Actually, it's best to not have toy guns that look too real. A little boy was shot recently, seemingly because he pointed a real-looking toy gun at a cop.

ION, guess what's been going on in that socialist country to our North:

At the science fair, girls dominate the class

To qualify for this week's Canada-Wide Science Fair in Winnipeg, Larissa Christie logged hundreds of hours investigating North America's vanishing bee population.

Why Canada's young male scientists also seem to be disappearing, she says, is easier to explain.

"So many girls are just determined," said Larissa, 15, speaking from the University of Manitoba, where 500 of Canada's best young scientists are competing for almost $1-million in scholarships and grants that will be handed out today.

As female students increasingly dominate in science competitions across the country, educators are facing a conundrum that requires more social analysis than hard science: Boys are not just getting beaten by girls — they're not even showing up.

Five years ago, boys made up 55 per cent of the competitors at the annual Canada-Wide Science Fair, a national competition where youth in grades 7 to 12 compete against other regional representatives. After a steady decline, this year boys are in the minority at 44 per cent.

Girls are also claiming the lion's share of prize money available each year: Eight of the last nine overall winners have been female.

...

Others say some boys simply lack motivation.

"If I were to say [why] — I know this might sound a bit sexist — but most of the time, the girls are more persistent in the work," said Ronan Lefol, a Grade 12 student from Saskatoon, who started competing in science fairs in Grade 1 and has gone on to win thousands of dollars in scholarship money.

Megan Hawse, 13, said many of her male peers in Mount Pearl, Nfld., would rather play sports than spend the hours she logged on evenings and weekends for her experiment on whether algae could be a sufficient source of Omega 3 for humans.

Wesley, (did you mean Moya?), neither, neither

To no surprise, it looks like all the CA props died a flaming death except 1F.

My personal favorite element of the SF vote is that voters "passed" 1B (to give more money to schools) but not 1A (where the money for 1B was going to come from). Sigh.

What does BINAO stand for?

I am so totally fed up with the public referendum system in CA. I'm beginning to agree that our state may be ungovernable.

And how there is rarely a connection between the regression and the new skill. I don't know if growing counts as a skill, exactly, but it seems like it would fit the general pattern.

It seems like everytime there is a new skill for us it feels like a regression, but I don't think it's the kid, I think it's me. It's like N or G do something I am not prepared for and it takes a while for all of us to figure out how to respond to that new skill.

I remember to this day the one time I ever knew that there was a gun in our house. My dad had borrowed a hunting rifle from someone for the weekend, and he made it a point to show each of us kids that he had the gun, where he was putting it and telling us that we were NOT to touch it and that he was putting the bullets somewhere completely elsewhere and out of our reach. When Dad got serious like that, you listened and obeyed, even when you were only five years old, like me.

BINAO = both is not an option

Wesley, Enterprise, Mal, Kaylee