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A Massachusetts principal recently threatened to suspend any student who said a certain word.

What horrible obscenity could cause such a blanket threat?

Meep.

Meep?

Meep.

No, I'm not self-censoring here. The offending word is m-e-e-p. Meep. What's it mean? Apparently, whatever you want it to mean. It's one of those fads that got started somewhere then picked up steam online. Consensus appears that it the genesis was Beaker, a Sesame Street character. Teens, especially, like using the word - probably because grownups don't understand it.

The principal said he ordinarily wouldn't take such a drastic step, but he had gotten wind that students were planning a school-wide disruption involving the word.

Meep?

It's not all health care, politics and gay rights here at the RT.  I and another member of the editorial board (who can identify himself or herself) were discussing an upcoming editorial. "Today is a good day to die" was suggested as a headline.  I argued it would be a wonderful headline that would be sure to grab readers' attention.  Needless to say, we didn't use it.

But we did get to talking about Klingons and other fictional aliens.  I suggested Klingons are easily top-five ever.  Then Cyclons and Daleks entered the discussion.

I'm hedging on my initial claim. There are a lot of really good alien races out there.  I still think Klingons will ultimately make the cut, but I have to consider it some more.

What do you all say?  What are the best alien races ever?

(And please, just have fun with this thread. It's categorized diversion for a reason.  Let's not descend into the typical partisan arguments.  No comments about illegal aliens, or likening liberals to Vogons or conservatives to the Borg.)

Virginia doesn't top the list of the happiest states, but in 15th place we aren't exactly depressed.

According to this MSNBC story, Utah has the happiest people, perhaps because there are more conservatives and right-leaning people tend to be happier. (You wouldn't know that from reading this blog.)

Overall, researchers said states topping the happiness list were those with with a more educated population, higher incomes and diverse populations that accepted differences.

Having lived in a few places, I have found that communities do reflect the happiness (or depressed) levels of their residents. How happy of place do you think Virginia or your locality is in relation to others? What factors do you think play a role. And, please, I beg of you, do not make this simply about conservatives and liberals.

We've all seen heart-rendering scenes of veterans returning home to children, husbands or wives and parents after a long, dangerous tour of duty.

Here, though, is another collection of homecoming videos, of soldiers being greeted by four-legged loved ones.

The last video on the page is for non-dog people: It's soldiers surprising their children at school.

Happy Veteran's Day.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is a strong defender of First Amendment rights when he sits on the court; not so much, perhaps, when he's out from behind the bench.

The New York Times reports that the student newspaper at a private school in Manhattan was unable to publish a timely account of a talk Kennedy gave to high school students in October "due to numerous publication constraints." The constraints proved to be a request by Kennedy's office to approve the story before it ran to make sure that quotes attributed to him were accurate.

That's not real-world journalism in a society with a free press. Yes, journalists want their stories to be accurate. Fact-checking is a routine part of reporting and editing. But handing a story over to a source for editing is a constraint on journalists' ability to report accurately -- not what someone wished he had said, or meant to say, but actually said.

The justice declined an interview, so it's not clear whether he knew of the request by his office -- which, by the way, returned the story, with quotations "tidied up," for later publication.

Apple has taken heat for some of the iPhones applications it has rejected for less than good cause (a Nine Inch Nails app was rejected for profanity - even though the iTunes store sells Nine Inch Nails songs, which contain plenty of rough language), and for applications it accepted but should have rejected (did you hear about the shaken baby app?).

The latest rejected app, though, is inexplicable. MAD magazine artist Tom Richmond had teamed up with a programmer to create an app that would make it easy to contact your congressman. To make it fun, the programmer got Richmond to draw caricatures of every member of Congress (all 540 - counting the nonvoting members). The app presented them as bobblehead dolls whose heads would wobble when the phone was shaken. Cute, but, as Richmond says, "that’s just a novelty, and the real purpose of the app is the database that allows you to find out who your representatives in Washington are and how to contact them."

So why was the app rejected? According to Apple, it was rejected "because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section  3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

Apple's been known to change its mind once a rejection has been exposed as ludicrous. Hopefully, there will be enough controversy over this to convince Apple it made a bad call.

See some of the "obscene, pornographic or defamatory" caricatures by following this link.

... who's to say they can't take your healthy appendix tomorrow and eat it in front of you and your children?"

Jon Stewart channels Glenn Beck, and it's hilarious:

First Oprah, then Roanoke. Yes, the Star City is one of the confirmed stops on Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" book tour, according to an Associated Press story posted on our breaking news site.

Palin is shunning the bright lights of the nation's big cities and is planning to drop by smaller, more Republican friendly towns.

Do any of you plan to read her book or turn out to see her again?

There's a fascinating piece up at Slate.com about Ayn Rand. It superficially is about two recent biographies of the author of "The Fountainhead," "Atlas Shrugged" and other works. In reality, it's about the writer herself, how she came to her beliefs and the people who subscribe to them.

Most people who get suckered into her me-first theories outgrow them. Too many do not, including, I'd wager, a fair number of readers of this blog.

Like her writing or not, the fact is that Rand has had a profound influence on a lot of Americans. It's worth your time to find out a little about her and where her worldview came from.

Or, if you have a few hours to kill, go play Bioshock and you'll get the gist of it and probably have more fun.

Ayn Rand person who invent objectivism. If you not know what it is, is basically philosophy of Dark Side from Star Wars only somehow it also about money. (The Barbarian, from his review of Bioshock.)

It's health care benefits sign-up time around here at the RT, where we're still lucky enough to have them, and the talk this year is of edging toward plans that are less costly for people who do what they can to stay healthy. The emphasis is on preventive care: wellness checkups, smoking cessation -- maybe someday a person's BMI, or body mass index, a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Uh-oh.

That, I suppose, is why I had a more than passing interest in a story that ran last week in USA Today: A then-and-now survey of New York City diners showed that the city's pioneering menu-labeling law (which since March 2008 has required chain restaurants to display the number of calories in their menu offerings) has helped the willing cut down. I say the willing because a little more than half the people surveyed said they saw the calorie postings, but only 15 percent said they actually used the information.

Still, those who did bought food that averaged 754 calories for lunch in 2009, compared to 860 calories for those who didn't see the information or ignored it. "The overall calories purchased decreased at nine chains between 2007 and 2009," the newspaper reported, "including dropping significantly at McDonald's, Au Bon Pain, KFC and Starbucks."

The findings are more hopeful than an earlier and much smaller study that suggested that people who noticed the calories and took them into account said they made healthier choices, but actually made worse ones.

Yeow. If only just wanting to could change us.