Hey look, another story about someone losing their job because of their personal blog.

"A high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia who was suspended for a profanity-laced blog in which she called her young charges 'disengaged, lazy whiners' is driving a sensation by daring to ask: Why are today's students unmotivated — and what's wrong with calling them out?"

As has already been proven time and again in the past, this is why you don't write angry blogs about your job (assuming you care about keeping said job, that is). I'm not saying employers should be able to fire people for their personal blogs, because I honestly don't think they should be allowed to do that*, but that doesn't change the fact that they can and do fire people all the time for exactly that, however. Blog about work at your own risk.

It is irrelevant that she was almost assuredly right on the money concerning the asinine behavior of her students (and kids in general, these days). I'm not even going to touch that issue right now. The bottom line is that, like many others before her, she blogged about work, they found out about it, and they took punitive measures against her. End of story.

* - Within reason, of course. If you're posting trade secrets or other NDA-related things on your blog, for example, then they should most definitely be able to fire you for something like that.

People who use the word "pretentious" are pretentious.

That's my take on it, anyway, at least based on most of the cases I've seen the word used on the Internet. It's seems like most people think that it's just a big word that means something along the lines of "thing I don't like." It doesn't. Granted, some people use it correctly, because being pretentious is a pretty crappy thing to be. It certainly explains why people like to use words or phrases such as "irregardless" or "beg the question" or, you know, "pretentious."

Oh well, that's it, folks. The health care debate is now officially over.

Justin Bieber On Health Care: U.S. System 'Evil'

Now, mind you, whether this results in a landslide victory for those on the supporting side or those on the opposing side remains to be seen, but one of these two end scenarios is surely imminent, right? </sarcasm>

(The response of Roger Ebert, whose tweet about it was what made me aware of this, was "People three times his age aren't that smart." Hmm.)

"Stupid Experiment Draws Stupid Conclusion"

"...South Korea's Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation ran a news story attempting to demonstrate that violent video games do indeed make players violent. How did it do this? Simple. It went to a net café where customers pay to use the internet and shut off all the computers. Observing the profanity-laced reaction of the establishment’s patrons, the report noted:

'They've been transformed into the violent characters they are playing.'"

That's... wow. Hahahaha. Sorry, it's not really all that funny, yet if you tilt your head just right and look at it in a certain way, it's actually kind of hilarious. Seriously, how stupid are they to think that was a valid experiment?