Alton Verm of Conroe, Texas for his recent attempt to have the book Fahrenheit 451 banned at his daughter’s school.  The classic book by Ray Bradbury is basically about banning books.  And, to top it all off, Mr. Conroe’s request comes during “Banned Books Week.”

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451″ came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence.

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read” is observed during the last week of September each year, according to the American Library Association Web site, www.ala.org. The week celebrates the freedom to choose or express one’s opinion, even if it might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them, according to the Web site.

Congratulations, Mr. Verm!

The Daily Journal has a fascinating article that illustrates the shrinking radius we give our children to explore over the years by looking at the childhoods of four members of a British family. Great Grandfather was allowed to roam some six miles away from home to go fishing at the age of eight. Grandfather had about a mile radius of freedom, Mother about half a mile, and the now eight-year-old-child can only wander to the end of his block.

In what I consider a ringing endorsement of “druidic values,” psychologists are concerned about the mental health of the current and future generations due to lack of exposure to the natural world.

The report’s author, Dr William Bird, the health adviser to Natural England and the organiser of a conference on nature and health on Monday, believes children’s long-term mental health is at risk.

He has compiled evidence that people are healthier and better adjusted if they get out into the countryside, parks or gardens.

Stress levels fall within minutes of seeing green spaces, he says. Even filling a home with flowers and plants can improve concentration and lower stress.

“If children haven’t had contact with nature, they never develop a relationship with natural environment and they are unable to use it to cope with stress,” he said.

“Studies have shown that people deprived of contact with nature were at greater risk of depression and anxiety. Children are getting less and less unsupervised time in the natural environment.

“They need time playing in the countryside, in parks and in gardens where they can explore, dig up the ground and build dens.”

During a sweat lodge ritual, a man died of heat exhaustion while ritual activities continued around him.  Everyone assumed that he was astral traveling in a deep meditative state, and no one had medical training to recognize and properly treat the problem.

The article is dripping with the contempt the mainstream media normally shows paganism.  The reporter can’t say the phrase “steam lodge” without putting it in quotation marks, along with words and phrases such as  “new age healer,” “pipe ceremony,” “cleansing,” and “vision quest.”  The title of the article even suggests callousness on the part of the participants: “Man died as friends danced.”

I am tempted to excuse the contemptuousness since, after all, a man died.  One might wonder at the ignorance that would cause people to put blankets on a man dieing of heat exhaustion, or that would engage in such a dangerous activity without preparation to handle the potential dangers, but is that the fault of their “new-age-ness?”  People do dangerous things unprepared all the time.  We wouldn’t see an article about a “snow skier” going on a “cross-country” trip who died of hypothermia and titled: “man died as friends skied,” would we?

Another thought occurs to me, though: this once again highlights the need for “guardians” or “warriors” at ritual.  When a ritual is in public or there are potential dangers, there should always be at least one person who stays outside the ritual, trained in first aid, and prepared to help with emergencies.

Metapagan is a new, collaborative project listing blogs and news stories about Pagans and Heathens. It is a project that I am excited to be participating in, and pretty much any interested Pagan can help out. You just need a del.ico.us account and to follow these helpful tips.

I don’t know how much I will be using del.ico.us outside of contributing to Metapagan, but if you’d like to see my bookmarks there, here you go. So far, it’s just a handful of articles from this blog that I thought Metapagan readers might enjoy, but I might expand that in the future.

For those of you not familiar with Louisiana, what other states would call a “county,” we call a “parish.”

Recently, a Livingston Parish lawmaker proposed an ordinance to ban fortune telling in that parish. He is doing this in spite of the fact that there are no fortune tellers he knows of there.

I have not read the proposed ordinance, and don’t know how it might avoid the separation of Church and State problems a similar ban ran into here in Houma. I suspect, and fear, that the proposed Livingston ban might actually be specifically aimed at neo-pagans, but I don’t know yet. What triggers the suspicion in my mind is that the very group that was run out of Houma after the court challenges in 2000 is now located in Livingston Parish.