Fred Phelps and his West­boro Bap­tist Church have, for some time now, been trav­el­ing the coun­try protest­ing at the funer­als of Amer­i­can sol­diers killed in the line of duty. Back in 2006, they protested out­side the funeral of Marine Lance Cor­po­ral Matthew Sny­der, who was killed in action at the age of 20. See this arti­cle, the orig­i­nal com­plaint, and Monica’s (of Spark a Synapse) post on the same topic for the unpleas­ant details. Eng­lish as a lan­guage lacks invec­tives of suf­fi­cient force and color to con­demn this kind of behav­ior in the terms jus­tice demands. How­ever, has WBC done any­thing prop­erly [ . . . ]

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Net­flix has gone and done some­thing wonky that messed up the Net­flix wid­get and broke the site for a while. Lovely if(isset($var)) state­ments have fixed the prob­lem, but the queue still doesn’t show. At least, not from where I’m sit­ting. It might be a mag­pie issue. Your cache may vary. Either Net­flix changed the for­mat of the RSS feed with my queue in it, thereby mess­ing up the reg­u­lar expres­sions the Net­flix wid­get uses to extract per­ti­nent movie data from the feed, result­ing in a null set of results, and which will require actual work on my part to fix, or my cache [ . . . ]

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News reporter gets the wrong prob­lem when report­ing on the fir­ing of a teacher for show­ing a boot­leg copy of The Simp­sons Movie to young stu­dents. The com­plaint is that show­ing a PG-​​​​13 film to 3d-​​​​5th graders is inap­pro­pri­ate. Noth­ing is said about how show­ing a boot­leg of such a film is inap­pro­pri­ate. In my not so hum­ble opin­ion, the lat­ter is the worse offense. The rat­ing sys­tem is pri­vate, vol­un­tary, and pretty arbi­trary. The film might well be just fine for chil­dren in a super­vised class­room set­ting. Copy­rights, how­ever, are the law. Teach­ers should be fired for infring­ing copy­rights in the class­room before we even [ . . . ]

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[Note from the Cham­ber­lain: All fixed!] What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Ded­i­cated Reader   You are always try­ing to find the time to get back to your book. You are con­vinced that the world would be a much bet­ter place if only every­one read more. Obsessive-​​​​Compulsive Book­worm   Book Snob   Lit­er­ate Good Cit­i­zen   Fad Reader   Non-​​​​Reader   What Kind of Reader Are You?Cre­ate Your Own Quiz And besides, it’s about all I have time for right now.