Thursday, February 1, 2007

How do you know your child's 12-year-old friend isn't a 29-year-old sex offender?

Clearly, it's happened once:
[Neil H. Rodreick II] is also a 29-year-old convicted sex offender who kept a youthful appearance with the aid of razors and makeup.

And the men known as his uncle, grandfather and cousin, who until recently shared a three-bedroom house with him here, were not family at all, but a web of convicted sex offenders and predators, law enforcement officials say, preying in part on one another....

Though many parents have publicly praised the Surprise school’s handling of the deception, Mr. Rodreick’s enrollment has raised questions about admissions procedures, which officials at Imagine, one of the state’s largest charter schools, said they were reviewing....

While looking for Mr. Rodreick, Lieutenant Gillock stumbled upon his new life. He learned he had been posing as a 12-year-old named Casey and befriending families at a local church. He had spent the night with at least one boy, the lieutenant said, and traveled to the Grand Canyon, with Mr. Nellis in tow as his uncle, with another boy....

“He absolutely looked age-appropriate,” said Rhonda Cagle, a spokeswoman for Imagine Charter School, of Mr. Rodreick, who is listed on the Oklahoma Department of Corrections Web site as 5 feet 8 inches tall and 120 pounds. “We have several seventh-grade students who are taller and of a larger build than this individual.”
Strange that the town was called "Surprise" and the school "Imagine." Imagine no age limits/I wonder if you can... You may say I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one/I hope someday you'll join us... Uh... or maybe not. Imagine all the people/Sharing all the... No, no, I think imagination is not always such a good thing. Maybe we'll call the new charter school "Convention."

Anyway...

Why wouldn't this sort of thing happen a lot and go undiscovered? And now that this story is in the news, why wouldn't it give a few people some new ideas? Haven't there been several movies about adults who go back to school and pose as kids? I can only think of one: "Peggy Sue Got Married." If you think about it, Kathleen Turner plays a sex predator of sorts.



She's a grown woman, fully sexually experienced, and she goes back and interacts in sexually aggressive ways with a couple of teenage boys. Well, she's a woman, so it doesn't quite register as threatening, does it? I think there are some movies where the adult posing as a child is a male, but I'm sure -- if these are mainstream movies -- the adult male never does anything remotely sexual with a child. But the idea that an adult could pose as a child is definitely out there, and how can it not be enticing to pedophiles? Not everyone has the appearance or the skill to use this strategy, but at least one did. Why would there be only one?

"Eh, he's a nice old man, isn't he?" "Oh yeah, he's very clean."

"Clean" -- the word that ruined Joe Biden -- was a running joke in the old Beatles movie "A Hard Days Night":
JOHN: Eh, he's a nice old man, isn't he?

PAUL: Oh yeah, he's very clean, y'know....

GEORGE: It's Paul's grandfather.

SHAKE: Oh aye, but I thought ...

JOHN: No, that's his other one.

SHAKE: That's all right then.

JOHN: Clean though, isn't he?

SHAKE: Oh yes, he's clean all right....

MANAGER: Lord John McCartney, he's the millionaire Irish Peer, filthy rich of course.

CUSTOMER: Oh I don't know, looks rather clean to me....

GRANDFATHER: Lookit, I thought I was supposed to be getting a change of scenery and so far I've seen a train and a room, a car and a room and a room and a room. Well, that's maybe all right for a bunch of powdered gee-gaws like you lot but I'm feeling decidedly strait-jacketed. This is no life for a free-booting agent of my stamp. I'm a frustrated man and that class of McCartney is a dangerous McCartney.

GIRL: What a clean old man....

JOHN: You see. You know your trouble -- you should have gone West to America. You'd have wound up a Senior Citizen of Boston. As it is you took the wrong turning and what happened, you're a lonely old man from Liverpool.

GRANDFATHER: But I'm clean.....

The BOYS giggle and slap him on the back.



A train and a room, a car and a room and a room and a room. I think Biden will be spared the tedium of excessive traveling soon enough.

"I don’t know whether it was an attempt to diminish what I had done in '88, or to say Barack is all style and no substance."

Jesse Jackson comments on Joe Biden's botched compliment. (Hmmm... I wonder if Jackson was sliding in his own opinion on Obama there.)

Al Sharpton provides the wisecrack that threatens to become every black person's greeting upon meeting Mr. Biden: "I told him I take a bath every day."

ADDED: More from Sharpton:
No stranger to electoral intrigue, Mr. Sharpton was quick to offer a political motive: That Mr. Biden was drawing distinctions between Mr. Obama and African-American leaders like Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson, to “discredit Mr. Obama with his base.”
And Sharpton, of course, has his own political motives. I think we've been seeing him try to get Obama to pay more attention to black voters (and black leaders).

"Google Posts Sharp Rise in Sales and Profits."

Too big to care anymore?
Google said net income for the quarter nearly tripled to $1.03 billion, or $3.29 a share, up from $372.2 million, or $1.22 a share, in the fourth quarter of 2005. Excluding charges related to stock-based compensation and other adjustments, the company earned $997 million, or $3.18 a share, in the latest quarter.

Google’s quarterly revenue rose 67 percent. to $3.21 billion, from a year earlier. Google sells ads that are displayed on other sites and passes most of the revenue from those ads to the owners of those site. Excluding those payments, Google’s revenue totaled $2.23 billion in the fourth quarter.
I used to have their AdSense ads up. I took them down, though, because the amount of money is so small that it's not worth the clutter on the page. The amount of money for me, that is. For them... those pennies pile up into billions.

If you're trying to comment...

On those last two posts, you're probably getting an error message, right? I'll just assume you're out there, sharing the hate... But I'm afraid readers are abandoning me because the site has become so sluggish... or because they're waiting to see evidence of updates in the feed.

I hate Blogger.

I am now bursting with hate for Blogger. I hate hate hate New Blogger. After that last post, I tried to open the comments page and got an error message. I tried to open the blog in a different broswer and got a "Server Error." Trying to open a "Create Post" window went nowhere for the longest time. Getting to the blog has been taking way too long ever since the switch. Perhaps you've noticed.

You know, for months, I wasn't able to respond to the invitation to switch to New Blogger because it was not ready to deal with very large blogs like mine. (I have over 7,000 posts.) Well, I tend to think they still weren't ready. But now I've switched, and I'm in this Blogger hell. And I have no way to contact anyone at Blogger support. They've scrubbed the site of any reference to an email address where you might reach an actual person. And it was never -- as far as I know -- possible to contact [ADDED: I mean telephone] anyone at Blogger, AKA Google.

ADDED: Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking. And in case that gets any Blogger attention to this post, let me say that my main problem is that my feed stopped working, as complained about in the previous post, "New Blogger is driving me crazy!" And Glenn puts it well: "Google's success depends on things working right, because if they don't, there's nobody to call, and they quickly transform from cute-but-big company to hated uncaring corporate monolith."

MORE: A blogger representative did notice my problems and email me at 1:40 this afternoon. About my feed's dysfunction, he said "we're looking into why and should have it fixed asap." It's 7 hours later, and it's still not working. And though the big errors that everyone was getting this morning are done with, Blogger is still opening pages terribly sluggishly.

UPDATE: The feed was restored at around 3 pm on Friday.

New Blogger is driving me crazy!

Oh, how I wish I hadn't switched to New Blogger! I'm over the problem that the switch itself took three hours, though I'm still irked that there was no warning that it would take such a long time, which would have tipped me off to do it late at night instead of in the middle of the day. And I actually like some of the new features: I get to skip the word verification stage in the comments, I can use labels creatively, publishing is quicker. Maybe there are a couple other things. But the feed doesn't work anymore.

The feed on my tiny other blog kept working normally, and the feed on individual comments (a new feature) is working, but the feed for new posts on this blog has not worked since I switched. What makes it all the more irksome is that it's become impossible to find a way to email anyone at Blogger for help. I can find the recommendation that one participate in the Blogger Help Group, and in fact, I did post a question over there. But after one unhelpful suggestion, it's off the front page, swamped by repetitive posts that all seem to say "I can't find my blog." I can see from my Site Meter that I've lost a lot of traffic over this. I've also wasted a lot of time. Having no way to contact anyone at Blogger is the most frustrating part of it.

If you're going to bring in something important and new, you ought to wow people with it, not make them wallow in regret that you've deprived them of the old. I have defended Blogger for years when people have told me over and over to quit. Ironically, the main reason I've stayed is that I'm assume that anything new will come with its own set of problems.

UPDATE: The feed was restored at around 3 pm today.