Free Republic

<p>ST. LOUIS - The fourth-grade field trip to the state Capitol was going well: The kids gaped at the rotunda, peeked in the Senate chambers, listened politely to a lecture on how a bill becomes law.</p> <p>Then someone noticed that the parent chaperone with the luxuriant hair and restrained makeup was a dad.</p> <p>Most of the kids on the trip, apparently, either did not notice or did not care that a classmate's father was dressed as a woman, in jeans, a sweater and nice shoes. Most of the teachers, apparently, were equally untroubled.</p>

O'FALLON, Mo. - A father who chaperoned a fourth-grade field trip while dressed as a woman has told the school district he regrets creating a stir. "He went on the trip because his daughter asked him to go," said Superintendent Dan O'Donnell of the Francis Howell district, which includes Castlio Elementary School fourth-graders who took the Oct. 18 trip. "If he had known it would have caused this much of an uproar, he wouldn't have gone." The father's identity has not been revealed, and he has not spoken publicly. Parents complained to the school board after the man, during a...

In last month's installment of Good Morning America's "Read This!" book club series, the "Wine, Women, and Jeffrey" book club read The Secret Life of Bees. Now they've passed on the book club baton to the "Jazzy Page Turners" of Knoxville, Tenn.     This month's selection is Noelle Howey's Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods — My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine. The poignant and tender memoir explores the author's coming of age as a young woman, at the same time her father was "coming of age" as a transsexual, and her mother was finding her independence.     Read an excerpt from Dress...

Transparent Alumina - Three Times Stronger Than Steel A ceramic research lab in Dresden, Germany, has developed transparent Alumina by subjecting fine-grained (I'm guessing extremely fine-grained) aluminum to a whopping 1200 degrees Celsius ...the result of which is amazingly light but three times tougher than hardened steel of the same thickness, and it's see-through.  Needless to say, the Pentagon is quite interested.        For story (in German)  http://www.spiegel.de  According to a post at Slashdot (News for Nerds) this is not transparent aluminum but transparent Alumina, which is aluminum oxide - Al2-O3. Also found this link here, which...