We don’t want our children’s education impacted by meddling bureaucrats who waste our taxpayer dollars twice over on nanny-state dietary rules — once to fund “food police” who patrol school cafeterias and the second time to pay the fines for breaking the rules:

Davis High School has been fined $15,000 after they were caught selling soda pop during lunch hour, which is a violation of federal law.

The federally mandated law prohibits the sale of carbonated beverages after lunch is served. The program is an effort to help fight childhood obesity and to have young students make better food choices.

The principal of the school that now must pay the fine at the expense of music and arts education exposed the nonsensical rules. “We can sell a Snickers bar, but can’t sell licorice,” he said. “We can’t sell Swedish Fish, we can’t sell Starburst, we can’t sell Skittles, but we can sell ice cream, we can sell the Snickers bar, Milky Ways, all that stuff.”

This is the second time in three months that school food police have made news. The first time they were caught confiscating a child’s lunch from home.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

President Obama’s website team was busted this week for rewriting presidential history by inserting Obama-friendly text into the White House biographies of almost every president who has served dating back to the 1920s — 13 presidents in all.

That ego-driven messaging tactic created great fodder for this parody video of “America’s fourth-greatest president”:

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns knows how to tell stories. He has told them brilliantly about defining political and cultural moments in American history — the Civil War, the sport of baseball, jazz music, World War II, national parks and Prohibition.

Today in a short Washington Post film, Burns shared his thoughts about what makes a great story. Here are the highlights, with the film embedded below:

• “The common story is 1+1=2. … The real genuine stories are about 1 and 1 equaling three. … The things that matter most to us — some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason — is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
• “The stories that I like to tell are always interesting because the good guys have really serious flaws and the villains are very compelling. My interest is always in complicating things.”
• “All story is manipulation. … Is there acceptable manipulation you bet. People say, ‘Oh boy, I was so moved to tears in your film.’ That’s a good thing? I manipulated that. That’s part of storytelling. I didn’t do it disingenuously. I did it sincerely. I am moved by that, too. That’s manipulation.”
• “We tell stories to continue ourselves. We all think an exception is going to be made in our case, and we’re going to live forever. And being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that that’s not going to be. Story is there to just remind us that it’s just OK.”

All-you-can-eat specials have survived the test of culinary time because restaurants make a profit from them. But eventually some large redneck with a larger appetite is bound to make a diner pay for promising an endless supply of food for a set price.

Enter Bill Wisth, the 6-foot-6, 350-pound fish fan that Chuck’s Place in Thiensville, Wis., wishes it hadn’t caught on all-you-can-eat night:

Picking a fight with Wisth after he downed at least a dozen pieces of fish but wanted more probably wasn’t the best marketing tactic for Chuck’s Place. The family restaurant has had problems with Wisth before. This time, he decided to protest the restaurant’s decision to try to cap his food intake.

Word spread far beyond tiny Thiensville, as the story has been told by The Christian Post, Christian Science Monitor, Eater, Gawker, The Huffington Post, International Business Times, NPR, New York Magazine, UPI and many more news outlets.

“I can’t believe how slow a news day it is when they’re bringing camera crews out here,” Chuck’s Place owner Ted Hagen said. “… A radio station in Toronto said they’d give me $200 if I’d let him back in and they could film him eating the fish. I said, ‘I don’t think so.’”

A Facebook friend shared this illustration today. It’s funny and sad at the same time:

The message: Teach a man to fish … and the government will steal his fish.

If you know the origins of the image, please let me know in the comments so I can give proper credit and a link to the source.

I was born more than a decade before West Virginia University football players started sporting the current logo on their helmets, but I don’t remember seeing what came before the “Flying WV” we Mountaineers cherish today. Now I know the story behind that storied logo, which has made WVU “one of the top royalty-producing colleges in the country.”

Jake Stump of the WVU Alumni Magazine unearthed the details in what he called “hardnosed, investigative (ahem) journalism.” It all started in 1979 with the arrival of new football coach Don Nehlen to the campus. The old football uniform, helmet and logo, with “WVU” overlaying an outlined map of West Virginia, had no pizzazz, so Nehlen commissioned one to make a statement.

The details of the logo’s past remain murky even after Stump’s research because Nehlen and the other people behind the vision and the design don’t remember events exactly the same. But the story is fascinating anyway (at least for Mountaineers fans like me). Here’s the heart of it:

What we now know and love as the “Flying WV” was born on a sheet of wax paper. John Boyd Martin’s main inspiration? Mountains. Yes. West Virginia has mountains. WVU’s mascot is a mountaineer. Such an obvious fit.

“The first thing I did was play around with the initials,” Martin said. “When you put a W and a V together, you had mountains. They may call it the ‘Flying WV,’ but to me, it depicts mountains.”

As a graphic designer, Martin knew that successful corporations have “honest, simple” logos. Case in point: the Nike swoosh, the McDonald’s arches, and the Apple apple. The WVU logo would be simple. It would be a W and a V. Anything beyond that would’ve been overkill.

Three decades later, the “Flying WV” saturates the state of West Virginia and other pockets across the country wherever WVU fans can be found. As the story says:

Today, the emblem is not only on just those products. It’s on grave markers, toasters, fishing rods, golf carts, and waffle makers. There were even talks of making a Mountaineer Cola in the mid-1980s. Some diehard Mountaineer fans have it tattooed on their skin. Big-name celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Brad Paisley and Randy Moss have been spotted in WVU gear.

WVU has more than 500 licensees authorized to produce merchandise bearing WVU trademarks. Prominent companies include Nike, Perry Ellis, Tommy Hilfiger, Upper Deck, and Victoria’s Secret.

The bad news for John Boyd Martin: He only earned $200 from the design. But he is grateful to have played a key role in WVU and West Virginia history. “It’s an awesome feeling knowing you were able to make that kind of contribution to an institution of that magnitude,” Martin said. “Every time I watch a WVU game, I reflect back on something very special.”

When you attend the annual Milblog Conference, you can expect to hear defense hawks and the bloggers they love sniping at the media. But this year’s conference, hosted by Military.com for the first time and held over the weekend in Arlington, Va., featured a bonus — journalists sniping at each other.

The pointed but brief rhetorical clash between defense reporters Austin Wright of Politico and Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post occurred as the two pondered the changing media landscape. It got personal when Wright framed the discussion in the context of the rise of Politico and corresponding fall of the Post (as seen most recently in another round of buyouts and an 8 percent drop in revenue).

He credited Politico’s success in part to its mastery of “niche journalism.” “Politico specializes in politics, and if advertisers want to reach people in politics, they advertise in Politico. If people want to advertise to people who watch sports, they advertise in ESPN,” Wright said. “And it’s harder to figure out what the audience is for The Washington Post because it’s such a broad [audience]. I think it’s a really big problem.”

Jaffe’s journalistic hackles raised at that last comment:

I think we put out a product that’s significantly better than Politico, which I find very chatty and very reactive and doesn’t provide much context. It’s a publication for this tiny percentage of insiders and doesn’t have bureaus or newsrooms.

God, I hope there’s an audience for The Washington Post or our democracy is screwed. And if all we have is Politico, I think we’re really screwed because it’s just this inside echo chamber that drives me freaking nuts. Sorry to get angry.

Wright reassured the audience that he is a big fan of the Post but also took a dig at the competing publication: “I might be their youngest subscriber.”

“I love The Washington Post,” he added, “and I’ve been very sad to watch as it has been shrinking. But I do think that Politico does offer something that people want. We offer insider journalism for people that know politics. I think that’s extremely valuable, as we’ve seen. And even as Politico has had success, I don’t cheer on the demise of our competitors.”

James Dao of At War, a New York Times blog, also joined the discussion as part of a panel on the military and the media, and not surprisingly, he defended the “generalists” at publications like the Times and the Post.

“You can get sports; you can get business; you can get style; you can get news; you can get international news, etc.,” Dao said. “The death of papers means that people aren’t going to get that broad view of things. They’re not going to get a broad range of viewpoints.”

Ultimately, the panelists seemed to agree on one point: The expectations of today’s online readers have created a market for both brief, up-to-the-minute, blog-style coverage and long-form journalism. The 500-word story is the real loser.

“Swamp People” is quality entertainment for rednecks across America, and today we are mourning the loss of one of the reality show’s regulars. Mitchell Guist, one of two gray-bearded eccentric brothers on the History Channel series, died after a fall on his boat.

I first saw the news in an announcement posted on the Facebook page of “Swamp People,” along with the photo that I’ve reprinted here:

We are extremely saddened to report that our friend and beloved member of the “Swamp People” family, Mitchell Guist, has passed away earlier today. Mitchell passed on the swamp, doing what he loved. We appreciate your respect for the Guist family’s privacy and hope you join us in sending our thoughts and prayers to his brother, Glenn, and the rest of the Guist family.

Associated Press shared more details about the accident based on a report from the local sheriff. Guist fell “while aboard his boat on the Intracoastal Waterway, near Pierre Part. … Guist was traveling on Belle River around 9 a.m. when he fell. The boat returned to a nearby landing in St. Martin and Guist was taken to a hospital. The cause of his fall is unclear.”

Mitchell Guist and his brother, Glenn, didn’t appear on the show often, but they were a hoot whenever they did, whether hunting squirrels, catching gar or cooking crawfish. I didn’t like the Guist brothers’ salty language, but I will miss hearing the trademark Guist “oh, yee yah” in Mitchell’s voice.

I started my journalism career as a copy clerk and obituary writer at The Tampa Tribune and periodically dream of starting a business built around story-length, multimedia obituaries, so I appreciated this obit about a woman who made a career out of writing story obits:

[Gerry Hostetler] felt that there were many people whose stories deserved more than the bare essentials. “I would do an occasional obit-news story,” Gerry said, “and they became quite popular. That prompted me to envision a column with more information and, above all, more warmth.”

Gerry learned to cope with a grieving spouse by asking how the pair met. “Almost immediately, he or she was back in the moment and ended up laughing about their dates. I loved that! I always felt that listening to them reminisce was so healing for them. I loved writing these stories, which not only filled a deep need for our readers, but also fed my hunger to write.”

The kicker to the story: It was the last obit Gerry Hostetler ever wrote for the Charlotte Observer. She penned her own obit before her death from complications of a stroke.

We want to give our children the flexibility they need to be able to recognize their dreams, like 17-year-old Emily Vanasdale of Zanesville, Ohio. She is an Ohio winner of the National Center for Women and Information Technology Award:

Vanasdale has successfully created games and applications that earned rave reviews. Her most recent project was an Android app for the Restoration that featured information about the event and links to bands’ and speakers’ pages.

She also produced winning games for Muskingum University’s Games By Teens Contest. The contest began in 2009. Vanasdale took top-three spots each consecutive year — second place in 2009 with “Running to Freedom,” second place in 2010 with “Running to Freedom 2,” and first place in 2011 with “Skylar Keyes and the Nazi Loot.” They can be downloaded at gamesbyteens.org.

Vanasdale was home-schooled. As the Home School Legal Defense Association noted on its Facebook page, “Imagine how limited Emily’s world would have been if she was in public school.”

Today’s lesson comes with bonus instruction from close to home, courtesy of the Richmond Times Dispatch. The paper published a detailed feature about homeschooling in Virginia on Sunday.

The positive lessons about homeschooling in that lesson included this insight from a parent: “You can go as deeply into what your kids are interested in as you want to, and you’re not held back by a curriculum or timetable.” That’s undoubtedly one reason that Vanasdale excelled in Ohio.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)