October 11, 2007 at 5:00 pm (Chicago, Friendliness, Oak Park, Personalitize, funny)
Tags: extreme hugging, hugs, Julian, middle school, Oak Park, Victoria Sharts
I have been so PROUD (sarcasm here) of my alma mater – the junior high school one – for all the national news coverage it’s been getting recently. Why has it made the news? For such uplifting progress in the eternal battle against hugging.
Yup. Hugging.
Back in Oak Park, Illinois, Julian Middle School principal Victoria Sharts has banned “extreme hugging,” after long chains of kids hugging each other in the hallways started impeding the orderly procession of students getting to class during passing periods. It’s not even about banning nonconsensual hugs, which of course are inappropriate. It’s about limiting how much kids show affection for each other. Sharts was quoted in Newsweek saying, “We know there are times that hugs are needed and welcomed, but every 40 minutes in the hallway, with large groups of students – then it’s not.”
Now, I am sure it was a big enough problem to warrant a response. I don’t know all the details. But don’t kids need more hugs as they group up, especially hugs from each other?
And couldn’t good ole Percy Julian be making news for something a little more inspiring? Like, say, its talented, world-changing alumni?
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May 23, 2007 at 6:10 pm (Friendliness, baby, flamingo, homosexuality, love, sexism)
Carlos and Fernando, two MALE flamingos, have adopted a baby chick over in the UK. The BBC tells more. (I LOVE the BBC’s human interest stories!)
Apparently, the zoo staff forgot to remind these chicky daddies that the best family to raise a baby has a mom (flamingo) and a dad (flamingo). But these birdies seem to be doing just fine, anyway. Maybe being flaming-o doesn’t make you unfit to parent.
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July 4, 2006 at 4:56 pm (Friendliness)
I do hope I live a life as rich as that of my neighbor across the street, Heinz Kuehn, who passed away this week after taking turns with his wife getting ill for several years now.
Heinz survived Nazi Germany, with a Catholic father and Jewish mother. He got out and came to the States in 1959. He married Regina, who he caricatured playfully in the color sketches he drew hundreds of. He was a devout Catholic. He and Regina had six children and more grandchildren (one of whom is Marcel Fremont, whose name I misspelled on his OPRF High School gym shirt years ago because he was too quiet to correct me). He and Regina were liberals who appreciated both my parents’ political company on the block and their renovations to the house; after my folks remodeled the front porch, they sent a thank you card. A few years ago, Heinz wrote a book about his experiences surviving Nazi Germany, Mixed Blessings: An Almost Ordinary Life in Hitler’s Germany.
Any death brings sadness, but it is a joy to remember a life that has been so lived to its fullest.
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