this pair of nice boobies[].
A pair of blue-footed boobies in the Galapagos Islands by Eugene on Flickr
It seems the planned Australian Filter has hit mainstream news. Not that I watch much of that, but it’s been bubbling around the intarwebs for a while.
I always think about the false positives that are going to happen. The biggest area, in my mind, that will be affected is the birds. No more nice boobies. Admittedly, there are a few bird names that kids giggle over.
It reminds me of when I was much younger and we only had books. We used to look words up in the dictionary. You can be sure I would have been googling words, but we were fairly limited. I mean, I remember looking up the word ‘fart‘ only to find it’s definition was sadly lacking and puritan: an explosion between the legs. WTF? I mean, there’s way more to it than that, but that was the only definition we had.
The other incident that springs to mind when I think about this is when I was working in a regional uni and introducing school kids to this new fangled internet. It would have been 1998/9. I was watching a group of young girls looking up the Spice Girls. Innocent enough, but the search also returned ‘spicy girls’ – not exactly what they were looking for. After they clicked on one link and got something that was, to them, rather disappointing, the student teacher who was working directly with them totally freaked out. I think she almost wanted to put herself between these innocent children and these images. As I was standing behind the group at the time, I leaned over to the girls and said something like, oh bother, that’s not what you want, hit the back button. The kids were very happy to comply because they didn’t want that, they had more sense than the student teacher! It wasn’t a big deal to them. They knew what they wanted!
It still peeves me that that woman will be transferring her puritan ideals to a whole new group of children. Please think of the children, let them grow and explore. Let them find the information they need to become well adjusted. Don’t block their access to everything!
