(no subject)

[gement]

I survived Gallifrey One! Um. Pics still in my camera as usual. I have lingering crud, so I'm still low-energy. But it was a total blast and I have about two dozen photos of Doctors taking photos of other Doctors.

I actually just hopped on to post my delight with the Girl Scouts. Since the cookies are ubiquitous at work right now, I did a little Googling to find out what their memetic stance is on sexuality and so on. I found this: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=97977 It's a conservative site painstakingly going through the entire modern Girl Scouts curriculum to be horrified at it. It's really amazing, because I can tell by the tone they're horrified, but the curriculum exactly as they describe it sounds spectacular to me.

So while I still don't like the cookie company making money off cute children, I may make an outright donation to my coworker's daughter's troop today. :)

Edited to add: I've just looked at the numbers and, unlike most child sales fundraisers, Girl Scouts gets about 70% of the gross. (~15% troop, ~55% larger organization). That's incredibly reasonable. I still have to make my own navigation around the issue of children and parents pressured to sell (I always hated that in school), but knowing that the substantial majority of the money is actually going to some pretty awesome life skills programs has me won over.

Comments

[gement.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the plug! I was raised oblivious to pretty much all youth organizations, so I was always deeply suspicious that they would all be creepy little conformity machines. Today is full of delightful surprises.

$0.02

[cinnamonteal.livejournal.com]

I was a Camp Fire kid from 5th grade until graduating high school, and most of what I came away with was "step one = learn something, step two = tell/teach someone about it". We did have the candy sales thing (I was one of those kids who opted out as much as possible) but overall that really was a small part of the whole.

I think the sales take so much focus because that's the single point of contact for the non Scouts or Camp Fire people (well, that and the advertising surge this time of year).