From cnn.com:
(http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/11/11/nz.text.ap/index.html)

New Zealand students may ‘text-speak’ in exams

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand’s high school students will be able to use “text-speak” — the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers — in national exams this year, officials said.

Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as “txt” for “text”, “lol” for “laughing out loud” or “lots of love,” and “CU” for “see you.”

The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.

New Zealand’s Qualifications Authority said Friday that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer “clearly shows the required understanding,” even if it contains text-speak.

The authority’s deputy chief executive for qualifications, Bali Haque, said students should aim to make their answers as clear as possible.

Confident that those grading papers would understand answers written in text-speak, Haque stressed that in some exams, including English, text abbreviations would be penalized.

I’ve been surfing the wedding registry of someone I know who’s about to get married. Some of the things they registered for are the usual–sheet sets, ovenware, toaster.

But how about these items?

Biolage 8 oz shampoo
Biologe 3.9 oz shine renewal
Cascade Gel 75 oz, lemon scent
Elton John’s Greatest Hits
Hangers, 6 pk, plastic
Bandaid 20 count
South Park, season 5
Lint brush
Febreeze 27 oz pet odor eliminator
SNL Best of Will Ferrell
Conair Ceramic Ionic Hairdryer
Dumb and Dumber

A wedding registry is supposed to help friends and family members know what types of gifts would help the new couple set up their new home together, right? Okay, so then maybe I can see the Cascade and the Bandaids. Maybe even the shampoo.

But South Park? A hairdryer? Will Ferrell?

Well, shoot, according to the registry someone has already given them the set of plastic hangers they wanted.

That’s okay, though; I already know what I am giving the couple. Something out of my closet of “re-gift items.” And it probably isn’t going to be Elton John’s Greatest Hits.

The cubicle walls are very thin where I work. In some cases this is good, like when the video crew next door is watching The Office. In other cases, I learn more about modern dating strategies than I care to.

On the other side of my cubicle is a group of student employees, including some single young men. One of them has fallen in love with a girl he sees on campus sometimes at random intervals. Now, if you’ve been a student at the Y in the past 10 years you know about the stalking possibilities on Route Y, and you know how many students do it. (Although, to the Y’s credit, I think they’ve made this more difficult by removing some of the contact information for students.) The guy next to me has gone above and beyond regular Route Y stalking and managed to track down the girl via Facebook.

One of his coworkers asked him, “How do you meet a girl on Facebook?”

He replied, “You don’t. Case in point: One time I wrote a girl on Facebook that I had seen her in a band, because I thought the music was cool and she was cool, and the next day she blocked me. I guess it kind of freaked her out.”

And then he explained how he tracked the girl down: by checking his friends’ pages on Facebook and then following their links to other students’ pages, going from link to link until he found the girl’s Facebook page.

I’m telling you, people: this is BYU stalking taken to a whole new level.

He keeps talking about how awesome this girl is, how much he has in common with her (based on her profile on Facebook). Apparently, the girl has gone to Kenya, loves the outdoors, and likes the same movies as the guy next to me does.

The next step of stalking, of course, is to go up and talk to the girl when he sees her on campus. His coworker (also single) tried to get in on the game, too. He said, “Yeah, the next time you’ll see her will be here at work because I’ll bring her in when I’m dating her.”

Then his coworker, trying to be more helpful, had an idea:

“Write your name and number on a slip of paper, walk up to her, slip it in her pocket, and kiss her on the cheek. She’ll never know what hit her.”

(…Or maybe he won’t know what hit him when she slaps him….)

I don’t know what the guy will end up doing, but this reminds me of my brother who has also met girls in some unusual places. My favorite is when he got the phone number of a cute girl he saw at the temple. I guess his favorite is the girl who came to his physics class to take a survey, whom he later asked out over email, who’s now his wife.

I don’t know. Maybe things will work out for Facebook Guy, too. It’d be a great story to tell his grandkids, and would be another success story of the great tradition of Y stalking.

I just heard an ad on the radio for Pet Poo Cleaners, a company in the Salt Lake area that, well, cleans pet poo.

Their slogan? “Your pet’s business is our business.”

To prove that I’m not making this up, here is their Web address.

Oh, did I mention their telephone number?

501-poop.