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In the frenzy to get kindergartners into the top private schools, parents are now hiring consultants to coach their children on the art of the interview, which these exclusive schools term “playdates.”

It’s hard out there for the Crust.

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Hand him 50 feet of hemp and let him chew on that for a while.

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The Dutch Royal Library is currently making available online all newspapers from the Second World War, which includes Nazi propaganda. Now the Dutch department of Justice has advised the library not to make digital versions of these publications, because it is possible that the Public Prosecutor might accuse the Royal Library of distributing publications that incite hatred.

This is too absurd for words. Government bureaucrats are like dim-witted robots. Anything that fits their target parameters is attacked, whether it makes sense or not. Eventually we’ll wind up like the Nazis, with Goverment Agency A at war with Government Agency B, and the ordinary citizen trampled in the ensuing riot.

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Citing text messages she sent her boyfriend shortly before the incident, Montana prosecutors contend that Justine Winter’s crash at 85 mph into an oncoming vehicle was a deliberate suicide attempt. Winter, who faces trial on homicide charges in the deaths of Erin Thompson, the woman she ran into, and Thompson’s 13-year-old son, has now sued Thompson’s estate as well as the construction company that built the interstate overpass where the accident occurred.

Well, what has she got to lose? And, considering some of the way such suits have gone these days, is it so far-fetched?

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Unfortunately, I don’t have a ‘coals to Newcastle’ category.

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A groom accidentally killed three relatives at his wedding in Turkey when he fired into the air with an assault rifle in celebration, according to reports.

Well, you know, these things happen.

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“I first went to the health clinic, but it was closed. So I rang the medical help line and they told me that it shouldn’t be closed, so I went to emergency and sat there,” the man named only as Jonas told the newspaper.

After an hour-long wait in a treatment room, he lost patience and proceeded to sew up his own wound.

But hospital staff were not as impressed by his initiative and have reported the man on suspicion of criminal dispossession (egenmäktigt förfarande) for having used hospital equipment without authorization.

But hospital staff were not as impressed by his initiative and have reported the man on suspicion of criminal dispossession (egenmäktigt förfarande) for having used hospital equipment without authorization.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Conservatives have long said that the day would come when liberal judges declare the Constitution unconstitutional. That happened today, when a gay federal judge in San Francisco, relying on the opinions of mostly-gay “expert” witnesses, ruled that an amendment to the California constitution, which was adopted in perfectly proper fashion by a substantial majority of voters, is “unconstitutional.” In this context, unconstitutional means “unpopular with me and my friends.”

As a legal matter, Judge Walker’s decision is a bad joke. It will be appealed, of course, but the outcome of the appeal will be determined by politics, not law. I think it is safe to assume that anyone nominated to the Supreme Court by a Democratic President is explicitly or implicitly committed to the proposition that gay marriage is a constitutional right. If you think that is bizarre, stop voting for Democratic politicians.

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As any Tomb Raider fan would know, Ms. Croft was conceived in Derby, so the voluptuous star was a natural choice, topping an online poll to choose the road name.

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Check it out.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that China had a pole-dancing school.

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A popular dating website exclusively for beautiful people has branched out to provide a fertility forum aimed at creating beautiful babies.

Hmm.

“It’s completely democratic – if you secure enough positive votes, you are accepted; if not, you are shown the door,” said Mr Hodge, who manages from Los Angeles the website launched in the United States in 2005.

In other words, the world’s biggest fraternity/sorority. Hmm.

In a major departure for the BeautifulPeople.com founders, even ugly people are allowed to subscribe to the new forum, browsing for attractive sperm and egg donors to ultimately improve the gene pool.

Well, it seems to me that, if you breed beautiful people to ugly people, you just get more ugly people — perhaps not as ugly, but still….

“But everyone – including ugly people – would like to bring good-looking children in to the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool.”

How generous of them. Now, you could just not allow the ugly people to breed…? Oh, wait, they already tried that.

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“We know that if you have veterans in one place where they can befriend each other and talk to each other. You know when you’ve gone through similar things you need to share it. I don’t care whether you are a policeman or a fireman or a veteran or by chance a member of Congress,” the California senator said. “[Democratic Rep.] Maxine [Waters] and I could look at each other and roll our eyes. We know what we are up against. And it is hard for people who are not there to understand the pressure and the great things that go along with it and the tough things that go along with it.”

I loved the incident where she chewed out some Colonel or General for calling her ‘Ma’am’ rather than ‘Senator’. Now, I would have waited until she finished and then said, ‘Whatever you say, sir.’ And I would probably have gotten fired. But it would totally have been worth it.

Check it out.

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The end times are near.

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I really started losing my enthusiasm for this “Year of the Woman” poltical talk when The Susan B. Anthony List basically turned on me.  Well, not me exactly, since, as an anti-choice political fundraising machine they were never really going to be my sort of folk.  But something happened a few weeks ago that really started to make me lose my enthusiasm for this alleged women’s wave, be it liberal or conservative.

The Susan B. Anthony Group started endorsing male candidates.

The horror!

I guess the response of the Modern Feminist™ to sexism is … sexism?

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You want scary? We got scary.

Watch it.

Be the first on your block to have the Führer’s face on your jammies.

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A Briton who was recognised as the world’s first genderless person has lodged an appeal after losing the official designation of gender neutrality.

Norrie was born a man and underwent gender reassignment surgery 20 years ago to become a woman. But doctors recently said because Norrie had stopped taking female hormones several years ago, they were unable to determine gender.

Whether it’s got a Y chromosome would seem to settle the question, but apparently not.

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Clarence K. Carter is a former Indiana prisoner and aspiring lawyer who wants to become a lawyer without going to law school, which is required by Indiana law. So Carter is doing what you might imagine: he’s suing Indiana, claiming the law requiring law-school graduation is unconstitutional.

I’m sorry, but as a law school graduate I find this incredibly amusing. It’s all about status, of course; that’s why the degree that used to be Bachelor of Laws is now Doctor of Jurisprudence.

So far, the state isn’t budging on its requirement. “Our position is that the Rule 13 educational requirement is not only lawful but also is a reasonable precondition for those desiring to enter the legal profession,” said Bryan Corbin, the attorney general’s spokesman. “We intend to vigorously defend this rule from the plaintiff’s challenge.”

But Carter and his lawyer are going to keep arguing that Carter deserves the chance to take the test. “Who’s more qualified to practice law?” Carter said. “The person who graduated from law school but failed the bar exam, or the person who didn’t go to law school but passed?”

An excellent point. If law school qualified you to practice law, why have a bar exam?

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

The decline and fall of education in America continues.

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Democrats are so cute when they actually have to cope with, you know, democracy.

The nomination by his party of Manning, S.C.’s finest, Alvin Greene, is embarrassing to Democrats, and they reacted as they have been conditioned to do. They blamed Republicans. This Manning-churian candidate, the Dems say, was funded by the GOP. As of this writing, no theories have emerged to explain why 60 percent of his state’s Democrats voted for him.

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You know it had to happen.

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President Obama interrupted my Father’s Day with an e-mail announcing the launch of “The President’s Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative” and an associated Web site, Fatherhood.gov, which honestly I could have mistaken for an elaborate prank undertaken by some libertarian group trying to make the point that the next thing you know, Big Government and President Obama are going to try to insert themselves into the father-son or father-daughter relationship. Except that, sure enough, at the bottom of the Web site is language announcing, “This is an official U.S. Government Web site managed by the U.S. Department of Health &  Human Services.”

The Obamateur isn’t really high on the list of people I’ll take advice from on fatherhood.

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The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists received its Royal Charter yesterday – its mark of approval from the Queen.

Charles Hughes, Master of the Company, told The Reg: “This is the culmination of three years’ work. It is a great honour and prestige to be awarded the Royal Charter and recognition of the importance of what we do. I hope it will encourage us all in our endeavors.”

The Information Technologists Company (ITC), established in 1985, works to promote the industry as a whole but is not a lobby group for specific issues. It is working with another company to set up a technology-focused school in Hammersmith and also works with Lilian Baylis Technology School in Lambeth.

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The mother of Abby Sunderland, the American teenage sailor who was feared to be lost in heavy seas last week, has said the family cannot afford to reimburse the Australian Government for the cost of saving her daughter.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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But you knew that.

Now, it has been discovered that science itself is racist. I wonder if we’ll have to change the phrase “the science is settled” to “the racist science is settled”?

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Now that the seekers of cosmic justice have taken care of health inequalities by ensuring that everyone enjoys equally poor health under Obamcare, they are turning their attention to inequalities in beauty. Here’s the lowdown:

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A year after “Kung Fu” actor David Carradine died from a dangerous sex practice, his wife has filed suit, claiming he would still be alive if he hadn’t been left alone in a hotel that night.

Carradine was in Bangkok shooting the film “Stretch” when he was found dead on June 4, 2009 in his hotel room closet with ropes tied around his neck and genitals — a likely victim of auto-erotic asphyxia.

The suit claims that Carradine was supposed to have dinner that night with the film’s director but the assistant responsible for his schedule and transportation to the set and meetings left him behind at the hotel after failing to reach him.
When Carradine reached the assistant an hour later he was told “they were already across town and David Carradine would have to make his own arrangements that evening,” the suit stated.

As apparently he did. Not clear how that’s actionable.

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No doubt this is what White People in Britain eat.

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How bad does AT&T suck? Let me count the ways….

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A short while later, after the patients had been evaluated and stabilized, another medic from the Blackhawk detachment visited the hospital to check on the two Afghan men. He found that when a forensic examination had been conducted of the patients’ hands, both men had tested positive for gunshot residue. This meant that in all likelihood they had been firing weapons a short while before. If this was so, then the most likely explanation was this: they had been firing at the American patrol, and after being shot had assumed the role of wounded civilians, seeking help from the same men they had been trying to kill, and from the same helicopters that, each day, the Taliban fighters try to shoot down.

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Not something you see every day.

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You’ve heard of Dancing with Wolves? Well, that’s nothing compared to Networking with Rodents.

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Well, if I were fishing for sharks, I’d certainly want a rocket launcher. You never know.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

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I’d be tempted to rabbit-punch her until her brain wakes up.

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No indication of whether Perry let the coyote draw first.

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A Native American tribe from the Grand Canyon has accepted a substantial settlement from an Arizona university after accusing its scientists of “genetic piracy”.

How magnanimous of them. (What is ‘genetic piracy’? Your guess is as good as mine. Making your Y-chromosome walk the plank?)

One subsequent research article suggested the Havasupai had originated in Asia, before crossing the Bering Sea and settling in the Grand Canyon.

That was a conclusion the Havasupai did not like as they believe they originated in the canyon and are closely spiritually connected to it.

Science gives way to myth, and the world is lessened thereby.

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A South Korean warship was destroyed by an elite North Korean suicide squad of ‘human torpedoes’ on the express orders of the regime’s leader, Kim Jong-il, according to military intelligence reports.

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Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed the remains of a 6th century BC temple-style building complete with detailed assembly instructions which they have likened to an Ikea do-it-yourself furniture pack.

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Scientists in Australia have embarked on a unique attempt to save the quoll, an endangered bushy tailed marsupial, by dropping toads from the sky.

Gotta love Australians.

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They used their disguises to fool officials for more than a week despite more than 300 members of the local constabulary searching for them.