My drama teacher in HS liked to tell stories about his drama teacher, who would slap and berate the drama students, all in the name of drama or something, making them cry and piss themselves and go into panic attacks, because he was trying to glean a "true performance" out of them. To seek some inner depths or darkness or whatever. That's when I decided to stick to lighting and sound.

Has everyone lost their everloving minds??

For the most part? Yeah, I think so.

Even with someone who usually gets bored and doesn't follow through, I'd escalate this one. Because, um, we don't invite pedophiles to schools to interact with children. Unless we want really awful publicity and huge (justifiable) lawsuits and going to a really extra-special hell if one is a hell believer.

To be fair, they are college students, right? BUT STILL.

I agree with everyone else - it's not just a bad idea, it's an actively malignant idea. Firing, lawsuits, hideous headlines. And, yes, there's absolutely certain to be a survivor (at the very least, family member of a survivor) involved in the production. Escalate that shit right up, because that really really needs to never happen. Preferably via a wayback machine that causes him to never have thought of it in the first place, but just stopping him cold and scaring him badly enough that he never thinks of it again without full-body shudders will also do.

Also, yes, everyone has lost their ever-lovin' minds.

Not unrelatedly, anyone who hasn't already done so should run over to the Atlantic website and read Ta-Nehisi Coates's brilliant "Fear of a Black President," but under no circumstances should anyone ever read the comments (he vigorously banhammers his own blog but doesn't have that privilege for the online versions of actual print articles).

Well, I am already the family member of a survivor, so I could possibly bring that up. O

I can't get to Facebook, and I'm wondering if Mittens has said something so incredible it's caused Facebook to spontaneously combust.

In New Elementary School news, the mother of one of the kids in Dillo's class was a local TV anchor for 15 years (left 2 years ago to do media at the Art Museum.) She's no Michael Stipe, but hey, this is Cincinnati.

I can't get to Facebook, and I'm wondering if Mittens has said something so incredible it's caused Facebook to spontaneously combust.

Our Fox affiliate is carrying the Bears game instead of the con, which kind of cracks me up.

ETA and FB isn't coming up for me either.

Facebook came up for me just now. But it took a while.

In New Elementary School news, the mother of one of the kids in Dillo's class was a local TV anchor for 15 years

My friend's stepson's mother is a local TV anchor. She does (or did?) mornings on NBC, which put a little damper on my friend's watching of the Today Show....

Loooong day. In which I got rather short with one of my bosses and made her do the work (I've been specifically told by my other boss I cannot bill to this project, so I pushed back. It's been a long month. But wow, Sara, way to incite ill will.)

In less annoying news, I ascertained that last night wasn't a one-off, Pumpkin really does have some physics reckoning skills: whirling a fake jillifont on the end of a string, Loki spins until he gets dizzy and falls over. Pumpkin, on the other hand, does a few swivels and then figured out that if she attacked the center of the spinny, she could nab the prize. I swear to whatever, you can see the bits flipping in her head (cause she's well past cogs.) Scary smart, this cat.