Miscellaneous

Reno once again becomes a national laughingstock.

Here is the document. Sad, really.
_____

John Foley of Ridgefield, Washington, also wants to make his city a laughingstock.

This is the embarrassing column in question:

The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms. Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States, and novels that use the "N-word" repeatedly need to go.

To a certain extent, this saddens me, because I love "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Of Mice and Men" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." All are American classics, and my students read them as part of approved sophomore and junior units, as do millions of students across the nation.

They all must go.

I hope they go to private and public libraries and remain in high school classrooms. I would keep copies in my own classroom and encourage students to read them. But they don't belong on the curriculum. Not anymore. Those books are old, and we're ready for new.

My God. These books are part of our national heritage, and the last thing students need is to be ignorant of these famous works.
_____

Another dumbass politician is caught with his pants down.
_____

A pair of conjoined twins have been separated in Oklahoma:

Conjoined twins born Oct. 25 have been separated by surgeons at Children's Hospital at OU Medical Center during an operation that lasted a little more than three hours on Monday.

Hospital spokesman Allen Poston said Preslee Faith Wells and Kylee Hope Wells, who had been joined at the chest since birth, were separated at 12:14 p.m., a little more than an hour after the operation began. The process involved splitting the girls' livers and a tissue bridge that connected them.

After the girls were separated, they were placed on their backs on separate beds in the operating room so that the surgical team, led by David Tuggle and Cameron Mantor, could begin the closing process, Poston said.

The surgeons, who said before the operation that it might last four to six hours, finished shortly after 2 p.m.

"Everything went well," Poston said.

The girls, believed to be the first known American Indian conjoined twins, are listed in critical condition and are in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, where they've been cared for since their birth.

_____