Lead Stories
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The for-profit school-administration company Edison Schools Inc., reportedly low on cash (its stock is currently worth around a dollar a share, down from $36 in February 2001), tried to cut corners this fall in its management of 20 chronically underperforming Philadelphia high schools. According to an October dispatch in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Edison sold off newly ordered textbooks, computers, lab supplies, and musical instruments; briefly moved some of its Philadelphia executives out of company headquarters and into vacant schoolrooms, trying to save on rent; and suggested that students could acquire valuable experience (as well as cut down on the number of salaried adults) if they worked an hour a day for free in school offices. (The school board, to its credit, would have nothing to do with the proposal.)
Scheduled to marry in December in Flint, Michigan: Ms. Laura Kah and Mr. Scott Boom (she’ll take his name, however, rather than hyphenating). And in August the Santa Cruz Sentinel published a story on the decline in the town’s hippie population since the mid-70s; among its subjects were men who’d legally changed their names to Climbing Sun, Shalom Dreampeace Compost, and (no last name) Chip. (Sundancer Sweetpea and Darting Hummingbird Over a Waterfall were not available.)
Over the past 20 years, retired graphic designer J. Jules Vitali of Freeport, Maine, has created more than 1,000 small pieces of sculpture, each carved from a single foam polystyrene cup with the same worn Craftsman pocketknife. He first took up his craft while bored at a meeting and toying with his Styrofoam coffee cup; these days some of his sculptures are cast in bronze or decorated with flourishes of acrylic paint, and an exhibit of his “Styrogami,” with pieces priced up to $800, is currently on display at the University of Southern Maine.
