The Doc Is In

…”a skier at Colorado’s ritzy Vail resort was left dangling upside down and pantsless from a chairlift last Friday morning. The January 2 mishap apparently occurred after the male skier and a child boarded a high-speed lift in Vail’s Blue Sky Basin. It appears that the chairlift’s fold-down seat was somehow not in the lowered position, which caused the man to partially fall through the resulting gap. His right ski got jammed in the ascending chairlift, and that kept him upended since his boot never dislodged from its binding. ….The exposed skier was stuck for about 15 minutes before Vail personnel backed the lift up and successfully dislodged the unidentified man from the four-seat chair.” …

By Tom Purcell

My second-grade teacher would be at once shocked and proud.

Maybe I better explain.

According to Britain’s Daily Mail, yet another trend is under way in which we’re turning our kids into a bunch of softies. Many schools within the UK have barred teachers from marking student papers in red. This trend has also been documented in Australia and the United States.

As it goes, correcting pupils with red ink is considered too confrontational and unpleasant for the children. Many teachers prefer to grade in more soothing colors, such as green, blue, pink and yellow.

Red ink surely wasn’t banned at St. Germaine Catholic School in the ’60s and ’70s. That school was all business, and the wonderful sisters who taught there were too busy ramming knowledge and values into us to worry about our sensitive little egos.

It is true that the sisters were more favorable toward the better students. Who could blame them. We had 40 kids or more packed into each class. The sisters, many of whom entered the convent during the Depression years and were getting on in years by the 1970s, were exhausted. They had little patience with underachieving runts such as me.

Whereas the better students, usually girls, were always attentive and eager, I was always off daydreaming in another world. I couldn’t wait until recess. I couldn’t wait until we played keep-away, as I was good at that. I returned to class sweaty and rumpled and resumed daydreaming through the rest of the afternoon.

I was a continual disappointment to my second-grade teacher (we called her Sister Mary Brass Knuckles) and, boy, did she let me have it. When she called me out of my daydreaming world to approach the chalkboard and complete an equation, I was lost in left field without a glove.

Sister never let me off easy. She never let anybody off easy, because she saw it as her duty to ram math, science and grammar into our noggins.

She didn’t worry about our self-esteem or how good we felt. She knew the only way to attain self-esteem — the only way to function as an adult — was to be accurate and correct. She marked up my English compositions as though she were getting paid to use red ink.

Nobody knew it then, but she was way ahead of her time.

A recent study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution found that “a nation’s level of student ‘happiness’ and ‘confidence’ is negatively correlated to student achievement when compared to other nations.”

The study concluded the following: “That America’s infatuation with the ‘happiness factor’ in education may be misplaced, and could, in fact, be hurting, not helping, American students when it comes to maintaining an international competitive edge.”

In other words, America has some of the most smug and self-assured — and least accomplished — students on the face of the Earth. Since they were babies, caring adults and educators assured them they are intelligent, attractive and wonderful — even though nobody asked them to break a sweat earning their wonderfulness.

So it turns out the proponents of the anti-red-ink movement have it wrong. The good sisters at St. Germaine had it right. All those red marks on my second-grade composition papers were unpleasant at the time, but they did me good in the long run.

Sister would be at once shocked and proud to learn that this daydreaming pupil eventually woke up and went on to write a nationally syndicated newspaper column.

©2009 Tom Purcell. Tom is a humor columnist nationally syndicated exclusively by CagleCartoons newspaper syndicate.

Your humble scribe is “under the weather” thanks to that Chicago Santa.  We (Santa’s helper isn’t so hot either) will return to publishing The Doc Is In as soon as a medical miracle arrives!

   If anyone can explain the worst flare up of Israeli-Palestinian violence in the Gaza Strip in four decades, it’s Aaron David Miller. For 20 years, until he became a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington in 2006, Miller was a top Middle East advisor to six secretaries of state (Shultz to Powell). His specialty was formulating U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli peace process. A regular guest on network and cable TV, a writer of commentary pieces for top U.S. papers, his four books include “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” Bill Steigerwald talked to Miller on Tuesday, Dec. 30, as the death toll from Israeli air strikes inside Hamas-controlled Gaza approached 400 and Hamas was continuing to use long-range rockets to hit population centers in Israel.

Q: Can you briefly describe what the society and economy of the Gaza Strip are like?

Bill Steigerwald is a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

   “Facebook is standing firm on a policy that has led to the removal of some photos posted by women that show breastfeeding.

The deletions have spurred Facebook members to stage protests both online and offline. Dozens of supporters gathered last Saturday at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., while online, more than 11,000 members participated in a virtual “nurse-in,” or changed their profile photos to images depicting women breastfeeding.

The controversy began after several women began noticing photographs of themselves nursing their children that were flagged for removal. They formed a group called “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene!” to protest a policy that prohibits members from uploading any content deemed to be “obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit,” which can include images showing exposed breasts.

Stephanie Knapp Muir, 40, one of the organizers of the Facebook group, said the company’s policy was unfair and discriminatory towards women. “If they were removing all photos of any exposed chest — male or female — in any context, at least that would be fair,” Ms. Muir said. “But they’re targeting women with these rules. They’ve deemed women’s breasts obscene and dangerous for children and it’s preposterous.” …

  “High-profile driver Danica Patrick paid a $196 fine to settle a speeding ticket after she was caught going 54 mph in a 35 mph zone last month in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Patrick, who in April became the first woman to win an IRL IndyCar Series race, was due in traffic court next week but paid the fine Wednesday, a Scottsdale City Court clerk said.

Patrick, 26, was pulled over by Scottsdale police Dec. 9 in her hometown while driving a 2007 Mercedes. A year ago, she was ticketed for driving 57 mph in a 40 mph zone in Scottsdale and was ordered to attend traffic school.

Scottsdale court records show the recent tickets are among several she has received in the past three years.”….

   The Food and Drug Administration in December cleared the way for Coca-Cola and Pepsi to use a new zero-calorie sweetener. Both Pepsi’s PureVia and Coke’s Truvia use rebiana, an extract from the stevia plant.

NutraSweet President Bill DeFer said the stevia products aren’t direct competition for its existing sweeteners. The company is working on its own product, he said, which is currently referred to as NutraSweet Natural with Stevia.

“Stevia is a genus of about 240 species of herbs and shrubs in the sunflower family (Asteraceae), native to subtropical and tropical South America and Central America. The species Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni, commonly known as sweetleaf, sweet leaf, sugarleaf, or simply stevia, is widely grown for its sweet leaves. As a sugar substitute, stevia’s taste has a slower onset and longer duration than that of sugar, although some of its extracts may have a bitter or licorice-like aftertaste at high concentrations.

With its extracts having up to 300 times the sweetness of sugar, stevia has garnered attention with the rise in demand for low-carbohydrate, low-sugar food alternatives. Medical research has also shown possible benefits of stevia in treating obesity and high blood pressure. Because stevia has a negligible effect on blood glucose, it is an attractive as a natural sweetener to people on carbohydrate-controlled diets. However, health and political controversies have limited stevia’s availability in many countries; for example, the United States banned it in the early 1990s unless labeled as a supplement, but reversed this decision in 2008 with the announcement of Truvia brand sweetener. Stevia is widely used as a sweetener in Japan, and it is now available in Canada as a dietary supplement.” ….