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Abstinence education in place of Sex education won’t work

Just say no! to naive school boards that try to do away with sex education in favor of abstinence education.

An Ohio school board is expanding sex education following the revelation that 13 percent of one high school’s female students were pregnant last year.

There were 490 female students at Timken High School in 2005, and 65 were pregnant, WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported. [Source]

I wonder how many guys were involved in this?!

Oh, the school board’s response in Ohio?

…the new curriculum moves beyond the "Just Say No" approach…

No kidding!

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Test your speed.

On August 9 I asked How fast are you? C|Net brings a new speed test service to our attention. Speedtest.net uses a snazzy graphical interface and records results. Other than making it look like the icon of the person is taking a whiz on the servers, the interface really brings this one home. I question the accuracy as it is the first service to truly rank my connection at the 6.5Mbit/s that it is supposed to be.

C|Net also offers their own meter similar to http://www.testmy.net/ and http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/.

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Not happy with the outside cat

Five years ago I put a bat house on the side of our house. It remains empty. A single bat can eat 500-600 mosquitoes an hour and up to 6000 per day. (if I am accurately remembering my information from the Knoxville Zoo tour) I periodically see 2 bats flying above our house and enjoy watching their swoops and zings in the dusk.

Our outside cat, Gray, treats us with gifts on the porch step. She particularly enjoys moles and skinks but has also gifted us with mice, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, birds, and a gerbil. I have seen her try to catch a woodpecker. This morning her gift was a bat. I now believe that the super huntress can catch anything. I warn the hawks! This cat can fly. Meanwhile, our inside cat catches zz’s as anyone that watches the camera is surely aware. The inside cat no longer catches mice. Ignores the tarantulas. Distastes The Beetles as much as my daughter. Converses with the squirrels. And only kills crickets by accident leaving their carcasses in the path of my wife‘s bare feet.

Of course my real concern here is that with the delay the child support check game being played at a bad cash flow time, along with start of school expenses, that a trip to the vet to check for rabies will cause unbearable hardship at this time. Of course, we will do what we must.

Update: I forgot to mention the bat lives in the freezer now.

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August Challenge – Cable TV

Eek! I missed yesterday so this post is for yesterday’s challenge. Yesterday I was happy that Tuesday night I took some time to fish a coax cable up through Noah’s wall, across the attic, and down into the girls’ wall so that the television which has been in their room since Christmas now has basic cable as promised. Additionally, our fried cable box (blown during a power outage two weeks ago) has been replaced and our digital guide is back! Did not realize how important that guide has become to our television viewing. Did not realize the quantity and quality of educational television that comes on the upper digital channels and is lacking from the lower channels. Evan is dancing again. Amy is learning her spelling again.Thank you Noggin! Btw, television and physical activity with children still needs to be monitored but after observing how television has helped the children with vocabulary, words, math, and concepts, I will never again call it a simple babysitter for today’s television is truly an educational aid. I still like to see it turned off periodically.

Oh, Tommy and Noah are learning to blow things up (thank you Mythbusters and I don’t care what Adam and Jamie say I still don’t want forks in the microwave). And Sarah is watching some anime crap that comes on the lower channels anyway. Yeah yeah. I know. I watched it too when I was her age.

Can you meet The August Challenge?

ps. The Mythbusters cast have the coolest job in the world!