It's not every day that employees ask their higher-ups to evaluate them more rigorously, but that's what a few city public school teachers asked for in an ad campaign launched by Educators 4 Excellence yesterday.
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Have you heard of SOPA? Of course you have. Have you heard of Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who in October filed SOPA -- which promotes harsher penalties and even jail time for people caught violating copyright laws, and is basically the reason that today you can't access Wikipedia and Reddit and various other sites, which are protesting the act? Lots of people are mad at Smith, because if there's anything people do really well on the Internet, it's get mad at people who threaten to take away their "free Internet" (more about all that here). They've gotten so mad that they've gone to Smith's website and done a bit of digging, and, well, it appears that Lamar Smith may be in copyright violation himself. This is called "Internet Justice."
Remember the brouhaha in October over the vibrator discovered by a TSA agent, who left a note in the suitcase inspected saying, knowingly, accusingly, "Get your freak on girl"? (Perhaps most upsettingly, that statement could have used a comma.) Remember how that TSA agent was hunted down and canned, post-haste? Well, the latest in missives left by TSA agents (this really should be a Tumblr, if it isn't already), according to rapper Freddie Gibbs, who both tweeted about and took a photo of his own special TSA love note, is this mild, all-in-all rather friendly admonishment (after the jump):
All is fair in love and war, which means wearing a sign on the F train that says "I love this girl!...Help me get a second chance," with a picture of said girl, and asking people to write "words of encouragement" on how to get that girl back is totally and completely acceptable, if not totally and completely sane. But who are we to judge? We feel for this guy, and not only because he's walking around underground in a billboard! Others apparently do, too: A tipster told Gawker that some of them did sign the sign, though most people were practicing the established subway methods of "avoid and ignore the weird yelling guy" on the train. 
via
There's an interesting case in the news today involving New York dentist Stacy Makhnevich, who is facing a class-action lawsuit from Robert Lee, a former patient. Makhnevich, who calls herself "the Classical Singer Dentist of New York," treated Lee for a toothache, but not before he signed a contract promising not to say anything bad about her online -- he claims he was in such pain he signed it in "a situation of duress" to get the treatment. Later, however, after he says she overcharged him $4,000, sent his records to the wrong insurance company, and refused to provide copies of records so he could submit them himself, he shared that wrongdoing on various sites, including Yelp. Makhnevich turned around and accused Lee of breaching the contract he'd signed and threatened to sue him. 
Makhnevich
I wasn't going to write about this, but it started making me madder and madder, so here I am. Business Insider today writes of a woman named Jessica Sporty, who, at 23, was simply too poor on her $45K salary to take care of her $1,475 a month (ahem -- Murray Hill) apartment and also her extra $500 or $1000 in credit card bills, so, she took to Internet dating on Match.com to essentially get dudes to buy her dinner and keep her out of debt.
"Make dinner happen."
The parents of Adolf Hitler, the 5-year-old New Jersey child with the most unfortunate name, have had their newest baby, a boy named Hons Campbell, taken away from them as well. Adolf and his sisters, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie, were all taken into custody by New Jersey Youth and Family Services in 2009. The Campbells, Heath and Deborah, say they don't know why Hons was taken, and the agency has reportedly been prohibited from talking about it. However, last year an appeals court ruled that the older children were at risk due to the parents' "unspecified physical and psychological disabilities," including violence in the home. 
Today in unfortunate mugshots: Here's a guy who crashed into a police car, which was part of a special alcohol fatality enforcement team, early today on Long Island. Along with being charged with driving while intoxicated, the man, 22-year-old Kevin Daly, is also being informally charged with a "Seriously, dude, why would you wear that shirt?" The bright side is that the cop was not badly hurt and Daly, who was fine, was arrested and will probably never wear the shirt again. (Also, hopefully, he'll stop driving drunk.)
From our friends at Bowery Boogie comes this photo of a guy casually going about his business, sans shoes, on the sidewalks of New York City. He's got those five-fingered running shoes attached to his belt, so it's clearly a matter of choice. But...why? Bowery Boogie has seen him not once but twice in recent days.
Bowery Boogie
This statement in the New York Times makes me mad: "Of all the many things that make up a wedding, few are more important than the photographs." Perhaps the Times, writing of Manhattan man Todd Remis's lawsuit against H&H Photographers for missing the last 15 minutes, including the last dance and that horrible ritual, the bouquet toss, of his wedding in 2003, is being a bit tongue in cheek. Because Remis and his ex-wife, Milena Grzibovska, have since divorced, and Grzibovska is "believed to have moved back to her native Latvia." 
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