“Tag” in Jeopardy
Two suburban Minneapolis elementary schools this fall hired a consulting firm to advise officials on kids’ recess, and the leading recommendations (promoting “safety” and “inclusiveness”) were elimination of “contact” games in favor of, for example, hopscotch. Some parents objected; recess, they said, should be more freestyle, unstructured. (More consultants’ advice: De-emphasize refereed “rules” games in favor of monitors who simply praise effort.) One Minnesota principal noted improvement—fewer fights and nurse visits now—but as one parent said, her child feels that recess is no longer really “playing.”
Can’t Possibly Be True
Florida Justice: Orville “Lee” Wollard, now 60, was convicted of aggravated assault in 2008 after he fired one “warning shot” into a wall of his home during an argument with his daughter’s boyfriend. Believing his shot defused a dangerous situation (the boyfriend had once angrily ripped sutures from Wollard’s stomach), Wollard had declined a plea offer of probation and gone to trial, where he lost and faced a law written with a 20-year minimum sentence. Florida has since amended the law to give judges discretion about the crime and the sentence, but Gov. Rick Scott and the state’s clemency board have refused to help Wollard, who must serve 13 more years for a crime he perhaps would not even be charged with today.
Inexplicable
Christopher Hiscock, 33, got only a year’s probation after his guilty plea for trespassing on a ranch in Kamloops, British Columbia, in September—because it was a trespass with panache. Since no one had been home, Hiscock fed the cats, prepared a meal, shaved and showered, took meat out of the freezer to thaw, made some coffee, started a fire in the fireplace, did some laundry, put out hay for the horses, and even wrote some touchingly personal notes in the resident’s diary (“Today was my first full day at the ranch … I have to remind myself to just relax and take my time.”) In court, he apologized. “I made a lot of mistakes. There’s really no excuses for it. Beautiful ranch. Gorgeous. I was driving [by] and I just turned in. Beautiful place.”
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New! Amazing! Awesome!
Low-benefit (but Internet-connected!) devices now on sale: HAPIfork (Bluetooth-connected fork that alerts you if you’re eating too fast); iKettle (a WiFi kettle that heats water at different temperatures for different drinks, controlled by phone); an LG washing machine that lets you start washing while away (provided, of course, that you’ve already loaded the washer); and Kolibree, a “smart toothbrush” that offers an interactive game connected to brushing, and tracks and graphs “brushing habits.” Also highlighted was the Satis “smart toilet,” which remotely flushes, raises and lowers the seat, and engages the bidet.
The Job of the Researcher
Scientists have somehow determined that rats dream about where they want to go in the future. Dr. Hugo Spiers of University College London (and colleagues) inferred as much in a recent eLife article based on how neurons in the rodent brain’s hippocampus fire up in certain patterns. They discovered similar patterns when a rat is asleep just before conquering a food “maze” as when he awakens and actually gets to the food (as if it plotted by dream).
Latest Religious Messages
The Power of Prayer: Two men with handguns walked through an open door of a Philadelphia home in July and demanded drugs and cash from the three women inside, threatening pistol-whippings. According to a philly.com report, a 55-year-old woman in the home immediately burst into loud prayer, causing the gunmen to flee empty-handed.
Least Competent Criminals
Paul Neaverson, 61, was convicted in September in England’s Maidstone Crown Court for a robbery his own lawyer called “ridiculous.” He had gone to a NatWest bank in Rainham, pointed a knife at a cashier, and demanded that money be placed “on the table” or “into his account,” according to the police report. Earlier, he had walked out of an HSBC bank when the teller balked at his robbery demand. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
© 2015 CHUCK SHEPHERD
