Graduates get sentenced to community service for parents exuberance

Although I agree with the consequences of the woman from South Carolina I do not agree with this, punishing the kids for the parents ignorant actions. – Phoebe

Pomp and consequence: Officials crack down on outbursts at graduations

By Joshua Rhett Miller  Published June 06, 2012

In Cincinnati, a popular football star has his high school diploma withheld when the commencement crowd cheers too heartily for him. In South Carolina, a proud mom got arrested after getting too loud at her daughter’s graduation.

Perhaps it’s the schools, or maybe it’s the audience, but as graduation season takes hold, it seems clear someone is overreacting. In both cases, officials defended the harsh punishments, saying too much noise for one grad means the next one’s fans can’t hear his or her name. Etiquette experts who talked to FoxNews.com couldn’t address the specifics of either case, but universally lamented what they see as an increasing lack of decorum at public events.

“It takes away from the other graduates and certainly is an intrusion on the ceremony,” Georgia-based etiquette expert Lydia Ramsey told FoxNews.com. “It’s not time for whistling and loud cheering.”

Ramsey — author of “Manners That Sell” — said disciplining the student in either incident was “totally inappropriate,” but said people ought to know to remain solemn and respectful at formal ceremonies like graduations.

“Now that this is happening and we are seeing these incidents, it’s now going to require that there be something either stated at the beginning of the ceremony or in print outlining what is appropriate at a graduation and what is not,” Ramsey told FoxNews.com. “It is like any other meeting when someone has to stand up and say, ‘Turn off your cellphones.’ They now have to be told.”

In the Ohio case, Mount Healthy City School Superintendent Lori Handler, who did not return a request for comment on Wednesday, told WCPO-TV that extended cheering for football player Anthony Cornist disrupted the May 24 ceremony at Mount Healthy Senior High School in Cincinnati.

“Americans are just … I don’t think they know the difference between formal ceremonies and sporting events. We’ve gotten a little too casual.”

– Patricia Napier-Fitzpatrick, etiquette coach

The boy’s mother, meanwhile, has said the cheering wasn’t disruptive, and said her son shouldn’t have been penalized for the vocal support. Cornist has legally graduated, but he will not receive his diploma until he completes 20 hours of community service, WCPO-TV reports.

And Cornist was not the only student to not receive his diploma that day — three other graduates’ diplomas were held for their families’ cheering as well. Those students received the similar community service punishments.

In Florence, S.C., police said they warned attendees prior to the graduation ceremony at Florence High School that anyone who cheered or screamed would be escorted from the venue. And while not commenting on the case of Shannon Cooper directly, police told WPDE-TV that those who were disorderly as they were escorted out of Saturday’s ceremony were arrested.

Cooper, who was booked into jail for several hours before posting $225 bond, told the station she was wrongfully arrested.

“Disorderly conduct? What’s the disorderly conduct?” she said. “How was I so disorderly, you know, any different from just a happy parent? I didn’t resist arrest, nothing.”

Karen Scarfo, a Connecticut-based etiquette coach, said cheering within reason is absolutely acceptable, but noted that a common sense approach is the best bet for parents.

“I get excited when I see my kids accomplishing things; however, you need to keep it in check,” Scarfo told FoxNews.com. “Look around you and see who you are with, yelling and screaming is not acceptable behavior. Parents are borderline rude; other people should not have to be subjected to people who are out of control.”

Patricia Napier-Fitzpatrick, founder and director of the Etiquette School of New York, said both incidents are indicative of something larger at play within America.

“We are a very boisterous society, very enthusiastic to the extreme, whereas in most countries outside of the United States, they would never act like that at a graduation ceremony,” she told FoxNews.com. “Americans are just … I don’t think they know the difference between formal ceremonies and sporting events. We’ve gotten a little too casual.”

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/06/graduation-disruptions-part-changing-sense-us-decorum-etiquette-coaches-say/?test=latestnews#ixzz1x4TLzx1Y

 

Famed science fiction author Ray Bradbury dead at 91

Published June 06, 2012

     

Ray Bradbury, the science fiction-fantasy master who transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters, and, in uncanny detail, the high-tech, book-burning future of “Fahrenheit 451,” has died. He was 91.

He died Tuesday night, his daughter said Wednesday. Alexandra Bradbury did not have additional details.

Although slowed in recent years by a stroke that meant he had to use a wheelchair, Bradbury remained active into his 90s, turning out new novels, plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry. He wrote every day in the basement office of his Cheviot Hills home and appeared from time to time at bookstores, public library fundraisers and other literary events around Los Angeles.

His writings ranged from horror and mystery to humor and sympathetic stories about the Irish, blacks and Mexican-Americans. Bradbury also scripted John Huston’s 1956 film version of “Moby Dick” and wrote for “The Twilight Zone” and other television programs, including “The Ray Bradbury Theater,” for which he adapted dozens of his works.

“What I have always been is a hybrid author,” Bradbury said in 2009. “I am completely in love with movies, and I am completely in love with theater, and I am completely in love with libraries.”

Bradbury broke through in 1950 with “The Martian Chronicles,” a series of intertwined stories that satirized capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonizers destroying an idyllic Martian civilization.

Like Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” and the Robert Wise film “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” Bradbury’s book was a Cold War morality tale in which imagined lives on other planets serve as commentary on human behavior on Earth. “The Martian Chronicles” has been published in more than 30 languages, was made into a TV miniseries and inspired a computer game.

“The Martian Chronicles” prophesized the banning of books, especially works of fantasy, a theme Bradbury would take on fully in the 1953 release, “Fahrenheit 451.” Inspired by the Cold War, the rise of television and the author’s passion for libraries, it was an apocalyptic narrative of nuclear war abroad and empty pleasure at home, with firefighters assigned to burn books instead of putting blazes out (451 degrees Fahrenheit, Bradbury had been told, was the temperature at which texts went up in flames).

It was Bradbury’s only true science-fiction work, according to the author, who said all his other works should have been classified as fantasy. “It was a book based on real facts and also on my hatred for people who burn books,” he told The Associated Press in 2002.

A futuristic classic often taught alongside George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” Bradbury’s novel anticipated iPods, interactive television, electronic surveillance and live, sensational media events, including televised police pursuits. Francois Truffaut directed a 1966 movie version and the book’s title was referenced — without Bradbury’s permission, the author complained — for Michael Moore’s documentary “Fahrenheit 9-11.”

Although involved in many futuristic projects, including the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and the Spaceship Earth display at Walt Disney World in Florida, Bradbury was deeply attached to the past. He refused to drive a car or fly, telling the AP that witnessing a fatal traffic accident as a child left behind a permanent fear of automobiles. In his younger years, he got around by bicycle or roller-skates.

“I’m not afraid of machines,” he told Writer’s Digest in 1976. “I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.”

Bradbury’s literary style was honed in pulp magazines and influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and he became the rare science fiction writer treated seriously by the literary world. In 2007, he received a special Pulitzer Prize citation “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” Seven years earlier, he received an honorary National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honor given to Philip Roth and Arthur Miller among others.

“Everything I’ve done is a surprise, a wonderful surprise,” Bradbury said during his acceptance speech in 2000. “I sometimes get up at night when I can’t sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, `My God, did I write that? Did I write that?’, because it’s still a surprise.”

Other honors included an Academy Award nomination for an animated film, “Icarus Montgolfier Wright,” and an Emmy for his teleplay of “The Halloween Tree.” His fame even extended to the moon, where Apollo astronauts named a crater “Dandelion Crater,” in honor of “Dandelion Wine,” his beloved coming-of-age novel, and an asteroid was named 9766 Bradbury.

Born Ray Douglas Bradbury on Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill., the author once described himself as “that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all.” He claimed to have total recall of his life, dating even to his final weeks in his mother’s womb.

His father, Leonard, a power company lineman, was a descendant of Mary Bradbury, who was tried for witchcraft at Salem, Mass. The author’s mother, Esther, read him the “Wizard of Oz.” His Aunt Neva introduced him to Edgar Allan Poe and gave him a love of autumn, with its pumpkin picking and Halloween costumes.

“If I could have chosen my birthday, Halloween would be it,” he said over the years.

Nightmares that plagued him as a boy also stocked his imagination, as did his youthful delight with the Buck Rogers and Tarzan comic strips, early horror films, Tom Swift adventure books and the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

“The great thing about my life is that everything I’ve done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13,” he said in 1982.

Bradbury’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1934. He became a movie buff and a voracious reader. “I never went to college, so I went to the library,” he explained.

He tried to write at least 1,000 words a day, and sold his first story in 1941. He submitted work to pulp magazines until he was finally accepted by such upscale publications as The New Yorker. Bradbury’s first book, a short story collection called “Dark Carnival,” was published in 1947.

He was so poor during those years that he didn’t have an office or even a telephone. “When the phone rang in the gas station right across the alley from our house, I’d run to answer it,” he said.

He wrote “Fahrenheit 451” at the UCLA library, on typewriters that rented for 10 cents a half hour. He said he carried a sack full of dimes to the library and completed the book in nine days, at a cost of $9.80.

Few writers could match the inventiveness of his plots: A boy outwits a vampire by stuffing him with silver coins; a dinosaur mistakes a fog horn for a mating call (filmed as “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms”); Ernest Hemingway is flown back to life on a time machine. In “The Illustrated Man,” one of his most famous stories, a man’s tattoo foretells a horrifying deed — he will murder his wife.

A dynamic speaker with a booming, distinctive voice, he could be blunt and gruff. But Bradbury was also a gregarious and friendly man, approachable in public and often generous with his time to readers as well as fellow writers.

In 2009, at a lecture celebrating the first anniversary of a small library in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley, Bradbury exhorted his listeners to live their lives as he said he had lived his: “Do what you love and love what you do.”

“If someone tells you to do something for money, tell them to go to hell,” he shouted to raucous applause.

Until near the end of his life, Bradbury resisted one of the innovations he helped anticipate: electronic books, likening them to burnt metal and urging readers to stick to the old-fashioned pleasures of ink and paper. But in late 2011, as the rights to “Fahrenheit 451” were up for renewal, he gave in and allowed his most famous novel to come out in digital form. In return, he received a great deal of money and a special promise from Simon & Schuster: The publisher agreed to make the e-book available to libraries, the only Simon & Schuster e-book at the time that library patrons were allowed to download.

Bradbury is survived by his four daughters. Marguerite Bradbury, his wife of 56 years, died in 2003.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/06/06/famed-science-fiction-fantasy-writer-ray-bradbury-dead-at-1/#ixzz1x1pHtAIX

Survivalist Reality Show Winner to Get Own Bunker

“These are not people that you may think are living in a shelter in the middle of the woods,” Spike exec says. “These could be your friends”

By DAVID BAUDER  Wednesday, Jun 6, 2012

The Spike television network is airing a competition this fall to award a fortified bunker to a family that believes the end of the world is near.

Seriously.

The network said Tuesday that its six-episode series called “Last Family on Earth” will feature survivalists competing to show how tough and resourceful they are. The winner gets an underground bunker in an undisclosed location.

Sharon Levy, executive vice president of original programming at Spike, said the series doesn’t necessarily coincide with the theory that the ancient Mayan civilization predicted the end of the world will arrive in December 2012.

Levy said polls show that many people believe that there will be some catastrophic event like an earthquake or epidemic that threatens civilization, and these are the people who will participate in the show.

“We don’t think there’s anything funny about that,” Levy said. “We think it’s a very interesting segment of the population that is very prepared, is highly intelligent. These are regular people. These are not people that you may think are living in a shelter in the middle of the woods. These could be your friends.

“We’re taking it very seriously,” she said. “We know they’re taking it very seriously, and we think it’s going to be incredibly riveting.”

Viewers will also learn useful information about survival skills, she said.

Winners will be selected by a panel of survival experts, with viewers given a say through social media. The families involved and the judges haven’t been selected for the series, produced by reality TV maven Craig Piligian and Pilgrim Studios.

Levy wouldn’t say how much the bunker will cost.

Although only six episodes have been ordered, Levy said there’s no reason that “Last Family on Earth” couldn’t last several seasons if it’s successful.

That will presume, of course, that the world doesn’t end in December.

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/entertainment/television/Survivalist-Reality-Show-Winner-to-Get-Own-Bunker-Last-Family-On-Earth-157451665.html