Search the Community

I have been helping HBO's news program LAST WEEK TONIGHT research a matter relevant to my profession and to our shared interest: namely, misrepresentations made by legislators in numerous US states, in order to require cursive. That I dislike so much about cursive-as-we-know-it is not the point of the program — the point is that the cursive boosters are systematically misrepresenting research documentation in order to make the documentation support cursive. This has been going on for a couple of years now, as you may know, in a number of state legislatures and school boards where various organizations and lobbies are "working with" state legislatures to have those legislators present — under oath — misstatements on handwriting as fact because such misstatements are necessary in order to promote cursive. The legislators, in bills they introduce & in hearings/testimony on those bills, misquote research they cite — and make other documentable misrepresentations — which the salesmen for certain textbook companies, as well as pressure-groups such as "Campaign for Cursive" (yes, an actual group!) are presenting to the legislators as fact. In some cases, it gets worse, and the legislators involved have not been "fed" anything by lobbyists, but have outright and unashamedly been making up THEIR OWN facts.) This is why the LAST WEEK TONIGHT researcher, Liz Day, phoned me yesterday for help (she'd been reading things I post as blog-comments on the Net, as well as news-pieces citing me, and had also seen state-legislature footage that showed people who were under oath, stating "facts" that were easily documented as being misrepresentations of the stuff that these people claimed to be quoting or citing), so I have spent today and tonight getting together all the documentation to send to her. So I MAY get on TV ... Or at least, my information will, and I will apparently be credited in some way. The episode airs on Saturday, November 2, 11:00 PM Eastern time.

Hi fellow FPNers, Just spotted this on our favourite auction site. Seller is claiming it to be a plum, our very own Bruce has some serious misgivings (and who better to ask, hmm?). So, throwing it into the lions den... http://www.ebay.com/itm/171386763746?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649