And into the Tape Spool I'll Be Fed

Amy and I are not going to have children, so we don't have to worry about ever losing our teenager. Still, it seems the world has gone off the deep end when we treat teens as if they're shopping carts we want to keep from wandering off the Ralph's parking lot. Today there's this story from a rural town near Sacramento:

Parents of elementary and middle school students in a small California town are protesting a tracking program their school recently launched, which requires students to wear identification badges embedded with radio frequency, or RFID, chips.

It seems odd they don't just embed the chips directly into the teenagers--perhaps even in a permanent piercing. That would probably make it OK with most of them. Sure it's a horrible invasion of privacy, but it looks so cool!

A different story about the same issue also claims, "Principal Earnie Graham hopes to eventually add bar codes to the existing ID's so that students can use them to pay for cafeteria meals and check out library books." And to think for all these years I laughed off the Bar Code Conspiracists as loons akin to the Black Helicopter Fetishists.

Luckily, there is a Porky's angle to all of this Gitmo from the high school get-go, for the AP story asserts, "Graham also asked to have a chip reader installed in locker room bathrooms to reduce vandalism, although that reader is not functional yet."

Heh heh, to reduce vandalism.