Last October the BBC announced that it would be responding to budget shortfalls with severe layoffs and programming cuts. According to their PR, online products would be hardest hit, though they would strive to cut volume before quality.

With today's posting of Mystery image of 'life on Mars', the BBC has officially failed this goal. C'mon, BBC, quoting some nutjob's theory that a Martian rock formation is a statue "obviously built by an ancient civilisation that later departed Mars and settled Denmark", and then attributing it to "Madurobob" on "the internet" isn't quite journalism. Actually, it isn't anywhere near journalism. What isn't quite journalism is Web worries after suicide spate.

The nutjob in this story is an MP blaming the internet for an uptick in suicides. Now it is an MP (and not some screen name off the internet) with the nutty theory, so even though the theory is nutty, the BBC has a legitimate reason, or maybe even an obligation, to publish it. As a voter, I believe that when CNN learns Dennis Kucinich believes he saw a UFO, they have an obligation to tell me. The news is that Kucinich or the MP or whomever believes the nutty theory--the theory itself should be treated with some incredulity.

This MP seems to have formed her opinion completely without evidence. There's a bunch of suicides. There's an internet. Surely they're related. Even though local law enforcement says that "while some of the seven young people knew each other, there was nothing to link them all," and that even this gives no indication that the ones that did know each other knew each other from the internet. Later in the story it is revealed that some of the boys knew each other--from school. The MP neither seems to acknowledge the well-established phenomenon of suicide contagion, nor does she seem worried that the schools could be the cause of the uptick. She fusses that "memorial walls" on social networking sites romanticize suicide, but doesn't seem to make the connection that these internet "memorial walls" are just reflections of the real-life memorials that spring up after all well-publicized tragedies. Clearly this is just another case of a public figure pointing the finger at society's latest Big Bad: Big Bad wolf, Big Bad rock-n-roll, Big Bad MTV--all have given way to Big Bad internet (and Big Bad video games played on the Big Bad internet). And while the BBC shouldn't be held responsible for the MP's crappy reasoning skills, they should have made the same observations I just did.

Since we've had TiVo, we don't do a lot of channel surfing. For various reasons, I found myself flipping through live TV. I landed on TLC and a program called "Kids by the Dozen". It turns out it's a serial, focusing on a different huge family each time.

They were profiling the Heppner family. Mom and Dad met at Baptist Camp. A year later, she was knocked up and he had run off to--well, I can't remember where he ran off to, but I think it involved a transatlantic flight. Dad came back, they got married, had a son. Their family was now "perfect" and they decided to stop having kids.

According to the Heppners, they were "trying to do the responsible thing," using two forms of birth control (they didn't state which), but they kept on getting pregnant. The worst forms of birth control (even "periodic abstinence") only has a 30% real-life failure rate. That means that any two, used together, has less than a 10% failure rate. That's one failure in ten years of sex. The chance of two failures is less than 1%, or once in 100 years of sex. The odds of 14 failures is 1 in 1 x 10^-14. That's once in 1 x 10¹⁴ years of sex. To put that in perspective, the universe is only about 1 x 10 ¹⁰ years old. Plus, after you've had a couple failures, you might seek out something more reliable (IUDs and surgical methods have a failure rate of less than 1%), especially if, as the mother states, she was so sick with her first six pregnancies that she ended up hospitalized with dehydration. I can't imagine that they were putting any real effort into "trying to do the responsible thing".

As it were, I don't think that having 16 kids is, by definition, an irresponsible thing. If you want 16 children, and have the resources to raise 16 children, I see no reason why you shouldn't have 16 children. The Heppners seem to have failed on both accounts. Mom Heppner was saying that people will often leave boxes of clothing for them, and though sometimes donors are worried that the Heppners may be embarrassed by the charity, they shouldn't, because "that's the way God provides for our family." The show then cut to the kids, who said that it was no big deal to not have the styles and to be wearing cast-offs, because they still dress pretty well. That's when I knew they were home-schooled. I remember middle and secondary school as a constant struggle to keep up with what the cool kids were wearing. I can't imagine how I would have felt showing up in the clothes that those kids had discarded.

This program was probably the first TLC I had watched since I saw the Duggars, and their blatant money grab. The Duggars also have 16 children, and also can't afford them. They started to build a house, but after working on it for three years, and before they finished it, they got evicted from their rental, so they called TLC, who came in and fixed up the house a la "Extreme Home Makeover." (BTW, have you ever noticed that those families ALWAYS have a passel of kids?) Something like 7000 square feet of furnishings, for free. At least the Heppners are making due with their 4-bedroom, 3-bath, 1-kitchen (gasp!) home, and seem to have a legitimate source of income (construction). The primary source of income for the Duggars appears to be selling dvd seminars on how the Bible can make you debt-free. Sure you can be debt free if you're "gifted" everything you need.

Do I even need to say that these children are also homeschooled? And what do I have against homeschooling anyway? Again, I have no problem with it--if it's done because the schools are crappy and the parents are well-educated. What I do have a problem with is homeschooling in the hope that it will prevent their children being exposed to ideas. If those ideas--of which I expect evolution, tolerance, acceptance and contraception are among the most feared--were so horrible, they wouldn't stand up to the light of scrutiny. In fact, one would think that in addition to the obvious benefits of having the kids out of the house, they could become "beacons of the lord" in the schools.

Not that the schools need more beacons. On Friday, I made the mistake of asking my class, all of whom intend to be science teachers, which of them believe in evolution. Not a twitch among them. Not one of them. It made me want to pack up and move somewhere else. Anywhere else.

So, my new year's resolution has started out pretty crappy--that's why I don't make resolutions. But I'm sitting at work and it comes down the wire that school is closed today, so technically, my time is my own. I say "technically" because I don't really gain anything: I don't have any class meetings today, so I was just going to spend the day catching up and preparing for the coming days--which I still have to do, even though my suspicion is we won't be coming for class tomorrow, either.

Today is the third day school has been closed this calendar year. Not just canceled (no classes), but closed (staff stays home). At the beginning of the year we were closed for two days and on inclement weather schedule (2 hours late) for a third. First of all, classes hadn't started yet, so it wasn't concern for the safety of commuting students. Furthermore, weather.com says that the total precipitation over those three days was 0.06 in. Factor in January 1, which was closed for holiday anyway, and the sum rises to 0.17 in. Add in the entire week before the closure, and the total rises to just over an inch, 1.02 in. Two and a half days off for an inch of snow arriving over the course of a week. Seriously, it didn't even obscure the grass on our yard, and by the time school finally reopened, all of it had melted away.

Today's snowfall is already heavier than that, and the forecast says 3-5 inches, so I'm anticipating another snow day tomorrow. Factor in the fact that things shut down pretty early on Friday anyway (they don't even serve lunch at the cafeteria), and Monday is another off day (MLK Jr. Day, and this is a historically black college) and I'll put the chance of having class tomorrow in the single digits.

While there is some instant gratification in having a snow day, in the long run it's just a steaming sack of trouble. Snow days are truly lost days. We don't have make up days, so I have to cram 15 weeks of material into 14.5 weeks (or whatever). I have enough trouble staying on schedule the way it is.

I've never been one much for new year resolutions. I find I spend enough time worrying about my imperfections that I don't have to sit down and catalog them into a fix-it list. However, in the interest of appeasing family and friends that have noted a paucity of posts on this blog, I publicly resolve to post, like, once a week.

Now, to keep up such a frenetic pace, I'll have to supplement my "something interesting happened" posts because, let's face it, interesting things don't happen every week. So I'll have to start commenting on news and politics, and to be perfectly honest, many of the people who read this blog will disagree with, if not be offended by, my commentary. Yet what's really going on with me is much less about the fact that I watched this movie or ate that food than it is about what I feel about the education and reproduction and ethics and faith. So when I piss you off, remember that it's what you asked for.