I am declaring right now that the pregnancy articles (yes, I have the nerve to have more than one this time) are going to be reserved for the end.

- Let's start with some good old-fashioned criminal stupidity. A guy drove to a meeting with his parole officer in a stolen car. He actually went to a dealership and "test drove" a car without returning it. I don't know where people get the stones to do stuff like this, but I know of another criminal who did something similar, and I may post that once I have a chance to go back and find it (missing a day just threw everything off).

- A man tried to rob a store armed with a palm frond. To be fair, this is a "Spanish bayonet" which is like running around with a living knife, but it is pretty bizarre (and this article comes with pictures!).

- A thief broke into a donation box to only get away with fake money. This box has been broken into before, so the fake money (that was black and white with no serial numbers) was used to cover up any real cash that may be inside. Unfortunately for this moron, the box had just been emptied of the "real" cash, so he gets nothing! He loses! Good day, sir! [Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory moment]

- Just a warning to any pot-smoking males out there: If you get arrested for any reason, make sure you mention the nine grams of marijuana wrapped around your penis before you get to jail. I've watched "Jail" enough times to know that you can get into serious trouble if you bring drugs into the jail population. It's just a thought.

- Now onto I-don't-know-what-to-think news, charges against an elderly man for stealing an apple pie have been dropped. It's hard for me to decide if this man is truly a bad criminal who has shoplifted from the Publix before, or was this a simple mistake of forgetting the pie in the cart (and the cashier missed it as well). By the way, I went to a Publix when I was in Atlanta last year, and I thought the little grocery store that could was really cute (and small). I have a story that goes with that, but I'll have to save it for another time.

Anyway...

- In unexpected animal news, I've got two for you. The first is that someone needs to get this motherf*cking skunk out of this motherf*cking plane. They don't know how it got there, and it sprayed the plane when they tried to remove it (I have another skunk one that I will have to unearth later). The second is that someone needs to get this motherf*cking snake out of this motherf*cking mailbox. It wasn't poisonous, but I did give me a chance to do a one-two punch with a tired catchphrase. I won't vow to ever use it again, but I will hope to not use it ever again. Man, this was my worst post yet.

- In bathroom-esque news, another two-fer. The first recalls to mind the threats my uncle used to make about having me get married in a paper dress. I didn't even believe that they existed until I got an old Josie comic and read the article about it. Well, somebody won a toilet paper dress contest with an entry I wouldn't have been embarrassed to walk in. Considering that there was someone who made a beautiful dress out of toilet paper at my bridal shower, I'm not that surprised. In grosser stories, a Russian town is celebrating enemas with a large sculpture of an enema bulb held up by three angels. To each his own, I say. Well, what the hell else can I say about it?

- The Oscars will be limiting the number of songs that can be nominated from the same movie to two entries. But after reading this article, it appears to me that multiple entries from the same film didn't help anyone win one, so whatever.

- It's what I said should be required reading. A Tom Tomorrow comic should not be ignored. Besides, Tinkerbell is such a scamp, she's even getting a star on the Walk of Fame.

- Oh yes, the 25 recipients of the 2009 Walk of Fame includes Tinkerbell, the Village People, and Cameron Diaz, but not poor Cheetah. He lost out again! How can they do this to a Tarzan icon? But William H Macy made the list, so all is forgiven.

Now to the pregnancy news.

- I had a hard time choosing an article about Jamie Lynn Spears, so I'm going to go with the one that actually made me mad: A costar of Ms. Spears talked about how she knows Jamie Lynn will be a "great mom." Seriously?!? Dammit, I'm 30 and about to have my first child and I'm very paranoid that I'm going to be a bad parent and I'm supposed to believe that a 17-year-old is going to be a better mother than I? Bullshit. The only thing she has over me is youth, she's in the age range that is prime biologically for having children, but that's about it. I'll be damned if some 17-year-old having children out-of-wedlock is going to be a better parent than me.

- Which brings me to my next post: 17 Massachusetts high school girls are pregnant in a "pregnancy pact". I chose to link to the BestWeekEver.tv story about this article instead of the original post to soften the blow a bit. I don't know why anyone would think that having a baby is something to toy around with, but these girls all thought it would be great to have babies at the same time and raise them together. What gets me about the original article is that the school is being criticized for wanting to give the students birth control, but that it's okay for them to give 150 pregnancy tests in the school. My school never gave pregnancy tests. All I got was a sex-ed class that helped us sixth graders know that it's okay to say "no". It also helped that we were in a school (4-12 grades at the time) that had a number of teenage girls who had babies who were the examples of what we did not want to happen to us. The bwe.tv article does sum up the weirdest part of this story with the picture of the hobo because one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless man.

They are concerned that there are bigger issues to this than just a crazy pact. A recent graduate who had given birth her freshman year had a number of students say that she was lucky to have a child to raise, but she had this to say: "They're so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally," ... "I try to explain it's hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m." They even have daycare in the school and the school is proud(?) that they allow their students to continue their educations, but maybe that (along with the bleak conditions they live in) contributes to more girls wanting to have babies. I knew of at least one school in Cleveland that had a daycare center, but this was also a school that focused on vocation and used the daycare center as one of the vocational fields that a student could train in for a future job (and it might have been originally created for the teachers to have daycare), but the school wasn't proud of it. It wasn't something you touted because it would allow the media to paint the picture of tons of urban black students having children out of wedlock.

I wish we still had shows like Rikki Lake on t.v. because these talk shows did a lot to show young people that having a baby to have someone to love you is not a good idea. My graduating class that had sex-ed in sixth grade only had one person get pregnant in high school, and she didn't get pregnant until a few months before graduation. I bring this up because there were roughly 6-10 girls who had children in the grades before and after us, and we were the only people to get this education that can be interpreted as successful (but I think we were a test-group and there was no money left to implement it again). I see the concern that people may have in giving out birth control to students, but I am troubled by the mayor saying that the school nurse and a local pediatrician "have no right to decide [to offer birth control without parental consent] for our children", because it wasn't as if they were forcing the students to use the birth control. They wanted to make it available without parental consent (and the long trip that students would have to take to get it themselves), which may be overstepping the parental boundaries, but this isn't a decision made "for" the children. The mayor is saying that people advocating birth control had no right to say these children should be using birth control, but that they still have to offer free pregnancy tests. Pregnancy tests are not cheap, so I'm surprised that the school had that kind of money to do 150 of them in a year.

I'm not really sure I know what I'm saying about this issue anymore. The school actually encourages teen parents to use the daycare center, but I don't hear anyone telling these kids that having a child while in high school is a difficult thing to manage. You can't say that giving the kids birth control will encourage them to have more sex, considering that there's enough encouragement by getting in pacts and being envious of your child-having classmates. Well, I guess the argument could be made, but I think there is really a problem here.

This is making my head hurt. I try to avoid truly controversial topics because I don't like trying to argue with people, but this is bothering me because I know that there can be things done to educate young people to find better things to do with their time than have children while in high school.

This went on for entirely too long, so if you made it to the end (or just skimmed it), here's a really funny Pearls Before Swine comic featuring the predator/prey relationship between Zebra and his neighbors the Crocodiles.