Ponies BANNED at Fountain Hills High

My daughter's high school officially has the dumbest firewall software ever. This isn't a matter of blocking Food.TV because they mention "chicken breasts." This is software that gets its instructions from the planet Zork. This is software that makes no sense at all.

My daughter's semester project in English is to create a blog about horses. Anyone who knows my daughter is saying, right now, "Of course!" As part of her assignment, she was supposed to show her teacher examples of similar blogs. So yesterday, in the classroom, on the school's computer, in the presence of her teacher, she tried to reach the following sites:

Horse Bloggers

Araya's Blog which she first tried to access through Stable Days.

Blocked, blocked and blocked!

Okay, I can see how in Paranoid World, Horse Bloggers might be blocked. After all, sometimes the ladies on Horse Bloggers (anyone know knows horses will not be surprised that all the blogs we checked out were women's) sometimes talk about things other than horses. Sometimes they talk about cooking, and it's possible that one of these ladies might possibly have gone so far as to post a recipe for "chicken breasts."

And I can also see how, in Really Paranoid World, Araya's Blog might be blocked. A student might decide to see what "Typepad" is all about. They will find that it's a place to host blogs. Then maybe they will starting reading those blogs. And maybe they will find stuff that their parents don't want them to see. And why make your firewall software work hard to filter out those blogs? Poor software! It's so tired! Better just ban Typepad completely!

But I cannot understand how any human on the planet Earth who is not a member of the Taliban can find anything wrong with Stable Days. It's a website about a fictional girl who rides horses. If it got any more G-rated sugar syrup would ooze out of your computer screen. Fans of the site go to Araya-the-fictional-girl's blog and post photos of their ponies, their birthday parties, their ponies' birthday parties and.... well, you get the picture. This is where I start to suspect infiltration from Zork.

And yes, I am calling the principal. I'll let you know what they say!