Yearly Archives: 2006

Friday Ark #84

This entry was posted in Bird Blogging Cat Blogging Dog Blogging Friday Ark Invertebrate Blogging Pet Blogging Weekend Cat Blogging Weekend Dog Blogging on by

We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….?

Alert: The Ark crew is traveling and expects to have limited net accesss for the next four days. Boardings will be slow….
Alert 2 – 4/28 : The Ark’s hosting site and others has been under DOS attack for some time. If you see this alert message you know that it resolved before staff left for today’s field trips. There may be few or no updates until tonight.
Alert 3 – 4/28 2:00 PM EDT: The good news: our hosting site appears to have recovered. The bad news: the boarders you see are the ones we have. If you submitted or tried to trackback and don’t see your boarder listed please resubmit. We apologize for the inconvenience. Back tonight….

We will add your post to the list if you do one of the following:

  • Leave a comment or trackback to this post (Don’t panic if you get back an “internal server error” message. Haven’t been able to figure out why this is happening but comments still seem to post.). Also note that all comments are now moderated,
  • Use the Carnival Submission Form,
  • Use the Blog Carnival Submission Form,
  • Email Modulator or
  • Our extensive staff finds it during our weekly search of the web

Of course, if our staff goes on strike then we will link only those posts someone tells us about. Time permitting we will continue boardings until the Carnival of the Cats goes up on Sunday.

Do link to the Friday Ark whether you use trackbacks or not.

Visit each border and come back regularly Friday-Sunday to visit new boarders.

Extra, Extra: All Ark boarders are invited to shout out at the Friday Ark Frapper Map. (57 shouts as of 04/27) BTW, the slideshow of the pics folks included is pretty nifty!

Dog folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings.

Cat folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Cats which goes up every Sunday and the 110th edition will be hosted this week by Furry Paws. There are more weekly cats at eatstuff’s Weekend Cat Blogging which has many participants who may not be familiar to Ark or Carnival participants. Do go shout out at The Catbloggers Frappr Map.

Bird folks: I and the Bird: A Blog Carnival for Bird Lovers is published every 2 weeks. The 22nd edition is up and hosted by Home Bird Notes.

For the spineless: Circus of the Spineless. A monthly celebration of Insects, Arachnids, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Worms and most anything else that wiggles. The seventh edition is at Research at a Snail’s Pace. The 8th edition will be up Sunday April 30 hosted by Get Busy Livin’, or Get Busy Bloggin’.

Arkive editions of the Friday Ark.
Cats

DogsInvertebratesBirdsOther VertebratesIn MemoriamDidn’t Make It
Exceptions (inclusion not guaranteed)
For other current carnivals check out The Conservative Cat’s Carnival Page, The Blog Carnival and The TTLB Uber Carnival

Note for Haloscan Users: Haloscan started (the end of July) rejecting trackbacks if they were submitted “too rapidly” by the same host. I don’t know what the timer is but it is long enough so that it was very difficult to ping everyone that is using Haloscan for trackbacks. I’m sure that they are doing this to try to hold back the tide of trackback spam but it makes the service pretty useless for carnival type posts. Perhaps you can contact them and urge some different solution. Update: Typepad appears to be doing the same thing. Everytime I update the Ark it appears the timers are reset and the long list of MT autogenerated pings fail. Yecchhhh….

Away Message

This entry was posted in Modulator on by

The Modulator staff will spend the next 4 days on a field trip to a remote area near some beautiful rain forests and wilderness areas.
There won’t be much net access, perhaps some dial up and 1 wireless hotspot in the area (if operational).
The Friday Ark is set to go up automatically at about 3:15 AM EDT if lack of access impedes manual posting.

I do expect net access issues to impede updates to the Ark throughout the weekend so regular boarders please be patient.

What Keeps Kids Off Playgrounds

This entry was posted in Education on by

A recently published study argues that for at least 25% of overweight kids bullying keeps them off their school playgrounds:

Overweight kids can be bullied or taunted right off the playgrounds or ball fields, potentially making their struggles with excess pounds even worse, researchers here said.
One quarter of overweight children ages eight to 18 reported significant problems with bullying, and such problems correlated strongly with self-reported depression, loneliness, anxiety, and curtailed physical activity…

First, let’s all agree that bullying is bad behaviour and should not be condoned. Second, I’ll go so far as to say that bullies, any one who threatens to or actually initiates physical violence against another student, should be removed from the school and face appropriate criminal charges.
Now, what really keeps kids off playgrounds and also forces them into an environment where they have to deal with bullies on the playground? Well, our school systems. That right.
The school system herds large numbers of students together into large buildings for a significant part of there day. During that day these young, energetic people spend most of their time crammed into small rooms, sitting in rows of chairs, sometimes behind desks. Five-six hours a day like this and we wonder why many don’t get enough exercise. Then during the day elementary* school kids may be released with 100’s of their schoolmates into a large caged yard, one that is not unlike a prison yard. Hmmmm, energy, 100s of kids, some of whom are jerks and bullies, in a large caged area. Just what kind of behavior do you expect?
Yes, damn the bullies. But also damn the institutions that force all these people into this overcrowded environment. Unless, that is, you really want to train our children for a life in prison or sweatshops.

*Note that by junior high and high school recess is a thing of the past and the bullies do most of their preying in the hallways, at lunch time or after school.