HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Thanksgiving is fun for everyone except the turkeys.

Each year, the President of the United States "pardons" two turkeys on Death Row. Here is the story of the first official turkey pardon.

The National Turkey Foundation and the Poultry and Egg National Board, since 1947, have presented the President with a turkey each year at a White House ceremony.  And the Presidents have always eaten it.

JFK was an exception; he said, "Let's just keep him". In 1989, the senior Bush started the practice of pardoning turkeys--two a year.  Till 2004, the pardoned turkeys were sent to Kidwell Farm (also ironically called Frying Pan Park),  a petting zoo in Virginia.  But now they go to Disneyland as the honorary grand marshals of the Thanksgiving Day parade. They are even given names.  This year's chosen ones are Apple and Cider.

 President Obama pardons a turkey 2010

I don't see what difference it makes to pardon two turkeys a year when, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 45 million turkeys are cooked and eaten in the U.S. at Thanksgiving!!

TEACHING TO CHEAT

One of the funniest things that I ever saw is this video on Youtube on how to cheat in an exam.  It involved a scanner, a coke bottle and some glue.  Mystified?  Well, here it is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91lQK5SCzlQ

First of all, it bothers me that the author of the above video gives it a serial number.  There are many more of these.  And then, I think the students could better utilize their time simply memorizing what would fit on the teeny Coke bottle label. 

Yet another student teaches to cheat by writing notes on a stretched rubber band. What?  Are they going to write on the heads of pins next? 

Professor Quinn of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, caught 200 of his 600 business-course students cheating in a midterm exam. 

He offered the students an ultimatum: Come clean and take a four-hour ethics course, and your records would be wiped clean. If they chose not to come forward, they'd run a risk. 

The risk of expulsion, that is. The move to make these students attend a class on ethics was a stroke of genius.

 Also, all 600 students had to redo their midterms.

Student Konstantin Ravvin accused the university of "making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if they want to teach us some kind of moral lesson." (Mind you, a moral lesson!! Who needs that?)
"This is college. Everyone cheats, everyone cheats in life in general," Ravvin said. "I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn't cheated on an exam."

Really, the Professor has nothing to worry about.  Those that do not learn the "moral lesson" his way, will learn it the hard way.  And then maybe they will learn that they are, in fact, only cheating themselves.  As Kiki Kho, a producer of similar "cheating" videos said, the viewers don't really have to follow the videos.  If they do, it is all their own fault.