Etc. and an Obituary to Note

The feds are hellbent on usurping local control when it comes to Race to the Top.

It's founded on unfounded assumptions on what would "work" in education, like "merit pay," which has NEVER been successful anywhere it has been tried.
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Blame pornography and the Brazilians for the trend.

It doesn't surprise me there are a slew of infections linked to the "shaving" craze.

It's also creepy to me, since unshaven necessarily harks back to kiddie porn.
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An obituary to note: Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown has died at the age of 90. She's considered a sixties icon, for she was the one who said it was okay for women to be single, of course as long as there was some guy around to appreciate her.

Brown herself remained single until later in life, when she married movie producer David Brown. They had no children.

More:

An ugly duckling by her own account, Helen Gurley was a child of the Ozarks, born Feb. 18, 1922 in Green Forest, Ark. Growing up in the Depression, she earned pocket money by giving other kids dance lessons.

Her father died when she was 10 and her mother, a teacher, moved the family to Los Angeles, where young Helen, acne-ridden and otherwise physically unendowed, graduated as valedictorian of John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in 1939.

All the immediate future held was secretarial work. With typing and shorthand learned at a business college, she went through 18 jobs in seven years at places like the William Morris Agency, the Daily News in Los Angeles, and, in 1948, the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency. There, when finally given a shot at writing ad copy, she began winning prizes and was hired away by Kenyon & Eckhardt, which made her the highest paid advertising woman on the West Coast.

She also evidently was piling up the experience she put to use later as an author, editor and hostess of a TV chit-chat show.

"I've never worked anywhere without being sexually involved with somebody in the office," she told New York magazine in 1982. Asked whether that included the boss, she said, "Why discriminate against him?"

She was definitely a product of her times. While she may have appeared to be "liberated" in her own life, her magazine was certainly backwards in many respects.

Brown, who actually didn't "have it all," started the "having it all" nonsense with a book she wrote around thirty years ago.
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Mass murder of the week: At least three are dead in a shooting near Texas A&M.
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I for one hated to see the end of the London Olympics.

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