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By Julie
Even though Alex gets his school picture taken in October and we receive his portraits only a couple of months later, every year it takes forever for the class portrait to get delivered. This year we finally got it on Friday. I've been pondering it curiously ever since. There are 17 kids shown. Alex says there are actually 19 kids in his class, one having enrolled later in the year, so I think the last one must have missed picture day.
The racial breakdown of the class is hard to miss. Kevin chuckled over the fact that there's only one obviously white kid in Alex's entire class. Counting Alex and a few other mixed kids, I guess you can say there are 3.0 white kids in the class. The rest are about 1/3 Hispanic and 2/3 Asian or Pacific Islander. This year there are no black kids in his class. What I noticed though was the gender breakdown. It's about 50/50 male-female, and as I learned back in January, if you invite all your 2nd grade classmates to your birthday party, you can safely assume no one of the opposite sex will show up. Even though Alex sometimes mentions the girls in his class when he recounts his day, for the most part he plays only with the boys. At age 7 or 8 these kids are already self segregating by gender. The reason this is on my mind is because they're only 6 months away from becoming 3rd graders. That was the age I found out many of my classmates already knew about the birds and the bees. Here's how it happened: I asked my mom for a box to take to school to turn into a mailbox for my Valentine's Day cards, and when I took the empty tampon box she gave me, several of the kids laughed and made interesting gestures. Despite both knowing very little English and nothing about sex until that point, I quickly figured out what they were talking about. Kevin thinks there must have been an extraordinarily large number of younger siblings in my 3rd grade class as the only reason he first heard about sex at about the same time was because of his same-aged cousin who had an 11-year-old brother. Either way, time is of the essence. We've got an 8-year-old son whose closest friends all have older siblings, and we want to take advantage of the fact that he's still willing to talk to us about anything, including stories about stuff the girls at school keep doing that have way more subtext than he realizes. Back when I was a kid I would have loved a book about sex, love, and relationships as I knew no adult was going to tell me anything worth knowing, and fortunately there are plenty of kid-friendly books on these topics now. But frankly, now that I'm a parent, I think it's going to take more than a book to do this right. For starters, Kevin is wondering whether he should stop skipping over certain parts of the Piers Anthony  book he's been reading to Alex at bedtime, stuff like his eyes lingered on her alluring curves -- excuse me while I giggle madly... okay, I'm done -- because including them might draw out questions from Alex. Hmmm.In other news, I discovered to my great annoyance that someone has stolen our code and posted it on this website: http://senibudaya.blogspot.com. From clues in the source code I'm guessing it's a guy, and he seems to have done it sometime ago as the stolen code resembles Juvin.com circa 2005. So I sent the following message to Blogger, hoping they would contact the user: Subj: Blogspot user stole our content The blogger at http://senibudaya.blogspot.com/ is hosting our content on his site without our permission. This includes the Flickr badge as well as other files referenced in his source code. We have always had a clear copyright notice posted on our site http://juvin.com, i.e. (copyright symbol) 1998-2008. We have allowed individuals to republish our content twice in the past. This was not one of them. We request that our content be taken off this site immediately. Blogger replied with a very long and tedious message that began with Hi there, Thank you for your note. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office website: http://lcWeb.loc.gov/copyright To file a notice of infringement with us, you must provide a written communication (by fax or regular mail, not by email) that sets forth the items specified below. Please note that pursuant to that Act, you may be liable to the alleged infringer for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees) if you materially misrepresent that you own an item when you in fact do not. Indeed, in a recent case (please see http://www.onlinepolicy.org/action/legpolicy/opg_v_diebold/ for more information), a company that sent an infringement notification seeking removal of online materials that were protected by the fair use doctrine was ordered to pay such costs and attorneys fees. The company agreed to pay over $100,000. Accordingly, if you are not sure whether material available online infringes your copyright, we suggest that you first contact an attorney. So the burden of proof is on us, and if we can't adequately prove it, we might have to pay the loser attorney fees??? What the hell?! Incidentally, the two people that I had allowed to use content off our website were both authors. One wrote a book on fortune cookies and cited my fortune cookies page (it's no longer up), and another was writing a college textbook about the Internet with a chapter about blogs. They even showed me how they were going to use the content so that I knew they were going to present it in a professional way. I guess what bothers me other than the fact that this loser didn't bother asking for permission is that he's totally mangling our content by presenting it on that hideous page. It's as if he was trying to learn HTML and failing very badly. Someone get this guy an HTML for Dummies book  , please!Labels: books, kids, lusers, parenting 3 Comments:
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