Telephones and phonies

Good to know that, in light of the quite-possibly-illegal spying going on in the good ol' USofA, as part of the highly questionable intelligence program, we can always count on telephone service providers to help out, and look out for privacy and security. Just as long as you don't get service from Verizon, BellSouth, or AT&T, because they handed over information at the governments request faster than you can dial into your voice mail. Qwest is currently the only company to come forward and say that they actually stood up for their subscriber's privacy, and refused to turn over the records. Of course, this is during a time where the new appointee for the position vacated by Porter Goss has proven that he doesn't know the 4th Amendment as well as he should.

And, oh, James Frey, have you learned nothing from your own case? As it turns out, the man who finally (after being hyped on Oprah) admitted that his book "A Million Little Pieces" was largely a work of fiction has now been forced to out himself again, in the paperback release of "My Friend Leonard". Yep. Once again, things he claimed to be true were merely the workings of his mind to create a better story. Is there an actual crime here? In my opinion, no, there's not. Sure, he misrepresented his books as being fairly autobiographical, but it's still his own writing, is it not? And he is admitting that the stories aren't completely true. It's not like he's a Harvard student getting paid a ton of cash to pull passages and characters from other author's works and claim them as his own. Heck, if Oprah hadn't pumped his book without getting the full facts, this wouldn't even be much of a blog-worthy piece.

Finally, a school teacher in Florida is getting into some hot water over pictures of her that have been circulating on the internet. First off, she's 25. Secondly, the pictures were taken a couple of years back (by all accounts) when she was doing some bikini and lingerie modelling to get money together. Thirdly, it's not like she's banging her students or anything. She had some sexy photos taken of her, and these were put up on a website. These pictures have proceeded to circulate for a couple of years, during which time nobody became any the wiser. Time passes, she starts teaching, and, eventually, a couple of students surfing the net run across the pictures. There are apparently talks that she may end up losing her job over this. Come on, people... so she took some sexy photos, and had thousands of men drooling over them. If there were more teachers like that, students may actually find themselves more inclined to actually go to class, and might even pay attention.

Not that it matters. She's moving on to become a bikini-modelling real estate agent. Probably without the bikini, though.