A Gift Perfect for Christmas in Siberia

We all know that Hoth is a fictional planet (right?), but in reality the weather can get rather cold and geeks don't have anyone to sleep with.

Enter the Tauntaun sleeping bag!

No longer will the nights of frostbite and solace triumph. The mighty Tauntaun with its horrendous smelling insides will gladly encompass you in a womb full of warmth and the feeling on an intimate relationship with something that has hair.

Plus, it's a steal at $99.99 and it won't tie you up to the bedposts and steal your credit cards!

Tauntaun Sleeping Bag: thinkgeek.com

(The above snark does not apply to 11-year-olds like pictured above, or at least not yet.)

Youth of ... Australia?

In sharp contrast to the creepy kid who declared his fondness of the shelled reptiles, a young boy in Sydney, Australia showed the world just how doomed our future really is.

This child of only seven years whose name was not released (likely name: Damien or Mikey if evil child movies are to be believed), unleashed an unspeakable horror on the Alice Springs Reptile Center and left the remains of 13 animals in his wake.

The child then went on a killing spree, bashing three lizards to death with a rock, including the zoo's beloved, 20-year-old goanna, which he then fed to "Terry," an 11-foot, 440-pound saltwater crocodile, said Neindorf.

The boy also fed several live animals to Terry by throwing them over the two fences surrounding the crocodile's enclosure, at one point climbing over the outer fence to get closer to the giant reptile.

How does a 7-year-old go unattended long enough to do this? Where were the parents? How does he have the attention span to throw animals over two fences that he subsequently must climb to feed the alligator? Are we to assume he never played Zoo Tycoon?

If it was an older child, it would still be horrific but more plausible. I sincerely hope this kid is in some kind of A Clockwork Orange-ish social reconditioning for the sake of humanity. Let's hope he never gets a hamster.

AOL: Boy, 7, Breaks Into Zoo, Kills Animals

What's In a Name?

While cleaning out my drafts of unpublished posts, I discovered I actually wrote quite a bit for this one but just never finished it. Thus why the article is dated 1/1/2008.

I often wonder if the people who grow up with those weird (sorry, unique) names end up hating their parents with every fiber of their being for saddling them with such terrible names. Some parents are misguided and think every kid wants to stand out from the rest of their peers. Some parents are pushed into passing along a family name that should have died out generations ago. Some parents indulged in too many psychotropic drugs in their earlier stages of life.

Now, CNN illustrates some of the parents who realized the error in their ways and changed their child's name. While none of the couples in this story had given particularly odd-ball names to their children, perhaps this will be a lesson to those mothers who think the name they choose while heavily anesthetized will have staying power.

Some names however aren't too odd or uncommon, but just really horrible names. For example:

Bertha: Do you want your child to grow up to be overweight and featured on Cops or Jerry Springer (or both)?

Gertrude: What an excellent name! For a grandmother of 12 who smokes 2 packs a day. For a newborn? Not so excellent

Hunter: You might as well petition L.L. Bean for a lifetime supply of plaid overshirts

Demon: Yes, a real name I have seen. Why would you continue to go by this name?

Many more exist and have been previously mocked here, here, and here.

Toddler Left Behind in Airport, Macaulay Culkin Laughs

Somewhere, executives at 20th Century Fox are commissioning a writer to start immediately on Home Alone: The Prequel.

Jun Parreno and his family were stopped at a Vancouver airport to pick up a connecting flight to Winnipeg. Having only a short time to dash from one flight to the other, Parreno's 23-month-old was inexplicably abandoned in the airport as each of the adults assumed the young boy was with someone else.

It wasn't until the staff from Air Canada in Vancouver contacted the family did they realize the young tyke was not in tow. Air Canada covered the cost of two additional flights for the father to retrieve the boy.

While it is good the young child was reunited with his family, it is unfortunate that this happened at all. For all the bad rap that they get, this is one scenario that kid leashes could have prevented. Certainly being tethered is not as psychologically scarring as being abandoned.

Boyfriend Pimps out Teen, Mother Cool with It

Perhaps as a follow up piece, this entry should be called "Don't Force Your Babies to be Internet Sex Kittens."

Fox News reports Todd Barkau and a young girl's mother were arrested and charged with the commercial sex trafficking of the young girl starting when she was 12.

Barkau allegedly forced the girl to perform sexual acts not only with him but with other random guys as well that she learned from the regime of pornography she was exposed to. Later, Barkau turned to the internet to pass along the middle-schooler as a barely legal dominatrix.

Where was the mother during all this? She has been accused of assisting with the sexually deviant acts but also encouraging her child to go along with it. I wonder if this means she was more involved with the logistics of setting up and not actually with any of the action.

I would think a 44-year-old mother would be kind of cheesed if her boyfriend was preferring sex with her daughter but who knows?

In other news, Josef Fritzl now has new, albeit weak, competitors in the Worst Parent of the Year contest.

See also: Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Internet Sex Kittens

Don't Entrust Your Kids' Sexual Health to Bureaucrats

Kids grow up so fast these days. I remember when I was a wee one, terrorizing the hallowed halls of my middle school, days were consumed with how to sell more Blow-Pops and Airheads for buying movies, avoiding those freakish 7th-graders who were about five and a half feet tall towering over us dwarfins and then didn't grow for the rest of there lives, and skimming through books and magazines at 11 o'clock for a book report the following day. Now, I guess middle schoolers have to worry about "family planning."

The New York Times reports a school in Portland, Maine has approved to start offering a variety of wellness services such as physicals and immunizations ... oh, and dispensing birth control. The proposal was approved by 10 of the 12 member school board and was backed by the Portland Division of Public Health.

I suppose if one had to choose, it would be better for a 13-year-old to engage in safer intimate activity to prevent "fluid-sharing" and procreation than a less safe interaction. Of course, wouldn't it be better if barely teenagers were actually being directed in positive activities like their studies, after-school activities, or recreational drug use?

The school principal, Mike McCarthy, said about 5 of the school’s 500 students had identified themselves as being sexually active.

The argument for this is not to encourage sexual activity but to ensure those who are active are doing so safely. By this reasoning, we should expect to see in Portland the distribution of clean needles for heroin because it is safer?

Regardless, all this hubbub is being caused by 25 kids, probably living on the wrong side of the tracks (if such a place exists in Maine) who need nothing more than a stable and influential guiding figure in their life. Perhaps with all his free time Michael Vick could lend a hand to Big Brother, Big Sister.