This cartoon is funny. This story is not. It is, however, beyond satire.

• Teen Girl Falls in Open Manhole While Texting: The family may sue the city.
• "Orgasm A Day" Campaign Directed At British Schoolchildren Sparks Controversy: The leaflet for high school students includes the slogan "an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away".
• Wells Fargo Bank Sues Itself: "Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium [and as] holder of the first, Wells Fargo is suing all other lien holders, including ... itself."

From The Daily Mail:

Prison officer Walter Schmidt wanted to give his colleagues' children a taste of what their mums and dads get up to at work while showing them around a Florida jail.

So to make the youngsters' experience all the more realistic as they toured Franklin Correctional Institution during the lock-up's 'Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day', he decided to zap them with his 50,000-volt stun gun.

The jolt sent at least two of them sprawling to the floor, crying out in pain and clutching at agonising burns on their arms. One child ended up in hospital.

But 37-year-old Schmidt told officials who later fired him that he had only been trying to show the children - whose parents all work at the jail near Tallahassee - what a typical day involves while handling unruly inmates.

'It wasn't intended to be malicious, but educational,' he explained to the St Petersburg Times.

'The big shock came when I got fired.'

I added The Art of the Prank to "Links we like" on the right side of the page. Some recent stories:

• Eunicure, "a loosely affiliated group of “board-certified urological surgeons” that offers hope—in the form of castration—to homosexuals that have failed to control their desires through prayer, meditation" (originally from Dan Savage in The Stranger)
• Obay: a drug to prevent children from having ideas of their own (from Alma's Soulfood)
• Penn and Teller get environmentalists to sign a petition to ban water (originally posted by Lew Rockwell)

After toy-maker RC2's recall of lead-tainted Thomas & Friends toys, customers received an apology and a bonus gift, which has since been recalled for lead contamination.

Consumerist, which ran the story, comments: "That's pathetic. Maybe the apology toys for these ones will contain polio.".

(Thanks, Kevin Godby.)

From a Chronicle of Higher Education article (May 11, 2007) by Sierra Millman:

They've finally figured out a way to harness the energy of children. Engineering students at Brigham Young University have built a merry-go-round that will enable schoolchildren in rural Africa to light their own classrooms.

Ben S. Markham, a retired engineer and Brigham Young alumnus, conceived the project during a mission trip to Ghana, in West Africa. Classrooms there, he observed, have no lights, and the children have almost no toys.

"You see them chasing chickens and goats around," Mr. Markham says. "Occasionally you'll see a kid with an old, worn-out car tire and a couple of sticks, and he's kind of rolling it around." After talking with Ghanaian engineers, he realized that playground equipment -- not only a merry-go-round, but also swings and a zip line -- could serve many purposes, such as educating children about science and engineering and allowing adults more hours of the day to work....

Mr. Markham is confident the children won't lose interest: "It's not like they're going to go home and watch TV or play on their Xbox."