Proud Alum

My high school:

A substitute teacher was charged with disorderly conduct Monday after she allegedly lashed out at a group of Gaithersburg high school students for using words in Arabic while practicing a commemorative speech to mark the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Montgomery County police say Carol J. McVey, 49, began screaming at the group of Gaithersburg High School students and one of their teachers for saying "assalamu alaikum" -- a greeting that means peace be with you -- while they rehearsed the speech in a classroom.

Police said McVey, of Olney, began yelling at the students and their teacher.

"Islam doesn't mean peace, it means killing everyone for peace," she told them, according to a charging document.

Place has gone to hell since Dave Sampselle took his transcendentalism and existentialism class first to Damascus then Watkins Mill.

Landru, gird yourself and click HERE.

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Update: When skipping class, one place we'd hang out is White's Ferry, whose owner, it says in today's Washington Post, is in a nasty licensing squabble with the Coast Guard:

The penalties risked by the 70-year-old family-run service, known as White's Ferry, were not trifling, either. U.S. Coast Guard officials said yesterday that investigators were considering seeking criminal charges and fines that could run into the thousands of dollars per trip for allowing an unlicensed mariner to operate the ferry and disobeying an order to terminate a voyage.

But that did not seem to rattle the ferry's owner, Edwin Brown, who bought the ferry in 1946 and christened its first wooden barge in honor of the flamboyant cavalry officer whose great-niece was a regular passenger.

"It'll be a cold day in hell before they collect any money from me," Brown, 86, said yesterday, adding that he had made his fortune defending property owners in eminent-domain disputes with the authorities. "I have never had any fear of the government."

Hah! First Needwood Dam is almost breached, now White's Ferry almost beached. That leaves Sugarloaf, the naval of school-cutting as (I pray) unthreatened this year by nature and man. Clearly, my adult failure to irresponsibly call in sick is wrecking havoc on sacred places.