It has been reported today that Italian police are investigating two individuals who may have been trying to sell clothing and watches under a false fashion line called “Clooney Clothes.” The investigation began after the actor himself filed a complaint. Clooney told reporters in Rome that, “if someone tries to sell you clothes or watches that are based on me, don’t buy them.”

Don’t worry George. We weren’t going to anyway.

“With its rich culture, prosperous business community, and thriving agricultural industry, you’ll find a family-friendly environment ideal for work or play.” This is what you would read if you visited the homepage for the City of Visalia, California, but don’t believe it for a minute; it’s a lie!

I can’t speak about the agricultural industry, but since the World Ag Expo is held not 5 miles away, I’m sure farmers are doing great; but families aren’t. Here are just a few personal experiences that might mean Visalia is not the best place to be.

About a year ago, just after we moved here, my car started getting hit with eggs. Several times over the course of three or four months the paint on the side of my car would be damaged by some sly prankster. I knew even the most adept police force would have little ability to stop the vandal, so I just ignored it. Eventually, I found out that another neighbor was able to catch the vandal, so the egging stopped. The whole business was annoying, but not life-threatening.

Less than a month ago I received a phone call from my credit card company asking me if I had authorized almost ten charges from gas stations all over town between the hours of 11:00pm and 6:00am. Of course I had not, and soon discovered that my wife’s purse had been stolen from our van parked in the driveway. Her iPod as well as her cell phone was in the van, and the thief used about 100 minutes in cell phone calls throughout the night. T-mobile refused to tell us who the criminal had called, even though it was our phone, but they said the police department would be allowed to have access to those records.

I filed a police report, and I thought it would be an easy case, since all the police would need to do is acquire the phone numbers, call the people that the thief had called, and intimidate them into revealing the thief’s name. However, one month later, I still haven’t received a single call regarding the matter, and I’m sure I never will.

Oh, but it gets better. I started writing this article last night, but was unable to finish it, so I saved it to finish today. A few moments ago my wife informed me that someone had vandalized our car. I went out to check the damage myself, and sure enough, someone had walked by with a can of green spray paint and tagged the side of our car. When I called the police station to file a report, I chose all of the appropriate options and the voice prompt told me I was being transferred to the duty officer. However, after one ring, I was sent right back to the main menu again. I tried this several more times with no luck; each time, instead of the duty officer I ended up back at the main menu. Not only that, but there is a long, annoying message in Spanish that Americans have to sit through before they are even given the prompt choices. And yes, I had to listen to the message each time I was sent back to the main menu. Please enjoy this recording of the department’s telephone system.

Of course, there are other interesting encounters I’ve had on the roadways of Visalia: I’ve had people give me the finger, get out of their vehicle at a stop light to spit on my car, and a few other delightful treats. So yeah, now you know what kind of “family-friendly environment” Visalia, California really is.

Lame jokes, bias coverage, and uninspired reports, and this only in the first five minutes. Airing on the television network The CW, tabloid video magazine TMZ might first sound like a television version of People Magazine, but this program falls short of even People’s meager standards.

Every night at ten o’clock, bored couch potatoes across the country are engorged in a non-stop moving slideshow of every celebrity who showed their face in public that day, and sometimes even celebrities who didn’t show their faces in public. And as exciting as it might be to see Dustin Hoffman get into an elevator, I can’t help but wonder if my time could have been better spent seeing Tara Reid bending over to pick up change for a parking meter. No-no wait, that was on after Dustin, and I still feel cheated.

The problem with TMZ isn’t really even the abysmal content of the program, rather the fault lies with the obnoxious and incredulous narrator that is enthralled with hateful comments toward each and every celebrity featured on the program, WITHOUT EXCEPTION. This relentless approach to celebrity journalism is an attempt to make the home viewer feel better about their own lives, knowing that the so-called celebrity Kevin Federline was booed at his own birthday party. See, didn’t that make you feel good?

It’s not just washed up B-list actors that TMZ unloads on; for some reason, Miley Cyrus is one of TMZ’s favorite celebrities to pick on. For practically one week straight, TMZ paparazzi followed around the star of Hanna Montana in an attempt to “catch” Miley saying or doing something wrong. But when Miss Cyrus failed to provide riveting footage, TMZ still featured her on their program and made whatever snide little comment they could to make her look bratty.

Viewers shouldn’t expect anything different than this cookie-cutter approach to the reporting of every last minor celebrity spotting that TMZ camera crews are able to record. With generally few interesting events happening in Hollywood from day to day, TMZ’s daily thirty minute program is a veritable pile of table scraps, mostly fatty gristle with the occasional fiber of meat. A weekly edition of TMZ would help to cut away some of the worthless dross that makes up most of the program. But even if this should occur, don’t expect anything other than mindless sensationalism lathered with abusive, unsophisticated commentary deplorably disguised as sarcasm.

This is the first entry to what will hopefully be many annoyed rants about being a Central California substitute teacher. Since I have been riding this roller-coaster for a couple of months now, I thought it would be appropriate to share some of the more memorable stories with the one visitor to this website. You know who you are, dad.

A couple of weeks ago I was teaching at a high school here in town. There were about five or six classes, two of them being honors, one of them sheltered English (or ESL), and a couple of regular classes. The ESL students were so pleasant and provided no trouble, but students from the regular classes were being difficult. This appeared to be a fairly affluent school, which accounted for many of the students’ bratty attitudes.

One child in particular wasn’t on the roll sheet, but the other students seemed to know who he was. I probably should have called the office to ask why he wasn’t on the roster, but instead I just wrote his name down.

This student was constantly talking with the other students and being disruptive. I told him to put away his iPod and he pretended to do so, but moments later he had it out again. I told him a second time to put it away and that the next time I would confiscate it. He did not comply so I had him hand it over. After class he asked for it back but I told him he would need to pick it up at the office after school.

Flash forward several hours, this student returned to class and I told him again he would have to wait at the office. But instead of going to the office to wait, he returned with two of his friends. Luckily I had already closed and locked the classroom door, but this did not stop him from pounding on the door and shouting for me to come out. I told him through the door that if they did not return to the office immediately that I would call campus security on them. They were waiting at the office when I got there.

The attendance secretary was surprised when the child told her that he was not a real student at the school but he had some arrangement with the regular teacher to sit in on the class. I don’t know what this arrangement was all about, but it was clearly putting teachers and students at risk, especially when the child had no accountability for his behavior in class.

Three-way phone calls are a thing of the past. In fact, three-way phone calls are so ancient, it’s probably something dinosaurs would have done, if phones had been invented that is, and if dinosaurs could talk, and if a communications infrastructure had been in place. But that is besides the point! which is, dinosaurs are really old, and so are three-way phone conversations.

Five-way telephone conversations are the wave of the future, and it is easier than you might have expected. Let me share with you how I was able to place my own five-way telephone call, and how you can have five-way calls yourself!

First, you need to have two telephone lines. Now before you go clicking that BACK button, please hear me out. Having two phone lines is not as expensive as it used to be. In fact, it might even be cheaper than your single phone line now. Personally, I use ViaTalk, a broadband phone company that routes all calls through the internet. It costs me less than $20 a month and I get two, real phone lines, with real phones. ViaTalk is not the only broadband phone company to offer inexpensive, dual phone lines; you might prefer getting two lines from the local telephone company, but either way, you will need two lines.

Second, you will need a two-line telephone with conferencing capabilities. I am using a two-line Uniden TRU9566 cordless phone, but any telephone capable of handling two simultaneous lines and has the conferencing feature can make five-way phone calls.

This is how it works. You use line one to call your first victim - I mean friend or family member. Then, press the flash key to get a dial tone, just like what you would do to make a three-way call. When the phone starts to ring your second call, press the flash key again and you will now be connected with your first and second calls. At this point, you are on a three-way call, but unless you want to become extinct like the dinosaurs, you will need to do just a few things more.

Let your two callers know that you are going to leave them for just a moment. You will need to press the “Line 2″ button to get a dial tone on your second phone line. Don’t worry, your first two calls will be able to talk to each other while you are on line two. Now, dial the number for your third call, then when you have them on the phone, press flash, and dial the number for your fourth call. When it starts to ring, press the flash button to bring the third and fourth calls together. Now you are in a three-way call with your third and fourth calls.

Now for the grand finale! Press the conference button on your phone to bring both lines one and two together. You will now be connected with calls one, two, three, and four, all in the same conversation. You make the fifth person in the five-way call, and now you won’t end up in a museum of natural history! Congratulations!

When I made my first five-way call, I called my mother, grandmother, brother, and cousin. Just for fun, you might want to try it with your best friend, your sister, her best friend, your boyfriend, and your boyfriend’s secret girlfriend! Let the fun begin!

“What a lovely purple shaded whimsical box,” you might be thinking to yourself. But you’d be WRONG! Or, you might be right! There’s only one way to know for certain: read Thew A.W. Varpness’ unpublished, untitled book (publishing date to be revealed later). Is this whimsical box a helpful friend, or a device created to destroy mankind? I won’t tell you which, but I will give you one small clue; it’s not a device created to destroy mankind.

 Find out about this whimsical box, and more, when you read the book!

In an effort to better mankind, I would like to offer you this short, one question survey (also known as a poll). Consider this poll carefully before you answer. The future of humanity just might perhaps rest in your vote maybe.

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So you’ve just returned from a vacation to Hawaii and the first thing you do when you walk through the door is plop down at your computer to check your email. Here is an email that offers you a great deal on viagra. Here is another email from the President of Nigeria who needs you to send him money in order to get a check for millions of dollars. Oh look, here is a fowarded message from your Aunt Carol. Isn’t Hercules the giant Mastiff cute? You weed through the piles and piles of spam and pick out the funny fowarded messages sent to you by your friends and family. The good messages and the bad spam don’t seem to have anything to do with each other, do they? Well, you’re wrong!

For nearly every piece of spam sitting in your inbox, you can thank your Aunt Carol, or your sister Carolyn, or your brother… uh, Carl. Or you can even blame yourself! You see, when someone forwards you an email message, they are sending you a list of all the people that they sent that message to, yourself included. If you then forward that message to your own friends and family, then you are sending all those name, including yours, to the next group of people, and those names are being added as well. Pretty soon, you’ve got hundreds of names, including those of you and your friends, all in a convienent little email.

Let’s take a look at it mathematically. If you send an email to just 3 people, and each person waits a whole day to send it to 3 more, then 9 people will have received the message by tomorrow. At the end of one week, your message will have reached 6,561 people. After a fortnight (that’s two weeks), it will have reached over 14 million people.

Now let me ask you this, with all of the spam you have sitting in your inbox, what are the odds that at least one out of those 14 million people is the spammer (person who sends spam). Considering all that spam you get in your inbox, the odds are pretty high that your fowarded messages have reach dozens, maybe even hundreds of spammers. And since you are the one who fowarded the message, the spammers know that your email address has a real person checking the mail everyday. Since real email addresses are worth a lot of money in the spam market, your email address will be sold to other spammers who will be kind enough to send you even more spam.

So what can you do about the problem? Well, you could stop fowarding messages, but I know you’re not going to do that. You might ask people to delete your name from the email header before they forward your message along to other people, but you know your friends aren’t going to do that either. So what is the solution? It’s really very simple. Start enjoying that spam! Sign up for free samples of sex enhancing herbs! Tell the President of Nigeria that his Western Union money order is on its way! Learn to love the colorful language used to describe the human body!

Or, you could just stop forwarding emails and save yourself, and your friends, the trouble of a box full of spam everytime they turn on their computer. You could, but you won’t.

At least, this is what the article by the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail would have you believe. Apparently a well-liked teacher at St John’s C of E School in Midsomer Norton, Somerset read a few passages from the end of the final Harry Potter book. These passages were selected by the teacher to be read to her graduating class because she felt the content pertained to her students graduating and moving on with their lives, much like the characters in the book. However some students did not see it this way.

A few students and parents are quoted as being upset by the spoiler, but the real amazement comes not from the fact that the teacher read the end of a popular book, but how Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations reacted to the event. Morrissey said of the teacher that ”it was unforgivable. It’s one of the cruelest things she could have done, even if she didn’t mean it.” Funny, because I can think of hundreds of things more cruel than reading the end of a book to some children, one of which includes trying to ruin a respected teachers career for making a minor, if unimportant mistake.

Margaret Morrissey went on to say that “this act will probably stop all those children [from] reading the book.” Unfortunately for Miss Morrissey, this viewpoint is severely out of touch with reality. Now, few people would deny that reading the end of a book is impolite, but any true fan of the Harry Potter series won’t let a few minor spoilers stop them from reading all 607 pages (759 in the US) of the final installment of their beloved book series.

In light of this being a simple error in judgement, and absolutely no harm was done to these children mentally or physically, I believe it is Miss Morrissey who has done the real harm in this situation. Hopefully Margaret will apologize to the teacher, who I will not name, and the parents and students will go on with their lives instead of feeling like victims of a crime.

Does this website scare you? It does? Wow, how old are you? It just has a little tree and some clouds. Seriously now, you’re scared of some clouds?  Grow up, really.