Wheat-dogg’s world
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Although her situation in Kuwait is still far from resolved, Katherine Phillips has at least been allowed to leave the country to stay with her parents. Late last month, Phillips, a US educator working in Kuwait, had been banned from leaving the emirate while an angry parent conducted a vendetta against her.

In a letter to the International Schools Review, which had publicized her plight, Phillips  said she had received a text message on her phone that the travel ban had been lifted. Since an earlier lifting had been rescinded, she chose to leave Kuwait immediately. (The complete letter is at the ISR site.)

Meanwhile, she has been officially banned from traveling to any of the Gulf Coast countries, which are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Ministry of Education in Kuwait has also instituted a ban against non-Kuwaitis serving in administrative positions in Kuwaiti schools.

You would think with such a frantic governmental response, Phillips had been charged with child molestation or murder. In fact, according to her and another person close to the situation, she was just following the school’s disciplinary handbook, which all parents presumably signed off on.

In fact, Phillips had sent three fifth-grade boys to in-school suspension last year for fighting in Al Bayan Bilingual School , where she was a deputy principal. Within short order, one of the parents, an influential Kuwaiti, called her on the phone to blast her with insults and threats. She was then charged with “unlawful imprisonment” and prevented from leaving the country.

My operatives in the field have reported that in some browsers (namely Infernal Explorer), my pearls of prose are invisible. Applications of lemon juice and ultraviolet light are to no avail. Being a Linux user, and therefore a Firefox or Opera user, I was blissfully unaware of this potentially dangerous situation.

After some quick research into cascading style-sheets (CSS) and the aforementioned Infernal Explorer, it appears that the CSS for my WordPress theme did not specify the font color for the story content. It seems that IE assumes in such a case that the color is, by default, white. OK, but not so great when the background is also white. Other browsers, however, assume the font color is black. So, Firefox and Opera users could read my posts. IE-dependent types could not.

Now, I want everyone, even the IE-handicapped, to view this blog. So, I have modified the CSS to specify that the story font is in fact black. I also changed the font specification, since the original spec was not all that readable. I hope that will correctly solve The Disappearing Letters Affair.

Anyone who can tell me to which 1960s TV show the title of this post alludes will get a special mention here. That’s all. Sorry, I have no prizes to give away. [Hint: one of the leads in that ’60s show is now a member of the NCIS cast.]

So, we’ve been living in southern Indiana, on the sunny side of the Ohio River from Louavul, for six months now. On Friday, my youngest and I decided it was time we got our Indiana driver’s licenses.In my book, that makes me an official resident of the State of Indiana. While I have lived in several places, this DL is only my fourth (after NY, WY and KY — notice how I lost the Y finally), so its acquisition is kind of significant.

In order to obtain an Indiana DL, you need to take a fill-in-the-bubble test. We took it without any previous preparation, because I was under the mistaken impression that KY residents did not need to take the test.

Anyway, it was a piece of cake for both of us. I only missed one question, and James three, out of 50. The multiple-choice responses were worded to make the correct ones obvious (pick the longest one), and some of the questions were painfully stupid. (When a school bus on a two-lane road flashes its red lights and extends its stop sign, which of the following is the correct response? …)

Megan, my BMV clerk, congratulated me on my high score, and said that I’d be surprised how many people fail the test on the first try. I responded by saying that might explain why there were so many bad drivers.

But, if we analyze the situation further, the low passing rate (based on anecdotal evidence, to be sure) points to some deeper issues.